SHORT STORY MACHINE

“That’s all I’ve got!” Max yelled as the attacker waved his knife at him.   “You’re lying!” he snarled, patting him down as a security guard would if he were in a real hurry. “Look man, if you’re going to mug people, you should go for the rich ones. Broke people like me are a waste of time!” “Shut up or I’ll cut you!” Max groaned. The blade was frighteningly close to his face. Suddenly it flashed away and the attacker released him. The threatening manner instantly evaporated. The knife clattered to the floor. Max found himself standing over the man, who was now cowering with his hands up in front of his face, palms out, as if trying to shield his eyes from an intense light. Perplexed, but not one to waste an opportunity, Max asked for his money back.   “Yes, yes I’m sorry,” the attacker quavered, his trembling hand holding out the meagre amount of cash he had just taken from him. Max took the money and kicked the knife into a nearby drain. Looking back once with a mix of confu...

  Lucy sat watching the spiders darting in and out of their burrows. She wondered why they took all the effort to hunt and burrow when they could be like other spiders and spin a web and just wait around for their food to come to them. She figured it had something to do with evolution. Spinning a web requires energy resources too. A spider appeared at the entrance of its burrow, froze, and then darted across the path, diagonally away from where she sat. Its legs moved so fast it was almost as if it was flying at low level along the ground. Lucy wondered if such a difference existed in humans too. Those who spun webs and waited to catch whatever they needed, and those who went looking, not content to stay in one place for too long. She considered herself. She couldn’t really decide if she was either. She still lived at home and went to college during the day. In a way, she was going out hunting for knowledge, but on the other hand she didn't have to go anywhere else because everythi...

   Doug is on his way to the shops to buy a packet of cigarettes. He is a carpenter and works from the workshop attached to his house. He loves what he does, but he has a few thoughts kicking around his head that bother him. Smoking gives him a bit of time out of the beautiful focus of working with wood, to mull these problematic existential thoughts. Doug sees a bee on a flower. It is a bramble flower. A truck drives past. Everything is normal.  Except for the fact that he has a strange compulsion to see where the bee goes next. It flies across the road and Doug follows it. It buzzes over the stone wall into the shady forest on the other side. Doug, despite living in the area for most of his life, has never been behind that wall, and he doesn’t know who the land belongs to, but he is following the bee, so he vaults the wall. The bee flies up into the branches of a tree and he finds that he is having a hard time keeping track of it. He catches sight of it again, and guess...

Captain Van Staden had his own tool of war. With a little bit of help from the South African government and a few I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mines, he had created his own weapons system. It was a system that nothing in the military could match, filling the tactical gap between the infantry and the Air Force’s strike fighters. It was his 1966 Piper Cherokee. His own plane. Drilled into the leading edges of both wings were holes from which the muzzles of two Vektor R4 fully automatic rifles protruded. Their triggers were connected to a mechanism that allowed them to be fired from the cockpit by pulling a ring underneath the pilot’s seat. Each rifle was equipped with  SADF special-issue 50 round magazines. Captain Van Staden’s plane wasn’t limited to just strafing the enemy. Between the two front seats was a tube; really just a piece of PVC pipe, leading to an opening in the belly of the aircraft. Just above the floor, the pipe had a hole with a pin running through it. Resting on...