Standing before the gates of Hell, I yell for Death to come and face me.
“You know why I’m here. I won’t let you take him away from me.”
Death chuckles as skeletal hands slip from his robe and a scythe forms from the ether.
But I won’t be cowed.
“Give him back! I challenge you…”
Smoke rises and turns into a table with a chessboard.
“…to a game of poker!”
“What?” Death utters.
“That’s my challenge to get Charlie back.”
“Fine.”
The chessboard fades and cards appear.
Death never stood a chance.
Soon, the gate opens and my cat Charlie bounds into my open arms.
I’d go to Hell and back for him any day.
Kai Delmas loves creating worlds and magic systems. He is a slush reader for Apex Magazine and The Cosmic Background. His fiction can be found in Zooscape, Martian, Crepuscular, and several Shacklebound anthologies. His debut drabble collection, Darkness Rises, Hope Remains, was published by Shacklebound Books. If you like his work you can support him at patreon.com/kaidelmas and find him on Twitter @KaiDelmas or Bluesky @kaidelmas.bsky.social
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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction
piece playing off at least two of the following key words: cat, poker, storm, sandwich.
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