When Jake pulls his van up to Judy’s house, his jaw drops. What kind of paranormal investigator owns such a luxurious mansion? Judy isn’t packed yet, so he pops inside to help.
“Well, credible leads are rare nowadays.”
Under a crystal chandelier, Judy wrangles with a fancy self-unfolding tent, but it refuses to fold. Jake hates wasting time when he could be chasing ghosts. “Let me try. Go load the van.”
§
Judy is skeptical Jake can do any better, until he emerges triumphant three minutes later. “How did you manage it so quickly?” she asks.
“Oh, the butler did it for me.”
Judy creases her brows. “Jake… I don’t have a butler.”
Ian Li (he/him) is a Chinese-Canadian writer of speculative fiction and poetry. As an economist and developer, he also loves spreadsheets, statistical curiosities, and brain teasers. His writing is published or forthcoming in Orion’s Belt, Abyss & Apex, and Worlds of Possibility, among other venues. Learn more as well as at https://ian-li.com. His most recent appearances in our pages were “Summit, in Memory,” “Hosting a Tempest,” “The Potato Singer,” and the absolutely delightful duel of wizards, “Wielder of Wit.”
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 story of no more than
125 words in length that plays off that old warhorse of mystery fiction:
“the butler did it.”
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