Nicholas Grider

SEVEN SIGNS

The lady who livestreams paid tarot readings for anxious cosplayers on Twitch gets freaked out when her angel deck starts bleeding but she just says whoops and keeps going, explaining that everything means something but not everything means something that adds up to anything.

The press release says the rogue swarm of chrome-plated drones in the fields east of Kansas City, the one shaped like a sketch of a black hole, is just user error and soon will be resolved and is not worth driving all the way out there to see for yourself.

The price of Diet Pepsi goes up again.

The lab guy in your DMs who says is real name is Grayson wants to know how long you can hold your breath and volunteers to mail you a personalized stopwatch so you can work toward a personal best.

The woman in the trailer for the Netflix Original pulls off her wig and yells THEY DON’T TELL YOU THE PRICE THAT YOU PAY! without explaining who the people are or what the price is or why she removed her unit, but there’s a needle drop right after for Dusty Springfield’s rendition of “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart” ran through AI to make it sound slowed + reverb.

The sign in breezy cursive neon above the menu in the new gyro shack near the campus recruitment center reads PAY ME WHAT YOU OWE ME AND I’LL DO IT AGAIN.

The guy who follows you around downtown Chicago early Saturday morning before the truck convoy leaves for the prairie lab keeps calmly imploring you to give him enough rope. Please mister, he says, just give me enough rope.

Nicholas Grider's story collections include Misadventure (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum) and Forest of Borders (Malarkey).