I.
Barely managing to conceal the trembling of her fingers, Lady Patricia Merclowe returned the quail canapé to the tray and muttered an apology to Mr. and Mrs. Hargrave and to their daughter Caroline, who was trying so hard to be pleasant, and weaved her way through the guests of her soirée, eagerly searching for glimpses of Mr. Cullen as he exited the room. She followed him, though she knew she shouldn't, both for the sake of her reputation and for her prospects for happiness.
As she hurried through the hallway towards the grand entrance, she noticed his green, gold-trimmed greatcoat by the tall windows overlooking the botanical gardens of the estate, despite there being nothing to see there at this time of night. She stood still, as if invisible hands stopped her from approaching him. They were not the hands of her conscience, nor the hands of her mother's ghost looking out for her, but the hands of a high-pressure nuclear shock wave that struck her from the front and flung her through the hallway and against the opposing wall, crushing her skull against an original painting of a pond with a fisherman and a startled duck.
II.
The numberless buzzing Cagalorians, the singular wispy Elfeen, and the human delegation had been fiddling with the translation devices for many maddening minutes. There was a human technician present, but his policy was to avoid doing anything, so as to prevent catastrophic gaffes. That must be why they'd chosen him. Inaction was practically a divine calling to him. He watched the Cagalorians figure out they were all trying to connect simultaneously. They chose just one to speak for them. At last, humanity could hear the messages the aliens shared in a formal public setting for the first time.
The Cagalorian got right to the point: "We receive happiness when addressing you. We want to know how much happiness you believe you will receive if we give you a technology, known to us and not to you, in exchange for a different technology, known to you and not to us." Then the Elfeen spoke: "There is an apparition that appears in a forest on Earth. The apparition is there. The apparition is there, in the forest, where it wasn't before, and it gazes up at the sky. The sky is seeded with stars. One of the stars the apparition calls home, feeling confused yet pleased."
The technician was the only one to see the missile approach through the main viewing port of the space station. He got goosebumps. He'd never felt more satisfied with his professional conduct. This was unequivocally a situation that called for doing nothing, because this was a problem none of them could solve. It was the human representative's turn to speak, but the translation device melted, the Cagalorians boiled where they hung in the air, and the Elfeen burned away like flash paper in a magic trick as the nuclear missile struck the space station and detonated.
III.
Ri-ri raised her right hand, palm upwards, and stretched her arm forward. She closed her eyes, hoping it would make the curious tree sparrows feel comfortable enough to sit on her hand. If it worked, she'd be happy. If it didn't work, she'd merely be embarrassed, standing eyes closed and arm stretched in the middle of Pung-gyo Park on a weekday. At what percentage chance of happiness does public embarrassment become a good bargain? At eighty percent chance of happiness? At ninety percent chance? At a single percent chance?
She thought she felt something. A flash of light on her face, brighter than the sun itself. A fluttering of her heart. A fluttering near her ear. A fluttering near her hand. A tiny set of feet on her hand, maybe. Another set. Another. Three tree sparrows, she estimated, busily pushing each other out of the way on her hand. Their claws were hurting a little bit, but she wanted to stay motionless and keep her eyes closed. It took no effort. It felt like nothing took any effort. The not watching. The not feeling pain. The not scaring the tree sparrows with a word, a breath, a heartbeat.
IV.
Frank Cormorant let himself sag against the doorpost, clutching his shoulder. He groaned and forced himself to make it to the bathroom of his pitiful mess of an office. He took off his trenchcoat and layers of clothing reeking of rain, sweat, and blood. Now he could inspect how much of his week would be ruined by this gunshot wound after the adrenaline and alcohol wore off.
He'd had a busy day. A tenacious brunette had shown up, insisting he should look at the destruction of an English estate, of a park in Korea, and other unexplained disasters in different times and places. There was something off, all right. About the familiarity of the times and places. About the obscurity of these sudden erasures of human life. About the impossibility of her dress following her every curve like someone had glued it to her.
Frank went to his desk and picked up the telephone to give an old friend a call, an old friend who knew something about some things, but on the last turn of the dial his eyes caught the sight of a giant cloud in the shape of a mushroom outside his window. The call connected. The last words he heard were "What do you want, Frank? You finally have my money?"
V.
She hugged the roof tiles of the lean-to. It was the best hiding spot she could get to before the All-Knower slithered into the courtyard on its tentacles, trailing black ooze. It wouldn't be hard to find her. Right now the monster was below her, but if the All-Knower moved further away from the lean-to, it could spot her. Perhaps it could smell her. She could only breathe shallowly and hope, hope that it wouldn't shred her with its serrated mandibles like it had done with her mother, husband, and pet budgie.
The All-Knower knew exactly where she was. It also knew about the tactical nuke that had appeared 800 feet in the air directly above its location. It knew that it could survive the blast, but would be incapacitated for weeks. "You should never have thought of me," it thought at me. It prepared itself as much as it could for the extreme radiation, the extreme heat, the extreme pressure, and amused itself at the thought of how it would orchestrate the most ironic revenge on the land of the living and on me in particular.
VI.
Daniel reached the final panel of his comic strip, "Adventures of Owlman 18". He always ended them with extreme violence after the central joke of the rest of the strip, even when he was working on one during lessons. This time he hadn't really gotten a joke in there. Daniel bit his 2H pencil. A flash of light briefly bothered him, caused by the sun's reflection on his wristwatch.
He thought of a silly joke. This time the last panel would be Owlman sitting in a comfortable lounge chair, with a smoking cigar in his hand, looking towards the reader and asking "What?" with feigned innocence. He'd drawn so many mushroom clouds that he wasn't sure why he bothered anymore. Daniel started outlining the final panel. A rumbling in the distance distracted him. Undoubtedly the thunderstorm his dad had been promising would come.
It was. It was a thunderstorm, although nuclear missiles were simultaneously raining down on all the carefully selected industrial and military targets across Daniel's country. I'd describe what happened next, but an irritatingly loud alert on my phone is telling me to seek shelter immediately and stay away from windows.
Author's note
As a young teen, I drew comic strips with bad jokes and often a nuclear explosion in the last panel.
Recently I remembered this and had the idea: what if I did a writing exercise whereby I write lots of short setups for stories in different genres and every story is interrupted by a violent nuclear detonation? Then I decided to tie it all together. This was the result.