Today’s treat from the No Shit Table of Contents is James Beamon‘s Episodes From the Abner-Mortimer Karmic War.
This story, y’all. This story. If Uranus Calling is the silliest story in the anthology, Episodes ties for the funniest. If you watched my video on the kickstarter, I mentioned we have some stories that are laugh out loud funny, and this is one of them. To be technical, this story made me laugh so loudly that it scared my cats and incapacitated me for several minutes.
Episodes From the Abner-Mortimer Karmic War is about two guys–Abner and Mortimer, as you might have guessed from the title–who really, really hate each other. With the seething, fiery passion of a thousand suns. And then some. And they are locked in an endless cycle of murder and revenge that neither of them are all that inclined to stop.
Now, murder and revenge might not sound that hilarious at first blush, but what makes this story is the karmic bit of it. Every time one of them dies, via revenge killing or natural causes, he is reborn… but not necessarily as a human. And it doesn’t matter what body he’s in: at some point he wakes up to the fact that his nemesis is somewhere in the world, and goes looking for him. Which ends up pitting man against snail, say, or seal against man. And the cycle repeats.
I’m not doing it justice. Because there is no way to accurately describe how hilarious James makes this concept without just transcribing the story for you. Instead, you should support the Kickstarter so you can read it for yourself. Just make sure you’re in an appropriate setting for loud guffaws, and not in the library, the quiet coach, or a church. I don’t want to be responsible for even the tiniest smudge on your karma, or any future encounters with vengeful snails.