October 2025 - RUNNER UP

Death is not the end. Turns out, it’s more like unpaid overtime.

Working at the Humajelly factory is no picnic, even if picnics are the primary place our product is enjoyed. No matter how I tweak the production line, the walls are stained crimson at the end of every shift—I blame chronic hypertension. And I’m always digging bones out of the gears. 

But the worst part is the screaming. I think I’m developing tinnitus.

“Can’t we gag them?” I ask my supervisor.

He shakes his head, or at least I think he does; the bolts in his neck limit mobility. “The banshees eat the screams. It’s our most valuable byproduct.”

“Must we feed them into the extruder feet-first?”

He offers a stiff shrug. “The wendigos swear it tastes better that way.”

I’ll get no relief from management. They won’t even cover my medical bills. Apparently, rotting eardrums are a “pre-existing condition.” Seems all the ghouls and damned souls are staunch capitalists. 

I must take matters into my own hands.

I take the PhanTram down to Necropolitan University and visit Doctor Yaga, the school’s most famous inventor. Her office is a dark, slime-covered cave festooned with viscera. Arrayed behind her desk are crudely taxidermied endangered animals. A white rhino. A sea turtle. A blue-footed booby.

“Thanks for seeing me, Doctor Yaga,” I say.

“Please, call me Baba.” She nudges a plate of saltines smeared with chunky pink jam. “Humajelly cracker?”

“No thanks,” I say, my stomach churning. “I know how the sausage is made. Actually, that’s why I’m here.”

Baba tents her spindly fingers and listens to my conundrum. She’s silent for a while, her obsidian eyes unblinking.

“What if you cut out their tongues?” she suggests.

“Then it’s more of a gurgle than a scream. The banshees would complain.”

“Banshees,” Baba snorts. “Always wailing about something.” She shoots me a worried glance. “Keep that to yourself. I don’t want to get canceled.”

“Consider it buried.”

She absentmindedly rattles a jar of teeth. “Can’t you just wear earplugs?”

“Not allowed. Monitoring scream levels is ‘essential to quality control.’”

Baba whistles. “It sure ain’t easy being a working stiff.” Suddenly she springs to her feet. “Eureka!”

She takes me to her laboratory, leading me past cages of test humans. She affixes one to a table with some rusty nails and drills into his skull. Even to my practiced ears, his screams are bloodcurdling.

“Don’t feel bad,” Baba says. “He’s a lobbyist.”

A few squelchy moments later the screeching ceases, even as the man still writhes in agony.

Baba claps her hands. “I’ve implanted a bloodstone that captures the essence of screams.”

“Amazing!” I exclaim. “You’ve done it again, doctor!”

With Baba’s endorsement, Humajelly management agrees to test the implant. Turns out, the banshees love the distilled flavor of the bloodstone screams even more than the raw original.

Finally, I have silence, and Baba gets royalties on every jar. Everybody wins—

A spray of blood speckles my smock.

Well, almost everybody.