Fragments 2025
Jan. 10th, 2025 05:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scott_sanfordVarious tidbits too small to stand on their own. The completely arbitrary cutoff is 500 words; longer than that and stories get their own files.
For earlier very short works, see the files for 2022, 2023, and 2024.
(10 Jan 2025) This scene was laying around in my notes file for a while and I finally decided to do something with it.
Jenny Everywhere was out of the house for
Losing His Shirt
by Scott Sanford
10 Jan 2025
Sometimes discovering a previously unknown book can lead to wonderful new thoughts, or even great adventures. And sometimes a neighbor is just cleaning house.
Kim considered the teenager at her door and his box of books.
“You’d better come in and put that down,” she told him.
“Thanks, this is kind of heavy…” Eric came in and put the box down on the table with a thud.
“So what’s all this?”, she asked, following him.
“Mom’s cleaning out some old books and thought you might want some of them. Not you specifically, Jenny too.”
“Hm, maybe.” She took one off of the top at random. “Science fiction, I see; it must be very warm on their planet. But the natives are friendly. This might be more to Jenny’s taste.”
Kim pulled out a few more slim volumes and considered the covers.
“Hm. Choices. Shirtless Scotsman in a kilt near a castle, or shirtless Scotsman in trousers with sheep on a hill?”
She kept looking, pulling out more books.
“Shirtless pirate. Shirtless man standing around in the dark. Shirtless Viking in a fjord, he’s got to be cold. Shirtless cowboy on a horse. Jungle explorer with his shirt torn off. Shirtless man with glowing sword. Another shirtless pirate, with long hair worn loose and blowing the wrong way. I think I see a trend.”
“Uh, yeah,” Eric admitted. “I don’t know much about the stories, I don’t read them.”
“That’s okay, I don’t think you’re the target audience for… a shirtless cowboy holding a rope. Rather suggestively, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Eric admitted.
“Jenny, though, I think she’ll appreciate some of these. Oh look, here’s a shirtless Scotsman in a kilt, on a hillside with sheep. Best of both worlds, I imagine.”
“I guess?” Eric shrugged.
“Sure, leave these here. I’ll show them to Jenny when she gets home.”
(6 June 2025) Sometimes a silly thing just arrives in your head.
The truth is out there, but so is a lot of silly nonsense.
"Kid, we only got one question.
Have you ever been arrested?"
– Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie
Group X
by Scott Sanford
6 June 2025
“Jenny? Have you ever been arrested?”, Eric asked.
“Almost, once, back when I was in high school…”, she told him.
Many years ago…
“Okay, young lady, into the car.”
“What? Really?”, she protested uselessly.
The officer guided Jenny into the back seat of the police car, with little help from the teenager herself. Unlike any normal car the rear bench was a single hard piece of plastic which made very little allowance for human comfort. The officer reached in and pulled the seat belt over her, and she noticed it was rigged backwards to be operated by someone standing outside the car.
From inside the slam of the car door seemed very final.
The officer got into the driver’s seat and started doing something with the car’s computer.
“Look, I’m sure this is a mistake,” Jenny said.
“Is it? We’ll see what your parents say.”
“Oh, yeah, you can ask them!” She wasn’t sure how that would work out but was sure it was better than being arrested. Or was she going to be arrested first, and she’d have to call her parents from the police station?
“Aw, dammit,” the officer growled. From the rear seat Jenny could see the computer screen flicker and display gibberish for a few moments before sorting itself out. “Now I have to start all over.”
That had barely begun when the computer stopped working again, throwing up peculiar nonsense again and going dark.
A moment later the car’s lights went out and the engine died.
Suddenly it was a very dark night, with no lights to be seen anywhere around them.
The officer swore quietly and worked the ignition key. Nothing happened.
From above them a brilliant blue-white spotlight illuminated the police car. Jenny could see wisps of fog moving through the previously clear air around them.
In the front seat the officer struggled with the door handle, discovering that even the mechanical latch wasn’t working.
“Oh, man, these guys again…”, Jenny said to herself.
Jenny felt herself become dizzy, then disoriented, then sleepy. She never felt herself topple over.
The next morning
Jenny abruptly became aware that she was lying in grass. Unlike the slow organic waking up most mornings, this was like turning on a light. But it was clearly morning; the sky was light with the approaching dawn.
She sat up and discovered she was wearing only her scarf and underwear, which was a better situation than it could have been.
Moreover, they’d dropped her off right next to a road in a neighborhood she recognized; she could walk home in half an hour or so. Maybe she’d mentioned it to the little guys, or they’d remembered her from last time.
She decided she was feeling pretty good, considering. Unusually well rested – and slightly probed, now that she thought of it – but for a few minutes she’d been afraid the night would end badly. She’d take whimsically, abruptly, and randomly.
There was a disorderly pile of clothes next to her, which turned out to be a police uniform. She did not need or want the badge, or any of the cop gear, or even the shoes – but would take the pants in the interests of not getting arrested again.
Today
“I don’t think I should talk about it,” Jenny told him.
(13 June 2025) Another silly moment in Jenny's life
"What's that, in the mirror and the corner of your eye?
What's that footstep following but never passing by?
Perhaps they're all just waiting. Perhaps when we're all dead
Out they'll come a-slithering, from underneath the bed!"
—The Doctor
Under the Bed
by Scott Sanford
13 June 2025
Jenny Everywhere was asleep when a cat wiggled out from under her bed.
Stretching, he looked around the room and leapt up onto the bed. He prodded her with his paw a few times, experimentally. Finding the occupant unresponsive, he walked up her body and stood on her head.
“Murf?” asked the human.
“Good morning,” Thoth said.
Jenny blinked sleepily, then pushed him off her face.
“Good morning yourself. What are you doing here?”
“I was going to the kid’s place. He sometimes has cat treats. And sometimes I can get him to dangle a string so long that he’s late for school.”
“So why are you here, on my bed?”
“There was a Thing under his bed, so I came out from under your bed. Obviously.”
“I just woke up,” Jenny reminded him. “Walk me through that. What?”
“I’m a wizard. And a cat. We do stuff like this,” he claimed. He sighed and elaborated, “Under the bed is a place. You thumb people all have beds, and you talk about ‘under the bed’ as if it’s all one place. Enough people do that long enough and with magic it can be.”
“Oh, right. I think of it as teleportation, but yeah. I’ve noticed you moving around like that. I thought it was just magic.”
“It is magic. But have you looked under your bed lately?”
“No.” Jenny’s tone did not include this being something she did often.
“You should. It’s around here somewhere. You know, the Thing Under the Bed.”
“Whoa, seriously?
“Sort of there.”
“I want to see this!” Jenny threw off the covers and tried to peer over the side of her bed, but saw only carpeting. She paused thoughtfully, considering ways to look underneath without getting too close to the bed itself.
“Oh, please,” Thoth said dismissively. “You know it’s never there when you look.”
“Right, of course not. But… why was it here?”
“It’s the kid.”
“Eric? He’s got to be too old to have a monster under his bed,” Jenny protested.
“Normally, sure – but he’s been having visitations lately. I keep my distance but you must have noticed it too. He’s got some kind of god or power or something showing up, from outside the universe.”
“Oh, her! Yeah, I know, she’s not a problem.”
“She’s wearing reality thin all through the building is what she’s doing,” the cat said. “Where there are this many miracles, you can expect more. This morning there was a monster under his bed.”
“The Thing Under the Bed?”
“Yeah, one of those.”
“It’s only the one Thing. And it’s under everyone’s bed, sort of. Potentially? It’s all quantum. You know how an electron is never really truly here or there, only a probability of it being observed or not? Like that.”
“That sounds like a scientist answer.”
“It is, I guess. Magicians probably explain it some other way. Anyhow, are you stuck here? What’s under the bed now?”
“One shoe and a stinky sock,” Thoth told her. “We’ve talked about it enough that it’s had to go somewhere else. I could go through now if you weren’t looking.”
“Fair enough. I’ll go take a shower.”
(20 June 2025) I wasn’t going to have anything for this week, but one night I was thinking about something else and this came to me. If you recognize the place, you know.
[He] dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain. —Spider Robinson
Wrong Time, Right Place
by Scott Sanford
20 June 2025
Kim remarked, “You spend so much time out at bars and music venues that serve alcohol, I’m always expecting you to get dragged into a fight some evening.”
“Bar fights? I’ve seen a few, sure.” Jenny shrugged as if it was no big deal.
“You don’t worry about yourself?”
“Not a whole lot,” Jenny admitted. “At least I try not to. I try to avoid fights when I can, but if they happen they happen, you know?”
“I’ve been in a few myself, so yes.”
“I remember one, just a few years after the War, when pretty much everyone was still decompressing and getting used to having lives outside of whatever we were doing during,” Jenny reminisced. “This was at a place I liked out on Long Island. A bunch of me would drop in there now and then, over the decades, but that’s another story.
“Anyway, one night guy called Big Beef decided he had a problem with the owner, and then everyone else in the bar, and then with the door on his way out. One of me got a good kick in before Mike, the owner, showed him the door and chucked him out into the world.”
Jenny laughed quietly and added, “I never found out where he went, but he never came back there.”
“Long Island, and after a war? This wasn’t you, was it?”
“You mean not this me?” Jenny clarified. “No, this was years ago, out in New York. That me was doing, uh, some technical stuff out at a place called Wardenclyffe, just down Route 25A from Stony Brook. This me doesn’t know enough about electricity to explain it.”
“That tells me all I need to know,” Kim told her. “I’ve heard of Wardenclyffe.”
(27 Dec 2025) Some bits of character background linger around for a long time and then produce a story. One night I was typing and this fell out.
Jenny Everywhere takes a
Late Night Caller
by Scott Sanford
27 Dec 2025
I was catching up on some backlogged albums when the landline rang. I hit pause and answered.
“Hello, is this the number for Mrs. King?”, asked a voice I didn’t recognize.
“You have the right number,” I said. I’d been through this before and recognized the code word. “I can take a message.”
“I’m calling from the Medical Examiner’s office. If Mrs King is available we’d like to see her down on Newhall Street as soon as she can make it.”
My blood ran cold a moment; I’d heard that before too, and if they were calling for “Mrs. King” this late at night...
“She’s out right now and it’s probably going to be a few hours before she can get there,” I said. “Is it… urgent?”
I didn’t like thinking about the ways it could be urgent. I’d rather leave this stuff to Kim, it’s her specialty the way dimensional stuff is mine, but the place was only about five kilometers away as the bat flies and I could get over there if I had to.
“No? But I think she’d better look at this. Like, soon? Before sunrise?”
“Okay, that I can do,” I said with relief. “I’ll let her know; expect to see her in a few hours.”
“Oh, thank you!”, they said, and I heard a lot of relief in their voice. “I don’t want to have to explain this and I am really, really looking forward to seeing her.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Hang tight, she’ll be there soon.”
Read earlier shorts (2022, 2023, and 2024) or check out the table of contents
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
For earlier very short works, see the files for 2022, 2023, and 2024.
- Losing His Shirt (10 January 2025)
- Group X (6 June 2025)
- Under the Bed (13 June 2025)
- Wrong Time, Right Place (20 June 2025)
- Late Night Caller (27 Dec 2025)
(10 Jan 2025) This scene was laying around in my notes file for a while and I finally decided to do something with it.
Jenny Everywhere was out of the house for
Losing His Shirt
by Scott Sanford
10 Jan 2025
Sometimes discovering a previously unknown book can lead to wonderful new thoughts, or even great adventures. And sometimes a neighbor is just cleaning house.
Kim considered the teenager at her door and his box of books.
“You’d better come in and put that down,” she told him.
“Thanks, this is kind of heavy…” Eric came in and put the box down on the table with a thud.
“So what’s all this?”, she asked, following him.
“Mom’s cleaning out some old books and thought you might want some of them. Not you specifically, Jenny too.”
“Hm, maybe.” She took one off of the top at random. “Science fiction, I see; it must be very warm on their planet. But the natives are friendly. This might be more to Jenny’s taste.”
Kim pulled out a few more slim volumes and considered the covers.
“Hm. Choices. Shirtless Scotsman in a kilt near a castle, or shirtless Scotsman in trousers with sheep on a hill?”
She kept looking, pulling out more books.
“Shirtless pirate. Shirtless man standing around in the dark. Shirtless Viking in a fjord, he’s got to be cold. Shirtless cowboy on a horse. Jungle explorer with his shirt torn off. Shirtless man with glowing sword. Another shirtless pirate, with long hair worn loose and blowing the wrong way. I think I see a trend.”
“Uh, yeah,” Eric admitted. “I don’t know much about the stories, I don’t read them.”
“That’s okay, I don’t think you’re the target audience for… a shirtless cowboy holding a rope. Rather suggestively, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Eric admitted.
“Jenny, though, I think she’ll appreciate some of these. Oh look, here’s a shirtless Scotsman in a kilt, on a hillside with sheep. Best of both worlds, I imagine.”
“I guess?” Eric shrugged.
“Sure, leave these here. I’ll show them to Jenny when she gets home.”
(6 June 2025) Sometimes a silly thing just arrives in your head.
The truth is out there, but so is a lot of silly nonsense.
Have you ever been arrested?"
– Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie
Group X
by Scott Sanford
6 June 2025
“Jenny? Have you ever been arrested?”, Eric asked.
“Almost, once, back when I was in high school…”, she told him.
Many years ago…
“Okay, young lady, into the car.”
“What? Really?”, she protested uselessly.
The officer guided Jenny into the back seat of the police car, with little help from the teenager herself. Unlike any normal car the rear bench was a single hard piece of plastic which made very little allowance for human comfort. The officer reached in and pulled the seat belt over her, and she noticed it was rigged backwards to be operated by someone standing outside the car.
From inside the slam of the car door seemed very final.
The officer got into the driver’s seat and started doing something with the car’s computer.
“Look, I’m sure this is a mistake,” Jenny said.
“Is it? We’ll see what your parents say.”
“Oh, yeah, you can ask them!” She wasn’t sure how that would work out but was sure it was better than being arrested. Or was she going to be arrested first, and she’d have to call her parents from the police station?
“Aw, dammit,” the officer growled. From the rear seat Jenny could see the computer screen flicker and display gibberish for a few moments before sorting itself out. “Now I have to start all over.”
That had barely begun when the computer stopped working again, throwing up peculiar nonsense again and going dark.
A moment later the car’s lights went out and the engine died.
Suddenly it was a very dark night, with no lights to be seen anywhere around them.
The officer swore quietly and worked the ignition key. Nothing happened.
From above them a brilliant blue-white spotlight illuminated the police car. Jenny could see wisps of fog moving through the previously clear air around them.
In the front seat the officer struggled with the door handle, discovering that even the mechanical latch wasn’t working.
“Oh, man, these guys again…”, Jenny said to herself.
Jenny felt herself become dizzy, then disoriented, then sleepy. She never felt herself topple over.
The next morning
Jenny abruptly became aware that she was lying in grass. Unlike the slow organic waking up most mornings, this was like turning on a light. But it was clearly morning; the sky was light with the approaching dawn.
She sat up and discovered she was wearing only her scarf and underwear, which was a better situation than it could have been.
Moreover, they’d dropped her off right next to a road in a neighborhood she recognized; she could walk home in half an hour or so. Maybe she’d mentioned it to the little guys, or they’d remembered her from last time.
She decided she was feeling pretty good, considering. Unusually well rested – and slightly probed, now that she thought of it – but for a few minutes she’d been afraid the night would end badly. She’d take whimsically, abruptly, and randomly.
There was a disorderly pile of clothes next to her, which turned out to be a police uniform. She did not need or want the badge, or any of the cop gear, or even the shoes – but would take the pants in the interests of not getting arrested again.
Today
“I don’t think I should talk about it,” Jenny told him.
(13 June 2025) Another silly moment in Jenny's life
What's that footstep following but never passing by?
Perhaps they're all just waiting. Perhaps when we're all dead
Out they'll come a-slithering, from underneath the bed!"
—The Doctor
Under the Bed
by Scott Sanford
13 June 2025
Jenny Everywhere was asleep when a cat wiggled out from under her bed.
Stretching, he looked around the room and leapt up onto the bed. He prodded her with his paw a few times, experimentally. Finding the occupant unresponsive, he walked up her body and stood on her head.
“Murf?” asked the human.
“Good morning,” Thoth said.
Jenny blinked sleepily, then pushed him off her face.
“Good morning yourself. What are you doing here?”
“I was going to the kid’s place. He sometimes has cat treats. And sometimes I can get him to dangle a string so long that he’s late for school.”
“So why are you here, on my bed?”
“There was a Thing under his bed, so I came out from under your bed. Obviously.”
“I just woke up,” Jenny reminded him. “Walk me through that. What?”
“I’m a wizard. And a cat. We do stuff like this,” he claimed. He sighed and elaborated, “Under the bed is a place. You thumb people all have beds, and you talk about ‘under the bed’ as if it’s all one place. Enough people do that long enough and with magic it can be.”
“Oh, right. I think of it as teleportation, but yeah. I’ve noticed you moving around like that. I thought it was just magic.”
“It is magic. But have you looked under your bed lately?”
“No.” Jenny’s tone did not include this being something she did often.
“You should. It’s around here somewhere. You know, the Thing Under the Bed.”
“Whoa, seriously?
“Sort of there.”
“I want to see this!” Jenny threw off the covers and tried to peer over the side of her bed, but saw only carpeting. She paused thoughtfully, considering ways to look underneath without getting too close to the bed itself.
“Oh, please,” Thoth said dismissively. “You know it’s never there when you look.”
“Right, of course not. But… why was it here?”
“It’s the kid.”
“Eric? He’s got to be too old to have a monster under his bed,” Jenny protested.
“Normally, sure – but he’s been having visitations lately. I keep my distance but you must have noticed it too. He’s got some kind of god or power or something showing up, from outside the universe.”
“Oh, her! Yeah, I know, she’s not a problem.”
“She’s wearing reality thin all through the building is what she’s doing,” the cat said. “Where there are this many miracles, you can expect more. This morning there was a monster under his bed.”
“The Thing Under the Bed?”
“Yeah, one of those.”
“It’s only the one Thing. And it’s under everyone’s bed, sort of. Potentially? It’s all quantum. You know how an electron is never really truly here or there, only a probability of it being observed or not? Like that.”
“That sounds like a scientist answer.”
“It is, I guess. Magicians probably explain it some other way. Anyhow, are you stuck here? What’s under the bed now?”
“One shoe and a stinky sock,” Thoth told her. “We’ve talked about it enough that it’s had to go somewhere else. I could go through now if you weren’t looking.”
“Fair enough. I’ll go take a shower.”
(20 June 2025) I wasn’t going to have anything for this week, but one night I was thinking about something else and this came to me. If you recognize the place, you know.
Wrong Time, Right Place
by Scott Sanford
20 June 2025
Kim remarked, “You spend so much time out at bars and music venues that serve alcohol, I’m always expecting you to get dragged into a fight some evening.”
“Bar fights? I’ve seen a few, sure.” Jenny shrugged as if it was no big deal.
“You don’t worry about yourself?”
“Not a whole lot,” Jenny admitted. “At least I try not to. I try to avoid fights when I can, but if they happen they happen, you know?”
“I’ve been in a few myself, so yes.”
“I remember one, just a few years after the War, when pretty much everyone was still decompressing and getting used to having lives outside of whatever we were doing during,” Jenny reminisced. “This was at a place I liked out on Long Island. A bunch of me would drop in there now and then, over the decades, but that’s another story.
“Anyway, one night guy called Big Beef decided he had a problem with the owner, and then everyone else in the bar, and then with the door on his way out. One of me got a good kick in before Mike, the owner, showed him the door and chucked him out into the world.”
Jenny laughed quietly and added, “I never found out where he went, but he never came back there.”
“Long Island, and after a war? This wasn’t you, was it?”
“You mean not this me?” Jenny clarified. “No, this was years ago, out in New York. That me was doing, uh, some technical stuff out at a place called Wardenclyffe, just down Route 25A from Stony Brook. This me doesn’t know enough about electricity to explain it.”
“That tells me all I need to know,” Kim told her. “I’ve heard of Wardenclyffe.”
(27 Dec 2025) Some bits of character background linger around for a long time and then produce a story. One night I was typing and this fell out.
Late Night Caller
by Scott Sanford
27 Dec 2025
I was catching up on some backlogged albums when the landline rang. I hit pause and answered.
“Hello, is this the number for Mrs. King?”, asked a voice I didn’t recognize.
“You have the right number,” I said. I’d been through this before and recognized the code word. “I can take a message.”
“I’m calling from the Medical Examiner’s office. If Mrs King is available we’d like to see her down on Newhall Street as soon as she can make it.”
My blood ran cold a moment; I’d heard that before too, and if they were calling for “Mrs. King” this late at night...
“She’s out right now and it’s probably going to be a few hours before she can get there,” I said. “Is it… urgent?”
I didn’t like thinking about the ways it could be urgent. I’d rather leave this stuff to Kim, it’s her specialty the way dimensional stuff is mine, but the place was only about five kilometers away as the bat flies and I could get over there if I had to.
“No? But I think she’d better look at this. Like, soon? Before sunrise?”
“Okay, that I can do,” I said with relief. “I’ll let her know; expect to see her in a few hours.”
“Oh, thank you!”, they said, and I heard a lot of relief in their voice. “I don’t want to have to explain this and I am really, really looking forward to seeing her.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Hang tight, she’ll be there soon.”
