By Stephen Lodge
Our party of volunteers remained vigilant as we reached the abandoned town of Willing Creek, just a few miles from the western shore of Broken River. It was a misty night all around, and a ghostly chill stabbed at us as we left our vehicles beside a forgotten roadhouse.
Beneath the sallow moon, we surrounded an old sack discarded in the middle of the road. Removing the sack, we found what was left of the missing robot. The recipe for his signature dish, Chicken Cassusalance, was gone. All this on the eve of the State’s Cookery Contest. We suspected fowl play.
A bizarre track-switch the works well. The thick and fast revelations of the second para were delightfully dizzying. One thing: it would have been good to see the final pun “fowl play” link up, in a revelatory way, to something in the first paragraph – otherwise it just hangs there a bit.
Which poses the question: “Is it murder if someone destroys a robot with malicious intent/premeditation?