I pulled a random book off my shelf: This Book if Full of Spiders by David Wong
Using a random number generator, I chose the sentence starting on the second line of the seventy-seventh page.
I wrote for ten minutes. This is the story I got.
“But you say Franky seemed normal when he left.”
“Well, yeah, he was normal but he wasn’t a hundred percent normal,” I tell Claire. “I mean what does ‘normal’ really mean?”
“It means to be not screaming about how there are eyes staring at you from your own shadow.”
I considered this. “Well, yeah, under that extremely strict definition of the word, I suppose that Franky wasn’t too normal when he left the party last night.”
“What happened? Did he drop acid? Do you think someone put something in his drink?”
“No, no, no, no. It was nothing like that.”
“Then what was it?”
“We may have, summoned Aroknu, the goddess of darkness.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing, Franky’s just been stressed out recently with his job and finals and we found this amulet and he’s having trouble with Marcy again.”
“Huh?”
“He and Marcy have been fighting all the time.”
“What was that about an amulet?”
The bathroom door opened and out emerged a slender woman with skin the color of a corpse that had been submerged in ice water for a week. Her eyes were hollowed out caverns, her teeth jet-black needles and her hair woven from the night. “You guys are out of hot water.”
“Sorry abut that Aroknu!”
Claire and the woman stared at each other.
I picked up on the hint. “Sorry! Claire, this is Aroknu, the goddess of darkness. Aroknu, this is my girlfriend Claire. She’s the goddess of…. me.”
They shook hands. While she was touching the dead flesh, Claire’s shadow grew black flames and blood dripped from its mouth. Of course she didn’t notice.
Aroknu walked back to my guest bedroom and I ran after her. “By the way, that guy you sort of cursed last night, is there any way you could maybe stop that?”
“He cheats at Mario Kart.” Aroknu intoned.
“Yeah, I know but he’s also a friend of ours so-.”
“All who cheat must be punished. I will expect hot water for my twilight bath as well as a dozen virgins to be my sacrifice.”
“Right, I’ll get on that.”
She closed the door.
I sat at my kitchen counter, picked up a “grocery list” notepad and started writing the names of every potential virgin I knew.