Description A bizarre little story I thought of on the fly.
	Background This story is pretty weird! In high school, one of my classes taught me about Microsoft Works (the DOS version). One day, I felt compelled to put the Microsoft Works macro function to the test. The plan was that I'd record a new macro by typing in a story. When the macro was played back, I should see the story type itself out again. Obviously, I was bored. This stream of consciousness was the result. Please forgive its graphic nature, as I was young and angst-ridden at the time. :-)
	wEirD
	This is a story about a man in a big city somewhere. This particular man happened to come across a bean on the road while he was walking to work, which he had been doing ever since his bicycle had been stolen the month before. It appeared to be a pinto bean or lima bean or something of the sort. He bent down to pick it up, and noticed a strange spot on one side of it. He picked it up and took a look at the spot more closely. It appeared to have a pattern to it. He took the bean to work and placed it under one of the many microscopes which were constantly cluttering the lab, and focussed the scope on the strange mark. What he saw was bizarre, yet not quite as bizarre as what he DIDN'T see. As he peered into the microscope, he saw what appeared to be... nothing. The miniscule "dot" on the bean did not appear to have a surface. Instead, it seemed simply to, for lack of a better term, EXIST -- with no substance or reason for existing. It wasn't exactly empty space, because at least empty space would have revealed the opposite side of the bean. No -- it simply did not let anything visual escape from its grasp. He could not determine it as being there, yet he could not be sure that it WASN'T, either. He looked around for a pair of dissecting tweezers (at the lab they usually work with artifacts and such, and frequently need to use precision instruments to pick apart their specimens). He found a pair sitting on a nearby desk. He looked back into the microscope's dual lenses and carefully maneuvered one of the tweezers' two prongs into the "anomale", as he had decided to term it. It began to enter the hole or whatever it could be referred to. All of a sudden, a red bolt of...SOMETHING...shot up the tweezers and up his arm, heading straight for his brain. It impacted the soft tissue of his cerebrum with the force of lightning, and in an instant, the matter between his ears was a thousand degrees hotter than the rest of him, and expanded so quickly that his skull was unable to withstand the pressure. It cracked and shattered within two seconds of the initial shock, sending wobbly globs of the man's brain flying out in all directions, and a massive spray of blood along with it, covering all of the lab equipment. The now headless body twitched a couple of times before collapsing to the floor in a crimson heap. The bean, which had been knocked to the floor, began to quiver. The blood flowing from the neckhole slowed to an ooze, then congealed within a few seconds. The bean began to glow a faint red color, growing brighter. The body twitched. The "anomale" then began to emit a strange glow, of a color not quite describable. It grew brighter, until it drowned out the fluorescent lights of the lab. It then let out one final, massive burst of light, withdrawing to reveal the room as it had been before the incident, with the one exception of the dead body on the... wait... the body twitched again. The bean began quivering, and the body followed suit by slowly moving its fingers. Then as if putting forth a lifetime's worth of effort into this one magnificent feat, the body sat up erect, then stood up. It picked up the bean and walked outside. Placing the bean on the sidewalk and avoiding people's eyes, the headless body disappeared into the immensity of the city. Had the body been in posession of that which it had so recently lost, one might see a peculiar, somewhat Machiavellian smile on its face. The bean, on the other hand, just waited...
	Copyright (c) 1993, Matthew Holmes