Short Story

Another morning, the sunlight spills through the gaps in the sealed boards on the windows onto the floor. It doesn't matter to us because we don't need to rest, we don't need to eat, and we don't get old. The start of a new day for us was just a matter of seeing the hour hand on the clock turn one more time, but we followed our custom and sat down at the table anyway.
"It couldn't have been worse." My sister Brenda said, pulling the old wooden chairs out of the way, making the harsh sound of rubbing against the floor, and sat next to me.
Three months ago, we got our smartphone through an online purchase, and Brenda hasn't stopped using it since. She is the only one of us who carries it everywhere she goes. But, understandably, no metal box could hold so many images at the time of our deaths.
"So, what happened?" I asked Brenda.
"I saw the Soviet Union again ...... Oh, they are now known as Russia. That country's military is active again."
David is holding a newspaper, reading the long-outdated news, still retaining his old-school ways after all these years. He turns toward us and seems skeptical: "How can that be? I always thought World War II hadn't been over long before they are going to have a third war. That's ridiculous."
Brenda didn't answer David's words as she began typing on the screen with a rubber-coated pen. I pulled out my phone and saw my sister's Twitter account was posting comments. Her comments were polite most of the time, but she hadn't quite picked up the phrases and new word usage that are now available on the Internet, and her wording was out of step with this online world. It makes her ridiculed on the internet. Didn't take long for her to seem like she wanted to throw the pen out but held back, retrieved it, and stuffed it in her coat pocket. I knew she must have been verbally attacked again, which happens often.

Short Story

Even though I don't like to argue with people online, I often browse the web and share her thoughts-that this planet is hopeless because so many humans seem both stupid and evil. They even think it's a woman's fault that she got raped and she doesn't have the right to decide if she can have an abortion. At this point, Brenda was covering her face and crying. I know it feels awful. We've been hiding in this house for decades so as not to scare other humans and bring them harm, but humans themselves mutilate their fellow humans.
I want to say something, but I don't know how to begin. She looked to be meditating at the table for a while and suddenly stood up, the chair behind her tilted back and landed on the floor with a dull thud. Both David and I were startled and turned our heads together to look at Brenda. Her voice sounds nasal, "David, that ...... thing you did to us black magic, tell me all about the way."
David and I were both quite surprised because this was something we had always avoided discussing, but today it was dug out of the ground and laid out in the daylight by Brenda. David seemed to realize something and said to me, "William, you need to talk to your sister, everyone becoming the same as us won't make the planet any better ......"
"Why wouldn't it, you see, we don't need to eat, we don't need to sleep, we don't have any of those most basic desires, which makes us almost perfect - that's not narcissism, that's an objective fact. If all people became like us, the world would surely be a better place." Brenda interrupted me quickly, and David began to look at me with a look of help.
I wavered between them, thinking they both had a point. Brenda decided that if David didn't tell her again, she would go through the black magic books stored in the basement herself, and she knew roughly what to do with the process anyway.
After she put away all the newspapers, magazines, and cell phones in the house, David finally gave in, but he still thought it best to use black magic on people with evil desires, so Brenda and I decided to punish our neighbors first. We found out from the backyard street photos they posted that they lived a block away from us and that they disagreed with us on global warming.
It was at night with dark clouds obscuring the moon and only a little light came through the thinner clouds. Brenda and I hadn't been outside in almost two years, so we were both on the verge of trembling with excitement, along with a sense of being superheroes who will remain nameless. However, two skeletons, in any case, would not make much noise. When we pushed open the unlocked door of that neighbor's house and entered the living room, we saw two puddles of skinless flesh squirming on the couch, waving in the air with their flesh whiskers outstretched and the screen of their cell phones still flashing around them.