Alarmingly Strange Stories
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He lifted his head from the table he had collapsed onto at the onset of his personal apparitions and stared at the source of the ear shattering noise. The cremation oven was rattling vehemently, the heat emanating from it intensified. Gustave let his mind tell him what was happening, and it took full creative liberties. Third grade had been a particularly tough year for Gustave. That was the year he had died. Oh, he wasn't really dead yet, the doctors told his nonchalant parents, he's in a coma. The standard procedure for this, uh, well … condition is to hook him up to an IV and play some Lawrence Welk in the background. Lawrence Welk? Let's go. Give me something I can use, thought Gustave. Of course, it really didn't matter, he was dead already. And he couldn't let old Lucifer hear about how much he hated Lawrence Welk. "Man, I love Lawrence Welk. He's my only catharsis, my only real escape from this hectic world we live in." Reverse psychology. That ought to stick it to him. There weren't many third graders who could outsmart the devil himself. In fact, there was only one fewer than Gustave thought there were. Third grade. And he's dead. So big whoop. His mother had volunteered him for random experimental testings. But, superficially protested the doctors, he's not dead yet. Like fun he's not, replied his mother, angry because there wasn't a vending machine at her disposal. He's only a ten year old boy, he was never good for nothing anyways, heck, now you can dissect his head, or whatever you science guys do in your spare time. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that the doctors pushed their protests upon Gustave's mother any longer. The next day he was sent to the cryogenics lab, packaged up in a freezer in the back room and left to sit. Gustave thought it was all very funny. In twenty years, they were going to thaw him out and ask him what he thought of the future. But Gustave knew that since he was dead when he went in the freezer, he certainly wasn't going to become less dead because he spent the last twenty years drinking frozen daiquiris in Antarctica. He sort of wished he could see the looks on everybody's faces when they found out that he had died, and they fired every janitor in the place for getting hammered and tampering with the equipment. Satan and some homeless janitors. Unfortunately for Gustave's mother, he wasn't really dead. She baked him a lopsided cake and bought him a tablet of drawing paper when he got out of the hospital, after being treated for all-encompassing death.

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