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    Stanley and His Sword
    Stanley and His Sword
    Stanley and His Sword
    Ebook47 pages42 minutes

    Stanley and His Sword

    By George Berger

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Stanley is your typical everyday, apathetic slacker, stuck in a dead-end job, when fate, destiny, and/or an unusual shipping error on the part of a large e-commerce site suddenly bestow upon him a shiny, sexy, nearly-magical sword.

    Soon thereafter, he encounters a succession of mentally-unstable invisible ninjas, nubile yet soulless college students, and fairly underwhelming mythical creatures in his way, and reluctantly confronts the possibility that destiny has greater things than middle-management in store for him.

    Follow along with Stanley as he overcomes adversity, hardship, misunderstandings, disobedient employees, raging hormones, and an invisible neo-Nazi ninja assassin in his own personal quest to get the girl and live happily ever after.

    A charming contemporary fairy tale for sensible people, Stanley and His Sword is a humorous and entertaining 11,000-word tale of lust, fate, and really shiny swords sure to delight a handful of Christopher Moore fans, somewhere.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGeorge Berger
    Release dateJul 26, 2011
    ISBN9781465717269
    Stanley and His Sword
    Author

    George Berger

    George Berger has written for Sounds, Melody Maker and Amnesty International amongst others. His previous book was a biography of the Levellers: State Education/No University.

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      Book preview

      Stanley and His Sword - George Berger

      Stanley and His Sword

      Copyright © 2011 George Berger

      ISBN 978-1-4657-1726-9 (ePub ed.)

      Electronically published by Smashwords

      Visit the author's website at www.mendacities.net

      Cover photograph © Stanislov Perov

      The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, corporations, airports, fraternal orders, political ideologies, musical acts, magazines, mythical monsters, or incredibly hot secluded places to get it on, is probably a coincidence.

      Once upon a time, not very long ago, a relatively uninteresting man named Stanley worked as the assistant manager of a relatively uninteresting little store at a small regional airport in an easily forgettable midwestern state. He was a tall, fair-haired former farm kid, whose two years of community college left him mostly able to run the store, but did little to qualify him as a hero.

      Not the everyday, just-did-what-needed-to-be-done kind of hero, or even the overcame-his-fears-and-took-action sort of hero that's so common in these modern and enlightened times, but the timeless and classic hero of yesterday, the one destined by fate to do improbable and unimaginable feats.

      He was not especially athletic, and the vast majority of his fighting experience had involved being on the receiving end of schoolyard beatings. He'd killed, it was true—but only deer, hunting with his father as a kid. Nor was he particularly brave, nor particularly smart, nor even a particularly charismatic leader.

      But these and his many other shortcomings were of little practical consequence, because like all great heroes, Stanley had a sword.

      It had arrived one spring afternoon at the store, quite unexpectedly. Whereas some heroes receive their weapons from the hands of angels, or beautiful women, or members of the nobility, perhaps accompanied by fanfares of celestial trumpets or ethereal choirs, Stanley's sword arrived on the counter with a muffled thump from the hands of the local UPS driver, a perpetually sullen and scary-looking fellow whose unpronouncably ethnic name he could never remember.

      Two things immediately caught Stanley's attention. First, the box bore the logo and name of a popular online store which had started selling books and since branched out to just about everything it was legal to ship, yet the box was glossy black with white printing, rather than the usual black-on-brown. Second, the box was over three feet long, which was most notable because the only thing Stanley had ordered from them recently was a package of erasers for his mechanical pencil—crossword puzzles being one of the many ways he dealt with the tedium of his job.

      He double-checked the address label, but it was indeed addressed to him, in care of the store, so he dug out his keys—the store was in the secure area of the airport, where anything pointier than a dull spork was prohibited—and used them to cut the tape holding the box closed.

      Inside, he found not an overpackaged container of erasers, as he'd expected, but the gleaming leather-wrapped hilt of a Japanese-looking sword.

      Not quite believing his eyes, he took the box into the store's cramped little excuse for a back room, and drew out the sword. It gleamed seductively in the fluorescent lighting, and the play of reflections along its mirror-like blade was enchanting enough to make him forget, if only for a few moments, that it had been over seven-hundred days since he'd last had sex with a partner. Because he was a man, he held it in his hands, and took a few

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