Two boys inspected their giftwrapped present.

“I think it’s a puppy. I can hear it scratching.”

“It’s a zombie,” his brother said.

“How do you know?”

“No air holes.”

They were both wrong. A considerate Santa’s helper had put batteries in a mechanical toy and forgot to switch it off.

John H. Dromey has had flash fiction published in a number of anthologies (print and electronic), as well as online at The Fast-Forward Festival, Liquid Imagination, three minute plastic, and elsewhere.