I simply couldnt resist picking this story off a book. This is one of the best bad stories i have ever read. There is a lesson in here somewhere but i am missing it;)

THE LITTLEST DEVIL (Steve Boynton)


Source: Chicken Shit for the soul 2 by David Fisher.


Of all the devils in creation, he was the smallest one and had always been so. At school, all the other young devils would make fun of him and he would get angry; but because they were bigger than him they had bigger powers, so when he tried to call down the fire on them, the flames were no bigger than a match and the other devils would easily blow them out. When he tried to spin a hurricane, it would be but a small breeze they barely noticed. When he called forth a flood, it was barely a trickle.


Even when he was fully grown, his two horns barely stuck out of his forehead. When he graduated from the University of Devils, he was determined to do worse than all his classmates, but he soon discovered that many people would not give him a chance. Employers wanted big devils capable of producing major storms, of blowing the tops off volcanoes and shaking the earth. They wanted devils who could make the stock market crash and spread plague and create great droughts.


Finally the littlest devil found a kindly old devil in the office of regional wars willing to give him a chance to run one region on earth that nobody cared about at all. When wars started there, nobody tried to stop them. Often nobody even knew that they had started. The pay wasn’t good but for the littlest devil this was a chance he had been waiting for to prove his ability to do really bad things

.

He did just what he had been taught in school. He gave food and shelter to one side and starved the other. He gave guns to the starving side but not to the other side and then he created a confrontation and waited.


The result was terrible. The two sides negotiated a peace treaty in which they shared the food and the guns. The littlest devil was fired in shame. People laughed at him.


The littlest devil tried everything he could to make people hate him but he just couldn’t do it. Even the freelance jobs he got didn’t work out well. Once he was hired to create a small tidal wave and ended up providing the perfect conditions for a surfing competition. Another time he was hired just to make it rain enough to wash out a big golf tournament but he got his dates mixed up and it rained just in time to make the entire course lush and green when the tournament began.


The littlest devil was so unhappy. He had no fire in his eyes. Maybe he just wasn’t cut out to be a devil. He thought, maybe he should go into another profession. Maybe he should be a lawyer.

But one day, as he was sitting all alone, an old devil saw him there and asked,

“What’s the problem young devil?’

“Just everything. Nothing I do turns out bad. Every time I try to create a disaster it turns out to be a disaster. I can’t make anybody hate me.


The old devil chuckled. “You know, when I was just getting into this business, I had a similar problem. It seemed like no matter what I did, somehow it turned out wrong. One summer I made this wonderful heat wave, it was hotter than here, and then somebody went and invented air-conditioning!


And when I started a flu epidemic, somebody else discovered a flu vaccine. It was very tough.


The littlest devil was intrigued. “Then what did you do?”


The old devil leaned down and said softly, “that’s when I realized you dint need to do really big things. Those people down there are very clever for human beings. If I did something really big, it got their attention and they did something to stop it. So instead, I started doing small things, and I found that small things eventually became big things, but by the time they do, it’s too late to stop them.”


“Like what?”


“Who do you think made it so easy to get a divorce?” the old devil stood up proudly. “That’s right. You are looking at him. By the time they figured it out, it was too late. It was more widespread and affected more people than an epidemic.


The littlest devil looked at him with wonder. And then he set out determined to do some good bad things. Think small, he reminded himself, think very small. And he thought and he thought and he thought the smallest thing he could think of was – a tiny flea.


A flea? What harm could he possibly cause with a flea? He wondered. And as much as he thought about it, he couldn’t come up with that answer, but sometimes he realized he just had to have faith in Satan that things would turn out badly. A flea, he decided firmly, that’s how he would get started.


It was a hot summer evening down on earth. The littlest devil searched until he found a smiling dog. Then, just as he had learned in freshman spells 101, he pressed all the right buttons and created one small flea.


It wasn’t much of a flea, but it was a flea. And as the dog was walking down the street, the littlest devil made his flea bite that dog as hard as he possibly could.


The dog yelped and ran into the street.


A car driving down the street swerved to avoid the dog and slammed into a parked car.


The parked car went crashing into a light pole and hit it so hard that it made it almost fall down.


The falling light pole stretched the wires until they tore loose. In the power station, bells went off and all the power going through those wires was diverted to another system.


The other system was already operating at full capacity when the additional power began surging through the wires. This overloaded the system and sparks began flying. The engineers had to shut it down.


But when they shut down this generator, other systems in faraway places that were connected to it also became overloaded and had to be shut down. House by house, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by tow, city by city, state by state, the entire country lost all its power.


Lights went out and television sets went dark and refrigerators turned off so all the food began melting; computers stopped computing, cordless telephones wouldn’t work, and the traffic lights blinked off and people drove right through them and had accidents.


All the devils watched this happening. This was truly a terrible thing, they thought with delight. And then they wondered who could have done such a grand thing? When they learned that this had been the work of the littlest devil, at first they couldn’t believe it. No one thought he would ever do anything bad.


But finally all the big devils apologized to him and told him that while he might be small in size, he was a very big devil!


The littlest devil was never sad again, for he had learnt the most important lesson: Bad things can also come in small packages.