Category: My stories

Draw a red line

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I watch my daughter drawing a red line.
She started drawing on her sketchbook, but ran off of the paper, along the floor…
And right out the door.
I shouted for her to come back, but why worry? She’ll run out of ink or get tired…
One hour… two hours…
I get up and shout again.
No answer.
So, I follow the red line.
That was seventeen years and ten thousand miles ago.
You can’t see the line?
Oh, it’s there. Just too faint for you to see.
But I can.
And I will follow it until I find her.

The Candles

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When Bobby turned five, he wanted his cake decorated like that “Harry Potter” series of books he’d seen, but was too young to read or watch the movies.
“No,” his mother said.
(When you’re five, you don’t take no for an answer.)
So, his mother made a cake with a demon made out of chocolate cookies inside an icing pentagram, a candle at each star point.
At the party, all of Bobby’s friends sang, and then he blew out the candles.
“What did you wish for?” his mother asked.
The demon on the cake opened its eyes.
“That,” grinned Bobby.

Child Actors

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The problem with child actors is that they eventually group up.
But if a series is popular, you want it to go on forever.
Recasting the parts is risky. Even with surgery, no two kids are alike.
We’ve tried cloning, but DNA only goes so far. The clones can be just as different as a surgically-altered double.
Computer-generated actors provide a consistent look and sound, but they’re horribly expensive to create and maintain. And they’re not as expressive as real humans.
Growth-suppression hormones are the answer. Freeze them at the age you want.
Kids love candy, you know.
Drugged candy.

Immortal

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I am immortal. And I am serving a life sentence in prison.
Sounds like a bad Twilight Zone episode, right?
It’s not. It’s my life.
And I am in prison for the rest of it.
Forever.
Maybe they’ll figure it out after a few decades,
Or, after “the organization” sends a few more guys after me.
Those knives hurt. But they can’t kill me.
Will I survive having my head cut off? Or being tossed in the furnace?
I don’t know. But they’re welcome to try.
Guilty? No. I didn’t kill her.
And I don’t want to live without her.

Your Shadow

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Sometimes
The world stinks
So much
That your shadow
Your goddamned shadow
Has to take
A long bath
To wash
It off
No matter
How much
It scrubs
And scrubs
The world’s stink
Sticks harder
And never
Washes off
Completely
Everything stinks
Around you
Cover it up
All you want
With soaps
And perfumes
It’s still there
And it never
Goes away
If your shadow
Can’t come clean,
What hope
Do you have?
None.
Pull the plug
The water
Drains out
You tried
But
That stink
Gets worse
So bad you gag
Close your eyes
And wish
It all
Away

Footprints

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Footprints in and of themselves aren’t terribly interesting.
But when you take them in context, that’s when my curiosity is piqued.
Walking to the edge of the roof…
Walking straight into a wall…
Walking in a perfect circle without beginning or end…
And then there’s the depth, which tells you how much the person weighs.
Or is carrying. A body, for instance.
There’s shoe tread, all sorts of factors there.
There’s nothing unusual about my footsteps.
Well, besides the fact that I’ve got flat feet, but that’s no crime.
What? The fact that they’re bloody?
I can explain that. Really.

Groceries

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I know, it’s not considered socially acceptable to eat something in the grocery store before you check out and actually buy it.
But there’s some situations where you just have to break from the norm.
I’m not talking about a free sample here and there, okay?
When I see parents let kids stick their grubby hands in the bulk bins or cracking open a soda bottle on a day when it’s not hot, that drives me mad.
And it distracts me from this boiling pot for the lobsters.
Got the butter melted yet, or do you need another cigarette lighter?

Scarecrow

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After Dorothy slew the Wicked Witch and Scarecrow was crowned as King Of Oz to rule in place of the departing Wizard, the sharpness of the tacks in his head didn’t always lead to the brightest of decisions.
Time brings rust, after all.
He was hailed when he was wise.
He was vilified for his foolish times.
So he enjoyed the times when he was hoisted on shoulders and led through Emerald City in a parade.
And he learned to hide when angry mobs wanted to burn him in effigy.
“They might mistake me for the dummy again,” he whispers.

Heartache

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After the funeral, I fired up Johnny’s brainscan on the simulator.
Johnny eventually calmed down, and I was able to understand him.
He wanted to know what was said at his funeral, who was there, and who wasn’t.
He also wanted to know how his donated organs were holding up.
(I guess when you don’t have kids or pets or someone else in your life, that’s the next best thing, right?)
I asked him what his password was.
When he finally told me, I logged on to the banking system, transferred the money, and deleted his will and brainscan files.

Codebreakers

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Deep under a secret military base, there’s a room.
In the room, 100 clones of the world’s greatest codebreaker work day and night.
We feed signals into their headphones and laptops, and they work furiously on their decoding machines.
Chewing up top secret military communications is their specialty. There hasn’t been a code invented that can get by them.
We can’t let them out, but we can bring them games and puzzles.
We used to show them movies, but someone decided to show them David Lynch and Terry Gilliam films.
Had to grow a new batch of clones after that.