Category: My stories

The Betting Man

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Governor Stack begins each sentence with “If I were a bettin man.”
Which everyone thought he was.
Tickets and race forms poked out of his jacket, and you could always find him down at the track, sipping a martini or a mint julep.
“I just come here for the drinks,” he says. “Best mint julep in the state.”
Which made no sense at all, since the racetrack made horrible drinks.
So, while he’s getting drunk on bad liquor and wasting his money on the horses, we run the state.
We run it better than Stack.
You can bet on that.

The Cubicle

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Joshua has two minutes to live.
He rubs the back of his neck, and the strange sensation there goes away for a few seconds.
Then, he passes out in his cubicle.
Only when his supervisor sees Joshua’s keystroke rate drop below the quota does he come out to the floor.
At first, he thinks Joshua is sleeping on the job. So, the supervisor pulls out his phone to call the department manager to get him fired.
Then, he reaches for Joshua’s neck.
No pulse.
So he makes another call to get someone from the next shift to come in early.

The Asteroid

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Astronomers spotted the asteroid last week.
It didn’t take long to figure out it was coming this way.
Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
The governments of the world called for calm.
The police of the world tried to maintain order.
They failed. The people rioted.
That’s when someone remembered that the great science fiction authors had met with NASA to construct a plan.
But NASA had shelved the project and couldn’t find the report.
Harlan Elisson was the last one alive.
They went to his house, found he had shot himself, and read the simple note:
“Fuck you all.”

Millard!

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O, Millard Fillmore gold dollar coin!
How shiny thou art!
Zounds!
Your luster and glisten have no equal among currency!
Your visage may be one that scowls, but your undepicted heart beats bravely, rest assured.
I tap you against a glass table… once… twice… three times, my, how you sing brightly!
If it were not a sin, I’d worship your graven image, I would.
But, alas, parting is sweet sorrow, and the waffle-chips are my craving.
Sally forth into the coin-slot as the ransom for my snacking desire.
I will gaze upon your beauty no more.
Farewell, brave coin, Farewell!

The Ark

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Noah brought the animals on to the ark in pairs.
And after days of rain, the ark reached land and Noah let the animals back out.
Then, when the checklist was complete, he watched a brood of platypus chicks crawl down the plank.
Noah called the beavers and ducks over for a meeting.
“We were bored!” cried the beavers. “It was dark in that boat. Things got confused.”
“We were drunk!” growled the duck. “They took advantage of us!”
Noah sighed, dismissed the animals, and looked at a horse.
“I don’t want no centaur-babies,” said Noah. “You’re having an abortion.”

Johnny comes marching home…

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When Johnny comes marching home again, we won’t be singing Hurrah Hurrah.
No, we’ll be waiting behind the woodshed with knives.
Johnny may think he’s a big hot-shot war hero, but his brothers who went to the front with him sent back letters saying otherwise.
A lousy shot.
A worthless coward.
A loose-lipped traitor.
He may think he made the explosion look like an artillery shell accident, but Tomkins saw it. And he sent the letter before Johnny finished him off, too.
We hear his horse come up the path, draw our knives, and his whistling grows louder.
STAB HIM!

Catering

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Usually, when there’s a big company-wide conference call, they bring in pizza or boxed lunches.
However, this time, they brought in crates full of glowing ham-sized seed-pods to put on every employee’s forehead.
“Hell no,” I said. “I’m not going to let you mess with my brain like that.”
The secretary put the pod away and handed me a box lunch.
The box had T on W written on it. Sure enough, inside was a turkey on wheat with a side of coleslaw.
Of course, the bitch didn’t say anything about the nanoprobes.
I mean, Unit Seventy regrets any insult.

The Bathroom Police

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It’s not every day you see 200 kids being lectured by a gigantic toilet.
Officer Flushy goes from school to school, teaching kids about the joys of washing hands, conserving toilet paper, and turning in kids to fix up with heroin in the bathrooms.
The program worked for other school districts, so we figured we’d give it a try.
Nobody told Officer Flushy about Big Mike, though.
He’s twenty foot-tall retarded kid from the woods. We think he’s half-giant.
He can’t read or write, but at least we’ve managed to toilet train him.
Much to Officer Flushy’s public, humiliating chagrin.

Make the monkey whine

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Once upon a time, I had a habit of molesting chimpanzee babies.
There’s just something wrong about me. Broken.
And the poor, innocent chimpanzees suffered my sickness.
I’d have gotten away with it, but one of those chimpanzees wound up in a language experiment and they taught it sign language.
The moment that chimpanzee saw me, it signed BAD MAN! and RAPIST! and EVIL BANANA HURT!
My lawyer said that the monkeys were trained to sign these things. The monkeys meant to sign NICE MAN! and FRIEND!
We sued the researchers for defamation. And won.
But in my dreams… CHIMPANZEES!

This is the way we have always done this

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The office goes silent as two acolytes open The Ark and the technician withdraws a cardboard box.
“This is the way we have always done this,” says the department secretary.
As the technician approaches the copier, the acolytes open the access panels.
While everyone chants, the old toner cartridge is removed and the new one slides from the box and put in its place.
“This is so stupid,” I mutter.
Oops.
“BLASPHEMER!” shouts the secretary.
“BLASPHEMER!” shouts the technician.
“BLASPHEMER!” rings though the halls.
Run!
(I’d transfer to Accounting, but the trial by walking across hot coffee burners scares me.)