George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
You know those stickers that soccer moms put in the back windows of their minivans?
The ones with stick figure families, with stick figure kids and stick figure cats and dogs?
Sometimes, you’ll see stick figure zombies and stick figure dinosaurs eating the families.
Well, George had a stick figure on the back window of his ship.
It was a stick figure pirate.
But it wasn’t a very good stick figure pirate.
He’d peeled the decal off wrong, and it was kinda scrunched up.
George eventually scraped it off.
Author: R.
George’s curse
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In desperation, he sought out a psychic to remove any curses that might be on him.
“I can determine if you’re cursed,” said the psychic,”but I’d have to refer you to a witch doctor or a witch to remove it. Or, if it’s demonic in nature, a priest.”
George was passed from charlatan to charlatan, until he had finally run out of money.
“Oh well,” said George.
He went back out to sea and hunted more treasure so he could continue his quest to resolve his frustrating curses.
George the Yoga Master
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He thought that yoga might somehow help him be a better pirate.
So, George bought a few books on yoga and a few audio tapes, but he had a hard time remembering the positions.
His crewmates had to untangle the knots he’d tied himself into.
Then, he went to classes, but the yoga teachers and students thought he was going to pillage and loot the classroom and they attacked him.
His crewmates had to untangle the knots they’d tied him into.
George insisted on keeping the skintight pastel leotard.
George the Infinite
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Still, he did what he could, and at the beginning of the day he’d stand in front of the mirror and give himself two thumbs up.
The mirror-George would give him two-thumbs up back.
George then mounted a mirror on the opposite wall so there’d be an infinite number of him giving himself an infinite number of thumbs up.
Curious about the nature of infinity, he pulled books by Cantor and Dedekind from his bookshelf while his crewmates yelled for George to bring up more ammo, God damn it.
George is…
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Is that all George is? A pirate?
Must we put so much value into our professions?
What else defines us?
Where we come from?
What we want?
What we hope to become?
How we treat others?
George may not have been a very good pirate, but he never cheated at cards.
Nor did he fight dirty. Always a clean, honest fight.
He lost a lot of fights, sure, but he came about it fairly.
“That’s why you’re not a very good pirate,” said the Captain.
George shrugged and smirked.
Weekly Challenge #875 – PICK TWO Point, Heat, Carrots, Rust, Wafer-thin, Creep
The next weekly challenge topic is: Superhero
LIZZIE
The man looked at him sideways.
“What’s up?”
The man didn’t reply and looked away while scratching the rust out of the bench with a pocket-knife.
“You new here?”
The man shrugged.
“Better be careful.”
The man had one eye. The other was white, empty of life.
“Do you have a carrot?”
“A carrot?”
The man nodded and waited.
“That’s how I lost my eye.”
“Are you looking to lose the other too?”
The man grinned a toothless grin and walked away.
“A carrot… Creep. They’ve opened the doors at the funny farm again. Hope no one dies this time.”
LISA
An Open Packet Of Wafer Thin Ham Two Months Past It’s Use By Date.
Layers of sticky grime had built up over years on the door. Lizzie added fridge to the endless list of items for the dump. As she opened the door, the smell hit her like holiday heat when you leave the airport. The whole house had an odour, unpleasant and pervasive but this was something else amid the lumpy milk, liquid carrots and inexplicably her Mum’s purse. She knelt with a bin bag, sliding the contents into it with her nose covered, remembered coming home from uni, and her joy at seeing that fridge, very much cleaner, crammed full of treats.
RICHARD
Japan: The Reality.
Wafer-thin walls and overwhelming summer heat.
That’s what I say, when people ask me about my time in Japan.
I could say more… The crazy traffic, crowded streets, awful cheese, long working hours and the barely-concealed unconscious racism towards anyone who isn’t Japanese, but none of those really bothered me. Somehow, I accepted that as part of what it meant to live in Japan.
But, some things were just too much to bear.
Oh, and haiku.
I could never master that damn thing. I’ll stick to hundred word stories!
The wafer-thin walls;
Overwhelming summer heat.
Japanese torture!
TOM
Not Providing Appropriate Adjustment
Jack was odd. Markly off centered. You could say he was missing one important thing or he was burdened with one maladaptive trait. One could say he was a wafer-thin creepy. How he entered a room, how he joined a conversation of his peers, even if was just walking pass you in a hall, you feel a sense of peril. And wasn’t just adults. Dogs and cats would go ballistic, small children would weep. I tried my best to at the least be surface friendly. That was until the day of the hard black rain. The day Timmy mysteriously disappeared.
SERENDIPIDY
I’ve never been much good at slicing vegetables; I’m always in too much of a hurry. No matter how hard I try, they always come out uneven and messy. Certainly not fit for dinner parties and entertaining.
So I bought myself a mandoline: One of those razor-sharp slicers that proper chefs use, and it revolutionised my kitchen. Now my carrots are wafer-thin, every time.
But, for my latest dinner party, I was running late, and rushing again.
I’d sliced my fingers off, down to the knuckles before I realised.
Nobody noticed the added ingredient.
And it tasted great.
NORVAL JOE
Billbert bit his lip and thought about what the girl had said. “Oh. You mean you have my friend, Linoliamanda.
The girl sneered, looking truly horrifying with hair the color of rust and teeth the color of carrots. “Call her what you want. If you don’t come with us, she’ll be called a memory.”
Sabrina tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “We should run. I think we can outrun them.”
The boy said, “You’d have to get through us first.” He grabbed Sabrina by the shoulders.
She sighed. “I guess he has a point. We probably better go with them.”
PLANET Z
The first time the Creep in the big grey hoodie walked into the grocery store and stuffed bags of baby carrots into this pockets before walking out, nobody saw it.
But after a few days of this, a guy stocking the produce section noticed him, and he got on the phone to the manager.
Too late to stop him from leaving.
Soon, hundreds of stores were reporting similar thefts.
Corporate told managers to have parking patrols watch the doors, and eventually they caught the carrot thieves.
Meanwhile, over in countless dairy sections, the real thieves had stolen all the eggs.
George the medicated
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Every night at 8 bells, the ship’s doctor opened his window in the forecastle and yelled MEDICATION!
Pirates lined up at the window to get two cups… one with their pills, and another with water.
The pirates tossed the pills in their mouths and washed them down.
“They’re just salt pills,” said the doctor. “And I’m not a real doctor.”
Which explained why so many pirates chose to go out of network to use doctors on other ships.
Oh, and those doctors handed out yummy sugar pills.
George and the layoffs
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When the captain reviewed the ship’s budget, he determined that there was an opportunity to reduce spending on personnel, and he announced layoffs. Everyone assumed that George, being not very good, would be laid off.
But instead, Stinky Pete, Cannons McGee, and Ochrebeard were sent ashore with severance checks.
“Why did you keep me,” said George.
“Because you’re cheap,” said the captain. “And there’s no risk of you mutinying against me.”
George asked the captain for a raise.
The captain said no way.
“Mutiny,” yelled George.
The captain sighed.
George does shifts
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
So it was hard finding things for him to do that didn’t put the ship in danger.
Swabbing the deck, working in the galley and acting as the spotter in the crow’s nest were his usual jobs.
He worked the night watch a lot, and he heard that pirates who worked the night got a bonus.
“That’s not true,” said the captain. “Everybody gets paid the same.”
“That’s also not true,” said George’s shipmate, Ralph. “I get a shilling a night.”
George ended up sleeping both day and night.
George through the universe
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In George’s body, though his veins and arteries, chemicals and elements flowed that had flowed through so many other living things over the eons.
Before that, the oceans… the fields… the sky… through space.
Blasted into the universe by dying stars, each atom made more complex and dense.
Generations of supernovas building carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and gold.
George opened his wooden treasure box, and ran his fingers through the gold.
The stars also made arsenic.
But George was wearing gloves, unlike the pirate who tried to rob him.