Author: R.

George the Pirate’s Bath Night

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He learned early on that he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Bath Night was every Sunday, he’d take all his bath toys into the bath with him.
Every Sunday, his pirate ship had adventures on the high seas in his tub.
He’d slosh the water into tidal waves, and ship and men sank to the bottom, eaten by his toy sharks.
The water would splash everywhere, causing mold and rot.
“Look what you’ve done,” shouted George’s parents.
Eventually, George was forced to hose himself off in the back yard.

George the Pirate On The Second Squad

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The Captain considered George to be “Second Squad.”
It consisted of George, the cabin boy, Blind Joe, and Cook, who only spoke bits of Dutch.
Nobody else on the boat spoke Dutch, so that didn’t matter much, really.
In battle, sometimes, The Captain would call for the cabin boy to lend a hand.
“What about me?” said George. “I bought a new sword, and I’d hate for it to go to waste.”
The Captain thought this over.
“You’re right, George,” he said. “Lend your sword to the cabin boy.”

George the Pirate Washed Overboard

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He fell overboard a lot. So often, George’s shipmates insisted that he always wear a life jacket, safety rope, and an emergency beacon.
It made hauling George back into the boat a lot easier.
Even when George was on dry land, his shipmates insisted that he wear all of the safety equipment.
“Just in case,” they said.
One night, while George was sleeping at an inn, a huge tidal wave washed George out of his bed and out to sea.
George gave the inn a negative review on Yelp.

George the Pirate Accidents

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He was always causing accidents or getting injured.
He filed a lot of Workman’s Compensation claims.
And he raised everybody’s insurance premiums on the ship’s group plan.
He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the wheel. Or the tiller.
God help everyone if he was allowed near the Powder Room again.
Eventually, The Captain took away all of George’s duties except for the “This Ship Has Been Injury Free” sign that counted days since the last reported injury.
The sign fell on George, and he had to be taken to sickbay.

Weekly Challenge #697 – PICK TWO: German, in the darkness…, vehicle, halfway, cute, color-coded, Pan

Nap

LIZZIE

The priest stared at a silent room packed with anxious people. Suddenly, a truck arrived. Three men, heavily armed, entered the room. Halfway through the aisle, one of them raised his gun and fired a totally unnecessary warning shot. The crowd remained in silence. “Everybody out.” They stood up and walked quietly. “Where are you taking them?” asked the priest. “None of your business.” When the crowd got to the truck, the three men had disappeared. The priest drove the vehicle down a ravine a few miles away. They had bought some time to run and now they had guns.

RICHARD

Pick One

Why is it that bomb makers can’t seem to resist using colour coded wiring in their devices?

Is there some sort of anarchists’ bomb manual that gives step by step instructions in making your own explosives; or do they do it simply because it’s easier to identify which wires to disconnect if they accidentally activate the timer?

Perhaps they’re just being cute… Deliberately not using red for live, and yellow for control, simply to wind up those faced with the almost impossible decision, ‘which wire to cut?’

If it was up to me, I’d just use the same colour throughout!

SERENDIPIDY

With a sputter, the vehicle died, coasting to a gentle stop. The headlamps dimmed and flickered, before fading completely.

A desolate road; a lonely forest; a broken down car and four teenagers rapidly succumbing to abject fear.

And, in the darkness: Shuffling footsteps, steadily coming closer.

My footsteps.

My hunched silhouette.

A disturbing figure, in the middle of nowhere, trudging along the road at midnight, holding a full can of fuel.

In different circumstances, in daylight, I might be a welcome sight – a guardian angel. A saviour.

But tonight, in this place, in the darkness…

What do you think?

JRADIMUS

•Summer, 1944, Rural France
Sgt. Wilford Green’s squad was encamped on a farm for the night, taking advantage of the relative security and comfort to rest from their patrols for German soldiers scattered by the Allies’ D-Day invasion.
As his men slept, Sgt. Green stood watch from the hay loft of the barn. While scanning the dark French countryside, he felt a voice shout in a whisper above him ‘Get down!’ He immediately obeyed, ducking to the floor. The next instant, a rocket flew through the window he had been watching from, his life spared. So much for a quiet night.•

NORVAL JOE

Billbert and Linoliumanda bobbed and shifted in a way they assumed was similar to what was considered dancing. As the song ended the DJ said, “Don’t go anywhere. Here’s a slow song for you cute couples.”

Before he could move Linoliumanda had Billbert in a bear hug. Resigned to enjoy himself, he put his hands on her back and swayed in rhythm to the music.

Halfway through the song, someone shut off the power. Standing in the darkness with his arms around Linoliumanda, Billbert wondered if he could keep dancing, even though the music stopped when the lights went down.

TOM

Darkness Darkness Be My Pillow

In the darkness I followed the color coded floor. Red as good as blue. A memory of things past, deeply stored flashes from childhood, set in stone by the horror of that moment, cold and hard. So here I was again letting my feet led and my brain accept that choice. In the end the end is just being left with a single choice, neither bad nor good, just what it is. Still in the black I wonder are my last steps pressing against blue or are they coursing over red. When the white return I see it was actually neither.

PLANET Z

Franklin worked in Municipal Services as a street-cleaner.
Until the robots came, that is.
Drones took over garbage collection, pothole repairs, and road cleaning.
Service Union Nine called for protests, and Franklin went out, attacking robots with baseball bats.
Sweeper Unit 482-Blue had a scratched proximity sensor, and instead of detecting Franklin’s son Ray and stopping, it ran the boy over.
The city showed Franklin the tape from the onboard security camera, seeing his own face repeatedly slamming a robot with a bat.
Digitally faked, but still enough to get him to settle out of court for much, much less.

Super Fraud

So, after the Super Bowl, someone stole Tom Brady’s jersey.
Despite lots of noise from law enforcement, it’s been missing for weeks.
What’s to stop Tom from fucking with the thieves and claiming he found his lost jersey?
Then sign a certificate of authenticity and sell it at a charity auction.
I mean, Tom lied about the deflated footballs that he used a few years ago, right?
And in the end, he’d be doing it for charity.
His diehard Boston fans will believe anything he says, anyway.
Why not make a buck off of those suckers while he’s at it?

Hips lie

Shakira claims that her hips don’t lie, but when you inject them with sodium pentathol, the truth comes out.
Oh, man, the truth comes out! The stories they could tell!
Of course, you can’t compel a pair of hips to testify against their owner, especially under duress or chemically-enhanced interrogation.
That won’t hold up in court. A good defense attorney will object, the judge will sustain the objection, and the jury will be instructed to ignore that testimony.
What you have to do is get a wiretap warrant, and then catch the hips perjuring themselves.
And her ass will follow.

Three sheets

John Redcloud was a lousy sailor and a constant drunk.
He was usually too blitzed to find his boat at the marina.
“Three Sheets To The Wind” was its name.
The rare times he managed to stagger to the right slip, his boat was usually moored at or crashed into another, covered with angry notes from his fellow sailors and the harbormaster.
Or sunk to the bottom, the topmast and ragged mainsail sticking out of the water like the fish wanted to surrender.
His father would buy him another, because boats are slightly cheaper than Porsches.
And cops. And reporters.

Fucks to give

Is there a unit of measurement for fucks to give?
The gandhi? The motherteresa? The marthinlutherking?
Or is it named after someone else who gave a fuck?
Such as Jesus. He gave a fuck about a lot of things.
I think that the unit is actually the shit.
Because people already give a shit about things.
Or run out of shits to give.
What’s the conversion rate between fucks and shits?
What about damns? (We know that darns are equivalent to one damn, right?)
The truth is, I don’t really care.
I ran out of shits to give long ago.

The Liver

Whenever I misbehaved, my mother would ask if I was raised in a barn.
“No,” I’d say. “But you’re too drunk to notice.”
“I’m out of beer,” she says, and she pulls a five from her purse. “I swear, if you spend this on candy or the arcade, I’ll kill you.”
Years later, she found Jesus. Right around when her liver gave out.
“The doctors say they can put just part of your liver in me,” she wrote. “It’ll grow back.”
I put the letter back in my pocket.
She died last night.
I ask Siri where’s the nearest arcade.