Bob Whitehouse played the drums.
He was really good at it, but he couldn’t fit his name on his bass drum.
His agent suggested he shorten his last name to White. Or House.
But Bob wrote BOB on the drum.
It was shorter than either WHITE or HOUSE.
Bob installed his bass drum upside down, and it still kinda looked like BOB.
It was such a hassle carting the drum kit around, and he hated using house drums.
So, Bob switched to clarinet. And he changed his name to Doris Franklin.
Because it said DORIS FRANKLIN on the case already.
Category: My stories
Martin’s Strain
Martin never liked going into the office.
All the people and noise confused him.
Having to pretend to pay attention during boring meetings.
It was easier to deal with everything through the filter of a screen.
So, when the pandemic came, and everyone worked from home, he was ecstatic.
His productivity went way up, he was happy.
He got a promotion and a raise, and lots of bonuses.
All that wasted commute time was now spent in his home gym.
And his chemistry lab, working on mutations of the virus.
So he’d never have to go to the office again.
Climb the mountain
“Climb the mountain,” says the wise man.
So, we climb.
It gets colder, and the air gets thinner.
The sky is so beautiful, here above the clouds.
The blue and white, swirling around the mountain range.
I can barely feel my body.
I can barely hear anything, except for… wind.
And the old man, grabbing my arms, shouting in my face.
KEEP CLIMBING! KEEP CLIMBING!
So, we climb.
The air is colder, thinner, darker.
We’re above the sky, looking down on the world.
The old man standing over me.
I close my eyes, and the cold and dark surround me.
Find my
I really like Apple’s Find My feature.
I rarely misplace my laptop, phone, and watch.
But when I do, it’s nice to be able to run Find My and ping the missing device.
Usually it’s in my apartment. Or in the trunk of my car.
Once I lost my phone while on a hiking trip, and the phone reported itself at the bottom of a deep canyon I’d been hiking through.
If only Apple had a drone service to go fetch your device.
As long as the drone doesn’t fail and get lost, and you have to locate it, too.
Markham County
All roads in Markham County lead to the landfill.
Trucks arrive at dawn, lining up at the gate.
The supervisor weighs each truck, takes their cash, and sends them along the last mile.
Up to the rim, and back down into the pit.
Opening their back gates, and laying out their trash.
The bulldozers shove the trash into a pile, and cover it with dirt.
The trucks leave the pit, drive down the rim, and back out through the gate.
Every day, the pile gets bigger, and the pit gets smaller.
At the end of the roads of Markham County.
Exit through the gift shop
It’s a cliche to finish a thrilling experience by exiting through the gift shop.
But what happens when the thrilling experience is a gift shop?
The greatest gift shop in the world is a very thrilling place.
And you exit it through a gift shop for the gift shop.
Over time, that gift shop for the gift shop has become so thrilling, it needed a gift shop to exit through.
Pretty soon, there were an endless series of gift shops.
And nobody could exit.
Because you couldn’t exit through a gift shop, they all winked out of existence at once.
Myrtle
Aunt Myrtle always said that everything is in the last place you look.
So when Aunt Myrtle lost her glasses, she fumbled around everywhere.
The sofa, the table, the countertop.
She checked the bathroom counter.
And she looked in her purse at least a hundred times.
“Did you steal them?” she yelled at her cats.
And she checked her purse again.
Her heart couldn’t take the panic, and she fell to the floor.
No, her glasses weren’t on the floor.
They were up on her hair.
She might have seen them in the bathroom mirror.
If she’d had them on.
The whisperer’s town
The village’s Lord Ghost Talker lay in the church for three days.
People paying their respects, tapping the old man’s forehead with their thumb, as the tradition.
One by one, they closed their eyes, whispered his name, and waited.
Until, finally, someone heard him.
It was the girl from the Martin farm, the pretty one.
She went to the Ghost Talker’s vault, standing at the wooden crate full of keys.
“It’s this one, he says.” picking up the key the old man had shown her.
And she opened the lock.
The town elders began preparations for a parade and feast.
Wanted, one piano
I bought a piano.
But it was haunted.
The ghost of a little girl played it at night.
And played it badly.
I hired the ghost of a piano teacher to give her lessons.
She got better, but the piano was out of tune.
So, I hired the ghost of a piano tuner to tune the piano.
“You need a living piano tuner,” said the ghost.
And he billed me for his time.
I refused to pay the bill.
The ghost of a collection agent kept calling me, over and over.
I hired an exorcist, and sold the damn piano.
Take it on the road
Elise does a pole act with ghosts.
They were the ghosts of strippers who worked at the club when it burned down a few years ago.
It’s really popular, gets lots of headlines, lots of tips.
But it’s not like Elise can take the act on the road.
The ghosts can’t travel. They’re focused on the location where they died.
The owner rebuilt the club so that the new main stage is where the old dressing room was.
Where the girls died, locked in there.
Don’t tell them what happened. They might want revenge.
Or worse yet, refuse to perform.