Category: My stories

I remember the last time I met Death.
We were on the ledge of a very tall building.
People on the street below.
Cars passing by.
And we were up here.
He didn’t have a scythe.
A pale horse.
Or a chessboard.
Just a man in a suit.
Checking his silver pocketwatch.
“Going to jump?” he asked me.
I thought it over.
“Not this time,” I said.
He snapped his watch shut, put it in his pocket, and went back to the void.
I sat there for a while, looking at the street below.
I thought about jumping.
Next time.

Danny rode his bike to the library every day.
He’d lock it to the lamp post, walk through the doors, and work his way down the stacks, one book at a time.
When it was time to go home, he’d make a note of where he was in the book, walk out the doors, unlock his bike, and head home.
This went on for a few years, until one day, someone had checked out the book he had been reading the day before.
Danny sat there, confused.
When it was time to go home, he just sat and stared more.

I live in a golf and tennis resort town, lots of families and retirees. People drive golf carts around and the kids ride their motorized bicycles like crazy. I go for a lot of walks along the golf course paths and hiking trails. A lot of people are out, pushing strollers or walking their dogs. I say hi they say hi. There are a few of those lending library kiosks in the various subdivisions named after famous golf courses or Caribbean islands. Sometimes I wanna put banned books in them. Then I realize it’s my neighborhood. Why mess it up?

The town had never had a parade. They had things worth celebrating, but nothing parade worthy. So the mayor decided they would have a parade. They got the high school band together. And they decorated trucks up as floats. the Car Dealer offered a convertible for the mayor and the queen of the parade to sit in and wave. On the morning of the parade, they all lined up on one side of the street together and crossed it. It only took about 30 seconds. I don’t think that was quite right said the mayor. We’ll try again next year.

As Henry walked through the woods, he listened to the birds and the wind blowing through the trees. Sometimes he would stop and close his eyes and just let the breeze and the music of the forest flow through him. But it was starting to get dark, and checked his map encompass. He didn’t want to pull out his phone, but he wasn’t too sure about where he was, and so he gave in and opened up the map and found that he had gone in the completely opposite direction from his camp. He laughed, turned around, and began walking.

Alfred kept a cheat sheet tattooed on his left arm. Werewolves were silver bullets. Mummies were fire. Vampires were garlic and crosses and mirrors. And so on with the list. Not that he ran into these creatures all that much, but whenever he did, he had their weakness right there. When he ran into things that he hadn’t before, one of the locals would tell him what he needed, and he goes straight to the tattoo parlor and add to his list. Then the store. He always made sure to wear short sleeve shirts when he went out on adventures.

I put a cover over my air-conditioning heat pump to keep leaves and rocks out of it. However, somehow something got in there. There was a loud banging. I turned off the air conditioning to the house and looked under the cover. There was a severed tail at the bottom of the unit and some sort of lizard or frog chopped up and stuck in the grading on top. Apparently it kept bouncing off of the spinning blades, sticking to the grading, and eventually falling back into the blades. I cleaned out the creature, and restarted the unit. Fixed.

Early chemists discovered elements by looking around, maybe digging a little.
Maybe they had to heat something up a little.
Further on, chemists had to go digging for a really long time, mix vials of goop, and filter out lots of crap to find new elements.
As the effort increased, so did the announcements and the launch parties.
Pretty soon, they were firing electrons at lumps of stuff behind large amounts of sheeting or concrete walls.
And the parties came with parades and fireworks.
But this request for a team of skydiving Elvis impersonators?
Rejected.
Just get a damn cake.

They say that if you meet Buddha by the side of the road, you must kill him.
But that is not Buddha.
It is Adam West.
You know, the guy who played Batman on television.
He was a voice in that cartoon show as the mayor.
And you killed him.
I mean, yeah, people mistake him for the Buddha a lot, I admit it.
If they were in a police lineup, you’d have a hard time telling them apart.
As if the Buddha would be stealing from a bodega or groping people on the subway.
Adam West? Maybe he would.

The alphabet started small. Two or three marginalized groups, bringing their causes together, fighting for their rights. Then other groups added themselves to the alphabet, trying to pin their demand for rights to the causes of others. More and more groups jumped aboard. Pretty soon, the reading of the alphabet took longer than whatever speech or presentation an activist was giving. God forbid they left anyone out of the alphabet, or there would be screaming accusations of marginalization among the marginalized. Eventually, it got too difficult to remember or say, and it was shortened to We hate white straight men.