Category: My stories

Every morning, I like to have a toasted bagel with cream cheese, chives, and basil.
I buy a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese every Sunday, and bring it to work on Monday morning.
I used to buy basil and chives, but I bought a set of hydroponic units to grow those at work.
Not only is this convenient, but the basil and chives are fresh. Just pick the basil leaves, and clip the chives.
Now, I just need to remember to bring in the bagels and cream cheese.
Which… I now realize… I left at home.

Senator Alfred had a love-hate relationship with the media: the media loved to hate him.
The feeling was mutual. Senator Alfred hated the media just as much as they hated him.
They’d shout insipid and disgusting questions at him, and he’d hurl insults and snide comments back at them.
“The voters elected me!” he shouted at the cameras and microphones. “Nobody elected you parasitic vermin!”
The media kits at his press conferences contained rat-poison soaked nails and an explosive rigged to go off when the lid was opened.
After a few accidents, his press agent outsourced that job to Haliburton.

We are predisposed to see faces in things.
We see a face on the moon, a face in the clouds, and faces in the water.
We also see faces in the furniture and machinery and other devices we make, but that’s not quite the same.
Some of those faces are deliberately there to spark some kind of visceral connection between us and that product.
So we connect to it and buy it, I suppose.
The faces you see tacked to the wall in the basement, however, are actual faces.
Your Uncle Edwin doesn’t much like trespassers.
Or nosy little brats.

Back before microchips and transistors, telephones required operators of a switchboard to plug cables into sockets.
Edith was the daytime operator in Macon Falls, and she liked to listen in on people’s conversations.
She’d tell her friends about what she’d heard.
Well, she called them her friends, but after she’d listened in on everyone in town, she didn’t have any friends.
When she was fired from the telephone exchange, nobody spoke up for her.
She got a job in the next town over, bagging groceries.
She applied for a job at the local phone exchange.
But she got no answer.

I think a lot of things.
Just because I think a few dark things, when I choose not to voice or document them, did I still come up with those dark thoughts?
By voicing them, do I embrace them fully, and that’s what I am?
There’s so many things I could say, so many different thoughts and directions.
Some positive, some negative, and some just outright horrible.
I am not the demons in my head, am I?
No. Only the ones I let out now and then.
As long as you keep them on a leash, the city ordinance says.

Leslie lived in a high-rise condo, and every time the window washing crew appeared, she’d put on a show for them.
The resident association complained that the window washing company tried to charge the building for overtime.
Not only did they take an extended break when they got to Leslie’s window, but they had to go back and clean it again.
Leslie paid the fines with tips she got from the window washers.
One day, while watching Leslie perform with a teddy bear and a zucchini, a window washer accidentally fell to his death.
He landed face-down, preserving some dignity.

Fear is a horrible thing,
First one disappearance. Then two.
Then half a dozen.
No bodies were ever found.
The police put out a warning:
The kidnapper only stalked women with braided hair.
Women rushed to the salons to get their hair cut short.
One woman defiantly refused. She had her hair done up in pigtails.
“What’s he going to do?” she said. “Kill me twice?”
She disappeared the next day.
Vanished while jogging.
She was the last to disappear.
Some said that she was the kidnapper.
Others say that she was an accomplice.
Still, nobody braids their hair anymore.

Cassie saw the injured puppy by the side of the road.
It had been hit by a car.
She bundled it up in her purse and took it to the vet.
The vet mended the puppy’s wounds.
They bonded instantly, Cassie and the puppy, and from that day on, the two were inseparable.
Eight years later, Cassie backed out from her garage and ran over her dog.
This time, there would be no rushing to the vet.
The dog was dead.
Cassie was inconsolable. She wept for days.
The neighbors complained, until one got a shovel and buried the dog.

They say that you should put a beautiful woman high up on a pedestal.
And that’s where I found her.
Because she was statuesque.
The most beautiful statue in the world.
Absolutely perfect.
And I wanted to make her mine. Forever.
At the auction, I tried to buy her.
But I was outbid.
“You will never own her,” said the agent.
If I can’t have her, nobody will.
So, I picked up a crowbar from her crate, and smashed her.
And I ran.
I haven’t completely lost her.
I still have her hand.
And a ring to put on it.