Category: My stories

Eighty years ago, the Germans exterminated my village.
Today, we dig up the streets and pull out the underpavement.
It is made from the gravestones of my ancestors.
The Germans had ordered the cemeteries to be destroyed.
But now, we are reclaiming the stones.
Buried under the streets.
Pavestones for paths through the farms.
Grinding stones for plows and knives.
They all have writing on them.
We wash the stones, and rub shaving cream on them.
The white foam makes it easier to read the letters.
Their names are slowly revealed, and we kneel, and we pray for their souls.

Almost twenty years ago, I got a support job at a webhosting company.
We packed hundreds of online scammer accounts on cheap servers.
Load averages were astronomical.
The only true solution was to stop overloading the servers.
But instead, we’d tell the caller that we were resetting the queue. Which did nothing.
If they wanted to stay on the line, we’d thank them, put them on hold, and forget about them as we picked up the next call complaining about overloaded servers.
I spent my time in between calls learning how to run my own servers.
And my own scams.

Dear Loyal Customer,
We regret to inform you that the licensed mumbo-jumbo provider at your local eternal life exchange performed improper service maintenance for the past 20 years.
New equipment and training have been dispatched. Please make an appointment with your nearest jiffy-prayer center to have the correct voodoo performed on your child, self, or parent.
Sadly, should the recipient of incorrect service maintenance have expired, they’re now in eternal damnation. Fill out the attached Form RMA-666 to escalate this issue with our upper management.
Thank you, The Church.
PS: At least the dude didn’t molest the kids… we think.

When people get old and everyone around them has died, and even the ghosts stop coming around to haunt them, they get lonely, and they talk to the mailman or the gas meter reader or the guy at the meat counter.
Or 911.
“What’s your emergency?”
“Everyone I know is dead.”
If it’s not a busy day, the operator talks to them.
And if it is, they take down their number, call them back.
Some say they drank something. Others burn things in the kitchen.
So we hire them to take calls.
The hard part is keeping the conversations brief.

When Bob saw the gun buyback program, Bob saw an opportunity.
He priced out a room full of cheap used 3D printers and buckets of manufacturing resin.
Then he bought plans for a simple “ghost gun” and set the printers to rendering them around the clock.
On the last day of the buyback program, Bob showed up with a van full of the cheap printed guns.
The chief of police said “No way. Ghost guns don’t count.”
So, Bob pulled out a ghost gun from his pocket and shot the guy.
“Does that feel like it doesn’t count?” said Bob.

After years of contention, Congress passed legislation to expand the size of the Supreme Court and the president signed it.
The Court immediately tried to review the law and declare it unconstitutional.
But the House filled the airwaves with meaningless impeachment hearings, and Senate and President ignored the Supreme Court, nominating Associate Justices and holding confirmation hearings.
The opposition party protested the move, doing all they could to disrupt the meetings and votes.
When the new Associate Justices descended on the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice refused to administer their Constitutional Oaths.
Which party was which?
Does it really matter?

We went to the town square for the public hangings.
By the time we got there, the crowd was shouting DEATH DEATH DEATH!
Three hooded and jumpsuited figures were on the platform, ropes around their necks and tied to a bar.
Nobody knew who they were.
Or what they had done.
A solder walked up a set of stairs to the platform, and shoved each figure forward, and they fell, and the ropes went taut.
One of them kicked for a minute, then went still.
Shit ran down from each of their pant cuffs to the ground.
The crowd cheered.

Victor St. Vincent, my nemesis.
Before I stomped on his hands and let him fall from the bridge to his death, he said:
“I’ll see you in Hell!”
But now that I’m in Hell, I haven’t seen Victor.
I’ve seen Stalin and Hitler.
I’ve also seen Gandhi.
It’s the shit they don’t tell you in school, the stuff with his nieces, that did him in.
And me, I did worse things. So much worse.
Victor, well, he was a pretty decent guy.
Which is why he kept trying to stop me.
Hey, did he end up in the other place?

The thing I like most about working from home is being able to look out the window and watch the possums wander around.
Sure, my work office had a nice wide window, but the odds of possums wandering around outside 8 floors up are rather slim.
And any circumstances that would lead to possums outside that work window aren’t good, ranging from hallucinations to some sort of “possum hurling” criminal on the loose.
Or someone dropping possums from the roof.
I think of these things when I’m at home.
But if I were still commuting, I’d think even worse things.

My mom had Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Or maybe only one of them.
But I think both, because the Alzheimer’s made her forget about the dementia and the dementia made her forget about the Alzheimers.
Both made her forget to take pills.
I’m got her one of those newfangled robots to dispense pills on a schedule.
She put a cozy over it like a tea kettle or a toaster.
Plus she would never remember to replenish the pills.
And the nurses were so used to handing out pills, they forgot too.
Now it dispenses M&Ms on a schedule.
She likes those.