Category: My stories

The people who live in the apartment next door have a kid.
The kid must be in remedial music, because they play the recorder every night.
Badly. The shrill music pierced the walls.
After a while, the recorder stopped.
And things were quiet.
Until I heard an electronic keyboard playing one night.
Badly.
Every so often, actual music comes from the keyboard, but that’s the tutorial mode.
When it slips back into ugly cacophony, I know the kid has taken off the autopilot.
Want to teach the kid something useful?
Get them some headphones.
Teach them respect for the neighbors!

Long ago, our family fled the Nazis for America.
Generations later, we flew back to see what had become of the old country.
Our vineyard was still a vineyard.
Run by another family from the village.
Who claimed to have run the vineyard for centuries.
They had taken our name. And taken our land.
We bought a bottle from them, uncorked it, and poured it at their feet.
The finest wine is poisoned with a single drop of arsenic.
Once tainted, you cannot filter it back out.
Or sufficiently dilute it with all the tears in the world.
Forever ruined.

If you fill
A telescope
With Jello
It’s a Jelloscope
Look far
Look near
Jello there
Jello here
If you look
In the wrong end
The Jello will
Flow and bend
What flavor
What color
Custard, pudding or pie?
Or that hospital crap
Why why why?
The Jello in
The Jelloscope
It ruined the lenses
You fool! You dope!
We’re stuck at sea
No land in sight
And our telescope
Cannot work right
How will we find
Our way back home
We’re doomed! We’re doomed!
We’re doomed! We’re doomed!
Pass me the compass
Before you fill it with oatmeal
Again

Billie needed to get her hair done. Her roots were showing, and the split ends were coming back.
But her regular cosmetologist was booked. And couldn’t fit in any walk-ins.
So, Billie went to a cosmologist.
“Of course I have time for you,” said the cosmologist. “The earth is over four billion years old, and we believe that the universe is nearly fifteen billion years old. What’s a few minutes here and there?”
They discussed galaxies and quasars and pulsars and comets.
After several sessions, Billie’s hair was an absolute fright.
Which explains how Albert Einstein’s hair got that way.

I shot my best friend Rex.
It was an accident, I swear.
Besides, he’s fine.
The bullet missed anything important.
And the surgeons got the bullet out.
He keeps the bullet in a glas jar on his shelf.
And he’s always showing people his scar.
“This is where my best friend shot me,” he says.
So, why did I shoot him?
There wasn’t a reason. None at all.
We were shooting at beer cans on a fence, and he held up a can and…
Hey, it was his idea. And he wanted to use shotguns.
Imagine that mess, right?

Jonas Salk, the man who developed the Polio vaccine, said that he got his greatest ideas by coming up with a lot of ideas and then throwing out the bad ones.
At first, he’d put the bad ideas in the lab’s wastebasket, but they could crawl back out.
Then, he’d put them in the trash cans in the alley, but raccoons and homeless people got in those.
Nothing worse than getting a call from the police because some bum is pushing a shopping cart around that’s full of your bad ideas.
Best to learn from bad ideas.
And incinerate them.

My cat Bruwyn ran away. He never came back.
A neighbor said that he had seen a dead black cat with a checkerboard collar along the side of the road, but didn’t see the MISSING poster until the city had swept up the body.
I find myself looking at old photos of Bruwyn, trying to figure out what we did wrong.
Was there any clue that he was unhappy? Or felt neglected?
Or unwelcome?
No. He looks like a cat. A happy cat.
Despite having a camera’s flash going off every time I photographed him.
He looks like a cat.

Every day, Colin changes the sheets on the bed.
Some days, he changes them into ghosts. The flaps them around the room, making scary sounds.
Other times, he changes them into sails. He’s sailed all seven of the Seven Seas on his bed that way.
Once, he changed them into Klan robes. He claims that he was going to infiltrate a meeting in order to uncover all the racists and haters in town. But nobody’s buying that cock-and-bull story of his.
Bad, bad Colin.
An angry mob killed Colin.
So, we’re changing the sheets into his burial shroud.
Poor Colin.

Down on Earth, kids are taught that Heaven is up and Hell is down.
But in orbit, even with spin gravity, up and down lose meaning.
You live on the inside of a gigantic spinning barrel.
So, down is out, and up is in.
To help with the confusion, The Brotherhood maintains a presence everywhere.
They watch for signs of rebellion and independence.
And teach the kids about Heaven and Hell.
Kids that resist get put in the airlock.
Until they scream for mercy.
Make sure to open the internal door this time.
We lose too many kids that way.

Cindy and Candy.
Perfect twins, and they’re perfect.
They don’t come cheap.
But they’re worth every dollar.
And worth the three month waiting list.
“Candy has the clit ring,” says one girl.
She must be Cindy.
And we begin.
Seven hours later, I can’t remember who is who.
Or anything else.
Everything hurts. It hurts so good.
So good.
I can barely walk to the shower.
Their smell, the stickiness.
The blood.
I watch the drain.
A year from now, some guy murders the twins.
He takes the ring as a souvenir.
The cops never mind him.
Or the ring.