My son doesn’t play baseball.
Or football. Or soccer.
Or any of those sports in school.
Instead, he jousts.
We got him a horse, a suit of armor, and a lance.
And he looks fine in his armor, on his horse, holding his lance.
The problem is, there’s nobody to joust with.
And you can’t joust by yourself.
Okay, you can charge at target dummies.
Or people walking around in the mall.
Maybe your kid might be interested in jousting?
We’ve got a spare horse. And armor. And a lance.
Just sign this waiver.
In case he’s maimed. Or killed.
Category: My stories
Night Watchman
I am a night watchman.
I watch the night.
My job begins when the day ends.
And ends when the day begins.
The hours are good.
Really good in the Summer, when the days are longer and nights shorter.
Not so good in Winter, when the days are shorter and nights longer.
But I get time off for the holidays, which takes care of the worst of the Winter nights.
The long, cold Winter nights.
Makes it hard to watch the night, with all the snow. And cold. And holiday lights.
I am a night watchman.
I watch the night.
The Football
People say that the president has his finger on the button, but there isn’t an actual button.
Or a switch. Or throw-lever. Or keypad. Or mouse to click.
Nor is there a voice-command terminal. Or fingerprint sensor.
Or gesture-based wand, like you get with the Nintendo Wii game console.
Not in your wildest dreams would the military provide such silly interfaces for a person to cause global annihilation.
It’s a pair of Marines.
You know, the guys who carry “The Football.”
It’s is really a briefcase full of nuclear launch codes.
Which the President must French-kiss the Marines to use.
BONUS STORY: George the Party Animal
George was a pirate, but he was not a very good pirate.
The crew did not like George very much, and that made George sad and lonely.
So, George left the ship, and he took a vacation
All night, way past midnight, he was a party animal.
And he drank. And threw up. And he passed out.
Then, he would sleep off his wicked hangover on the beach.
Over and over and over.
After a month, he returned to the ship.
The crew still did not like George very much.
But George was too drunk to care what they thought.
(Created with Shatoetry and The Hit Crew’s “Sailors Hornpipe”)
The Treasure
The dentist’s office had a treasure chest. In the chest were all kinds of cheap plastic toys, stickers, and trinkets.
I have no memory of what I took from the treasure chest. I never kept anything from it. Nothing on my shelf, and nothing in my drawers.
Just a memory of the treasure chest itself, there in the dentist’s office.
Maybe I could make my own?
The party supply store has those things. Plastic rings, string necklaces, and other cheap amusements.
All I need are pliers, a drill, and some floss.
Alleyway dentistry, we’ll call it.
Sounds good?
Open wide.
Science
I am a scientist.
I work in a science lab, and I make science.
I wear a nice white lab coat. I have a badge pinned to my lab coat.
I conduct experiments.
Experiments take questions that begin with “How can you…” and try to find the answer to them.
The government gave me a big lab.
And a really nice new lab coat that’s really white. And a badge pinned to that coat that lets me get into really cool places.
“How can you make lots of enemy soldiers stupid?” they asked.
I think I found the answer.
Right?
The Last Straw
That’s the last straw.
No, not the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Or some ordinary straw, like the straw from a broom
The last straw is a bendy straw.
And I need it for my drink.
It would have been nice to have had a silly straw, because those are really fun, but someone used the last silly straw.
When the last silly straw broke, they reached for the last bendy straw.
“NO!” I shouted. “THIS IS THE LAST STRAW! AND IT IS MINE!”
And I smacked their hand.
They whimpered, and scuttled off to buy some more straws.
When you access Facebook from the Western Hemisphere, the globe icon in the heading shows the Western Hemisphere.
And when you access Facebook from the Eastern Hemisphere, the globe icon in the heading shows the Eastern Hemisphere.
Last week, I was abducted by aliens. They examined me, probed me, and took me back to their homeworld.
That’s how I ended up in his alien zoo. I’m the Human exhibit.
What does the globe icon look like when I try to access Facebook?
I don’t know. The WiFi really sucks in this zoo, and my smartphone is running out of power.
Leperchaun
Just as the Leprechaun guards his pot of gold from rainbow-chasers, the Leperchaun flees the people who follow his trail of rotted-off appendages.
Why people would follow a trail of bloody fingers… toes… or worse, I have no idea.
Sometimes, it’s the police, After that John Wayne Bobbit incident, anything’s possible, really.
The dogs sniff out a trail, which leads to the miserable creature, hunched over a pot of glue.
With antibiotics, he can be cured of the horrible affliction. But the disfigurement is permanent.
With prosthetics and a 3D printed half-mask, he’ll still look like a goddamned Irish midget.
Chivington
Nothing lives long. Only the earth. And the mountains.
So sang the Cheyenne chief, standing in front of his lodge, watching Chivington’s soldiers ride their horses around the camp, shooting and killing.
The men. The women. The children. The old.
One soldier tore open the belly of a pregnant woman and chopped up the unborn baby.
Grant called the massacre nothing less than murder.
But none faced trial. None faced justice.
You can still hear the screams in the wind.
You can still hear the Cheyenne death song.
You can still hear the gunfire, the dust, the evil, and fear.