Sometimes I like to start a fire in the fireplace and stare at the shapes in the flames for hours.
After a while, the flames tell stories, and I find myself in a magical land of orange and yellow and red.
In that land lived a beautiful princess in her magnificent castle. And both were engulfed in flames.
So were her horses. And her car. And her friends.
That’s when the shrieking of the smoke alarm pulls me out of the story.
Before I can pull out the battery, my sister screams.
Yeah, I threw her Barbies on the fire.
Category: My stories
Aborted
Lawmakers in Ohio just passed a law that requires women seeking abortions to see a sonogram of their fetus before they can get an abortion.
And in Florida, they make them climb a 25 foot rope. Without using their feet, too.
Just to outdo them both, Texas is pondering a rule that requires written permission from the fetus himself or herself.
Somehow, in all this madness, California decided to open the gates and legalize everything.
First, Second, Third Trimester? All’s legal!
Which, if you consider how awful most Californians are, it makes you wish they’d done that a lot sooner.
Noise
Every fourth of July, loud firework celebrations happen across the country.
And every owner of a sensitive dog knows that life’s gonna be hell for their poor little pooch.
But one year, all the sensitive dogs came up with a plan. And while the country slept, they got to work.
The next evening, fireworks celebrations started as planned, except that every fireworks fuse had been sabotaged.
Instead of going off like they should, they went off instantly, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands before word got out.
Fireworks were banned forever.
The dogs loved it. They wagged their tails happily.
The King Of The Beach
The King Of The Beach lives in a massive sandcastle.
He stands on the parapet, looking out over his beach.
When he spots a child making a sandcastle, he orders his men to invade the usurper’s territory and smite their castle.
Sometimes, a child tries to put up a fight, so The King lays siege to their castle
“Mom, can you get me an ice cream?” shouts the child.
Their mother looks at the King’s men, and she urges the kid to surrender. “We’ll go to Disneyland next month, okay?”
The victorious King laughs, and returns to his parapet, watching.
Anniversary
It’s our anniversary. Can’t think of any personal gifts to get.
So, we bought ourselves a huge Smart TV. And we replaced our old Blue Ray player with a Smart Player.
I can control them with my smartphone.
We will probably get a smart sound bar to give us surround sound for the baseball games and movies we watch.
I’m not sure what more we can add to this system, but with all the apps and features running on these devices, they suck down more electricity than a Vegas casino.
Our electric bills bankrupted us.
Not very smart, I guess.
The Counselors
After the bomb went off, they rescued as many as they could from the rubble.
The doctors and surgeons did the best they could. But it wasn’t enough.
That’s when the counselors took over.
Repeat after me:
I am not a victim.
I am not a casualty.
I am not a statistic.
I will live on.
Remember these sixteen words.
And only these words.
They will get you through this.
And then the counselors went through the survivors.
The next day, they’d picked out the ones who were fading, and they harvested their organs.
You will live on.
In them.
Baby
My friend just had a baby.
Another friend had one recently.
Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like, to be a father.
Then, I look at my father… well, think of my father, because I haven’t actually seen him in two years, and I don’t call my parents much.
I’m not even sure what he looks like now. In fact, he could be standing right here next to me, holding out his hand and expecting a tip for hauling my luggage to my hotel suite while I tap out this story.
If so, I don’t tip. Even you, Dad.
Salt
My family makes the best pretzels in the world.
The secret is in how to add the salt. We have a patent on it.
However, a famous patent troll threatened to sue us because he had a general patent on how to salt pretzels.
“I have to preserve my rights,” he claimed. And he offered to license his patent to us.
So, we offered him a tour of our facility.
Five hours later, he was stuffed into a wooden barrel full of shit.
“That’ll preserve you well enough,” I told the barrel.
And we lost it deep in the warehouse.
Pitbulls
My coworker owns Pitbulls, and he’s always saying how the media gets them wrong.
“They’re wonderful dogs,” he says. “People just raise them to do horrible things.”
Well, he says that when he’s not telling me about the latest thing they’ve destroyed, like a door frame or feature pillows.
“But I’ve signed them up for a 6 week obedience course.”
Sure enough, six weeks later, he’s proud of his dogs.
“I’d show you the certificates, but I left them on the countertop and they chewed them to bits.”
Maybe the trainer was too scared of them to hand out Fs?
Clone Crime
The problem with a clone of a person murdering the original is that you’ll find only one set of fingerprints and one set of DNA markers.
So, a murder will get flagged a suicide by the automatic systems, or it will get placed in the hard cases queue.
The investigators in that queue are really good at their jobs. As if they were born to do the job.
But they weren’t born to do it.
They were grown. In tanks.
And every so often, one goes astray, and kills another.
The rest circle the wagons quickly.
Call it a suicide.