I swore an oath to write a story every day until the day I die.
The Devil overheard me, and he offered me his hand.
And we shook on the deal.
I kept up my daily writing for a few years, but after a while I ran out of ideas.
“A deal’s a deal,” I said, and I went to sleep, not expecting to wake up.
“Don’t give up,” said The Devil. And he gave me a plane ticket to Paris. “Think you can write there?”
I nodded, and The Devil smiled.
“Good. It’s much nicer than Hell. Trust me.”
Category: My stories
The Vultures
A crazed gunman shot up a school in a small suburb, killing and wounding dozens.
The media swarmed, descending on the town like locusts. They refrained from trying to interview the families of the victims, but they harassed everybody else, and it came to a head at the city council meeting.
“We’ve suffered enough,” said the city manager. And he threw a punch at a cameraman at the meeting.
Pretty soon, an angry mob had formed, chasing the media vultures back to their hotel.
“We’ll say it was a gas leak,” said the Fire Chief, and he lit a match.
What do you want to drink?
The stewardess asked me what I wanted to drink.
I said “The tears of every bully who picked on me in school.”
She checked her cart.
“We’re out of that sir. Care for some Pepsi? Or juice?”
“What about their blood? Do you have their blood?”
“Sorry, sir, but we don’t carry that either. Maybe you’d like a glass of milk?”
“Just don’t give him any booze,” growled the guy next to me.
Frankie?
Frankie Podhoertz.
Sitting next to me.
He used to beat me up for my lunch money every day.
“Just a straw,” I said. “A sharp straw.”
The Church
I know a guy who’s in a church that protests military funerals.
They say that our soldiers die because of gays, abortions, and other things their church says that God and Jesus don’t like.
However, this guy is really lazy, so instead of actually going to Arlington Cemetery, he looks it up on his computer.
Then, he searches the map for the gravesite, loads the picture, and protests.
Right from his own living room.
He’s been trying to convince the other members of the church that this can save a lot of time and gas money.
I hope he succeeds.
Alarms
All of the alarms went off at once.
Fire.
Intrusion.
Radiation.
Chemical leak.
Everybody panicked.
Except for me.
“The alarm system is malfunctioning,” I said, and I crawled into the access hatch.
Sometimes the organic components in the alarm systems get out of whack.
I pulled out two aspirin, crushed them up, and dropped the powder into the brain tank.
After a minute, the alarms stopped.
Then I checked the biofilters in the nutrient tanks.
Clogged.
I exchanged them with some fresh filters and put the clogged ones in the cleaning system.
“Just like changing diapers,” I grumbled, climbing out.
Oh By The Way
My least favorite words are: “Oh, by the way.”
Whenever someone says that, it means they forgot to tell me something important, and they’re about to make it my fault for not knowing about it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” is not the proper response to an “Oh, by the way.”
Instead, you should say “I’d like you to put your oversight in writing so that I can hold you legally responsible for any consequences that result from your failure to keep me informed.”
They never do.
This is why I record everything…
Oh, by the way, I’m recording this.
Cold Cat
Usually, the cats like to go outside and hunt. They come back in to get food, water, and use the litterbox.
But Bruwyn really doesn’t like it when the Winter chill comes.
Instead of going outside with Myst to hunt lizards, he stays inside and sleeps on the bed or curls up on the top of the chair.
Okay, so he sometimes goes outside in the cold, but he comes back inside quickly, and he growls angrily as he runs around the hall.
I grumble as I walk home from work in the cold, and know exactly how he feels.
Ducks In A Row
My boss keeps telling me to get all my ducks in a row.
Have you ever tried to get ducks in a row?
It’s hard. Really hard.
Ducks like to wander around, foraging for things to eat.
They only get in a row if they’re running away from something.
So, I unplugged my keyboard and phone and banged them together to scare the ducks.
Sure enough, they ran down the hall in a row.
Along with everybody else’s ducks.
Pretty soon, the halls filled up with scared ducks running around.
My boss smiled, and then went back to herding cats.
Vile
Ted’s smartphone was a cesspool of filth.
His browser’s bookmarks linked to the most hardcore and obscene sites on the Internet.
The music library was packed with rap that glorified gang violence, subjugation of women, and drug use.
And his collection of apps couldn’t be any more foul and putrid.
Ted was always on the lookout for more, so he fired up his smartphone’s genius feature to find new apps based on the rogue’s gallery occupying the memory chip.
The phone suggested one app.
So, he clicked the download button, and then opened it.
The app wiped the memory clean.
Outlaws
After every handgun massacre, there are calls to outlaw guns. And there are the counter-responses that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
The debate rages for a while, people get outraged over other things, and nothing gets accomplished.
So, I decided to break the cycle by outlawing signs that say I AM AN OUTLAW.
And sure enough, once those signs were outlawed, only outlaws had those signs.
Which made them really easy to to identify.
We rounded them up and killed them.
Sure, there were a few jokers and free-speech wackos with the signs.
Fuck those idiots.