I keep the bathroom scale under the sink.
It’s one of those expensive scales that measures body fat and blood pressure and all that stuff. Tracks your progress on the Internet, too.
Well, every so often, my littlest cat likes to walk into the bathroom, pull down the hanging towels, and she then stands on the scale.
Ten pounds.
“Who’s a happy little kitty?” I ask her.
She arches her back, ears twitching, and blinks happily at me.
Meanwhile, the scale talks to Weight Watchers, and at the end of the week, my chart is a wacky series of spikes.
Category: My stories
Flower Shop
The whole town loves Evelyn’s flower shop.
It’s a nice store, right there on Main Street.
The awning needs a bit of work. And the paint’s faded on the glass on the door.
She keeps saying she’ll touch it up, but she never does.
The flowers are pretty. She grows them herself in greenhouses behind her house, right outside of town.
There, she plants the seeds, keeps the plants fed and watered.
She cuts her finger, sings the magic spell, and rubs the blood on silver shears.
Snip.
Snip.
And we all love her shop just a little bit more.
People Are Stupid
Most people are stupid.
Despite the fact that most people are stupid, a tiny few are smart, and they come up with the things that keep the stupid ones from screwing it all up.
It only takes a few smart ones to invent things. And even smarter ones to dumb that stuff down so the stupid ones stop falling off cliffs or getting eaten by bears.
The extremely smart people want to let the bears eat the dumb ones and live in stupidity-free peace.
Which, I suppose, proves that the smart people aren’t as smart as they think they are.
The Glop
I like to add berries to my iced tea.
Blueberries.
Strawberries.
Raspberries.
I drop them into my glass, mash them up, and then pour in the tea.
However, I get lazy, and forget to mash them.
Sometimes, I can spear them out with my straw.
But they often just go to waste.
That’s why I got the blender. To blend up the berries for my tea.
Now, I’ve got the berry slurry sitting nearby, ready to pour into my tea.
So, I pour… and it all comes out.
SPLASH!
There’s glop all over the table.
I should switch to coffee.
The Killer Pool
Every week, I have to fish a dead neighborhood kid out of the pool.
No, they don’t drown in it. The coroner’s made that perfectly clear after every autopsy.
No water in the lungs.
And the fact the children have had their throats cut.
The blood. I don’t know if that gets taken care of by the chemicals and the filter. And I don’t care… I drain the pool, scrub it down, and replace the water.
The water bill is killing me.
One more, and I’m just going to fill the thing in with dirt and raise a vegetable garden.
In The Dead Of Night
The tooth fairies exchange money for teeth.
Then, the sandmen grind them up into dream dust.
Overprotective dogs aren’t a problem with a face full of dream dust, but motion-sensing alarms can be.
Then there’s the sandmen and fairies who think the whole racket is stupid, so they steal jewelry, credit cards, and MacBooks.
Don’t get me started with the bootleg videos of hot celebrities and models sleeping. The Council can barely deal with the Lindbergh baby incident, let alone Internet paparazzi stalker porn. Technology’s like magic to them.
We’ll pay for Lady Gaga’s dentures and a new laptop, okay?
The Search
The producer for NPR’s Fresh Air says that every time they listen to an interesting interview, they want to quit their job and do whatever the guest is doing.
This is the ultimate irony, because the more they love their job, the more they want to quit it and do something else.
They said the next interview is with a guest searching for extraterrestrial life.
Endless years of scanning radio waves for signals.
Boring!
I believe in being so interesting and unusual, extraterrestrial life seeks ME out.
And if we never find it, well, at least we had fun, right?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an asshole.
Heaven doesn’t have a door to knock on.
It has gates. St. Peter stands at the Gates Of Heaven with a book, and the dead line up to find out if they get in.
You don’t have to bang on the gates, because St. Peter is always out there, waiting for the recently-deceased.
Well, not really waiting, since people are constantly dying and joining the line.
Does he ever get a break? And how does he get updates in that book?
After lying to us for decades, Bob Dylan sure as hell isn’t in it.
Shod And Dangerous
I bought a pair of running shoes with built-in computer chips that track how far and fast you run.
Just wave the shoes over your laptop, and it uploads all the information to a website, complete with maps and calories.
One morning, I looked at the chart, and it said I had run all the way to bank and back overnight.
I don’t remember doing that.
Had I been sleepwalking? Or sleepjogging?
I got my shoes out of the closet, and a bag of money fell off a shelf.
Apparently, I’d been sleepbankrobbing.
At least the shoes paid for themselves.
Masterpieces
Miyuki paints masterpieces.
She’s an art restorer. She touches up and fixes damaged paintings
She’s the best art restorer in the world, fixing everything: vandalism, neglect, smoke damage.
But it brings her no joy.
She wants to paint her own works. Instead of little bits of Renoir or Matisse, she wants to see a Miyuki in the gallery. A Miyuki exhibition.
Years of restoring others wore her down, and then… snap.
She painted over a Picasso, and…
It was beautiful. Magnificent. Her masterpiece.
And sent to another restorer to remove.
Someone stole a Rembrandt?
It’s Miyuki.
She needs more canvases.