George Carlin once said that life is a series of dogs.
The dogs you owned, one after another.
For me, life has been a series of cats.
One, two… One time, four of them at once. Now just two.
They were all unique. Different. Special.
How they went, sudden or slow, each its own unique sadness.
Laying in bed, almost asleep, I hear the familiar sound of him leaping to the bed, walking along the blanket, laying down against my side.
Nothing. He is gone. And my mind thinks I still need him there.
Haunting myself for comfort’s sake.
Category: My stories
False Witness
The Famous Reverend Blake is never seen in public without his twin bodyguards.
And his bodyguards are never seen without their white plastic masks.
Well, sometimes, they are. When they take their turn as Reverend Blake.
They’re actually identical triplets, changing roles when convenient.
This is useful for Blake’s “24 Hours Of Jesus” marathon sermons.
Or, during his weekly sermons at his sprawling megachurch, an alibi for his perverted obsessions in the day care center.
Twenty thousand loyal followers saw Blake up there preaching.
There’s no way he could have been down there.
Bearing false witness is a sin, child.
Fuss
It was another quiet day at the library, right?
Wrong.
An old couple burst in through the front door, fussing and arguing with each other loudly.
Then, the old woman grabbed the gigantic dictionary off of the reference desk, opened it to the last page, and RIPPPPPPPPPPPP! tore it out.
Sticking it in her purse, she repeated this with all the other dictionaries, and then stormed out of the building.
The old man stuck some cash into my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Here’s some money for the damage.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She always insists on having the last word.”
The Whorologist Of Babylon
The first thing that Dr. Foster was told when he first joined the Royal Observatory Museum’s staff was to describe his job as researching and maintain historical timepieces.
“People crack jokes when we say horology, and they never take us seriously,” said the museum’s director.
“When I say I’m the director of a horology institute, they ask me if that makes me a pimpologist.”
The director winked, pressed a button, and twenty beautiful women in various states of undress walked into the room.
“I wind everybody else’s watch all day long,” he said. “So why not have them wind mine?”
Born into the theater
I was born into the theater.
Literally. My mother, the famous actress, scored a year-long run in Oklahoma! via that infamous casting couch.
Nine months in, she still refused to give up the spotlight to her understudy.
The costume girl eventually went insane.
During the matinee, her water broke in Act 2, but she didn’t miss a line.
She concealed contractions with howls of laughter and screams of joy.
The curtain fell, I was born, and she was holding me to her breast through four curtain calls.
If you think that’s bad, that bastard director added it to the script!
The Alarm
What? Huh?
I wake up to a cat leaping up to the bed, walking along the blanket, and curling up on top of my butt.
I turn to look at the alarm clock.
It’s 5:29. The alarm will go off at 5:30.
I turn to look at the cat.
“That butt’s going away soon,” I say.
Eyes closed, the cat flicks an ear.
The alarm goes off.
The cat, eyes still closed, takes a firm grip with his claws.
I reach for the clock and hit the snooze bar.
We’ll deal with it later.
And I go back to sleep.
Switched
Every so often, you hear about a “Switched At Birth” story in the news where two couples get each other’s babies by mistake.
Usually that gets cleared up with DNA testing, or an out-of-court settlement with the hospital.
However, there was one instance I heard of where a baby was accidentally switched with a janitor’s mop.
The happy couple was a bit concerned that their bundle of joy didn’t cry or eat, but they appreciated being able to sleep through the night without interruption.
The janitor filed a grievance with management because the baby didn’t clean floors all that well.
The Slaughter
The Bugs set off a blanket of electromagnetic pulses over the planet, wiping out our technological infrastructure overnight.
It didn’t take long for them to slaughter billions.
The survivors were rounded up for hunting and experiments.
And then… the Bugs figured out one of our languages.
The hunting and experiments stopped.
They obsessed over books and the surviving recorded material.
“Wow, we sure fucked up,” said a Bug representative. “We’re really, really sorry about that whole invasion thing.”
They cleaned up what they could, built some nice habitats, and left.
Sure, I still have nightmares.
But it’s peaceful now, right?
The Wrong Saint
We needed to dump this house. Quickly.
But the market’s a mess, and everybody’s low-balling us.
Someone told me that burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard will speed the sale of a home.
So, I went to a Christian bookstore and bought a statue.
It wasn’t Joseph, though. It was Saint Winefride, the patron of payroll clerks.
At first, I barely noticed them, but after a week it became difficult to mow the lawn while navigating the colony of accountants camping out on the grass.
But, in the end, one of them offered to buy the house.
Measurement
I worked for a television station when the Internet took off.
I demonstrated streaming video to a salesperson, and then showed them the statistics file.
The salesperson recoiled in horror, like a vampire faced with a cross made out of garlic.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The exact figures?” they asked. “No corrections?”
“Exact,” I said. “Just like Nielsen numbers.”
“But Nielsen corrects those numbers,” she said.
“Corrects?” I asked.
“Fudges,” she admitted. “If the advertisers knew the real numbers, they’d freak out.”
“So did you. Why do we use them if they’re wrong?”
“Because they’re the wrong we agree on.”