T.S. Eliot said “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
Me, I steal, demand ransom, and threaten to cut off toes and fingers if my demands aren’t met!
He’s been tied to a chair in my kitchen for 3 days.
“My life is measured out with coffee spoons,” he says, and smiles.
I dump out the silverware drawer over his head.
“Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative!” He whines.
“Time’s up,” I say, pulling out my gun… and…
The damn thing misfires.
So, I pull a knife from the butcher’s block and I killed him.
Boy, did he did whimper.
Category: My stories
Knowing
Whenever GI Joe used to say “Knowing is half the battle,” I wondered what the other half of the battle was.
My friends didn’t know.
“But knowing is half the battle!” I said.
“Yes, the other half,” said Ricky, the kid who ate paste. “Perhaps the other half is not knowing?”
“Just like that Socrates guy!” said Sue. “He knew that he didn’t know, so not knowing is… knowing you don’t know!”
“Maybe we just need to buy lots of their toys?” I asked.
We agreed, and played GI Joes in the sandbox.
Except for Sue; she played with matches.
That Shit Burns
I made the mistake of watching the news.
Our embassies were being attacked
Because while incinerating garbage
At a military base
Worn-out Korans had also been burnt
And this pissed Muslims off.
And our president
The leader of the free world
Apologized
Fucking apologized
Instead of telling them
Why don’t you take some of those
Billions in oil profits
Billions in foreign aid
Call up NASA
And buy the heat-shield tiles
That can survive re-entry from orbit
From the retired space shuttle fleet
And write your prophet’s words on them
Because when you put them on paper
That shit burns.
Dead Switch
Roger found a service called DeadSwitch that would let him address a note to be sent after his death.
If he didn’t log in once a week, the service would assume he had died and release the note.
The problem was, he didn’t have very much to say to anyone, let alone anybody to say it to.
So, he wrote a joke note to the president, saying he wouldn’t have to pardon him for all his brutal and horrific crimes now.
A week later, the site got hacked, and all the notes were sent.
Roger never did get a pardon.
Sonnet 18
I see him, wrestling through would-be Plaths, Frosts and Burkowskis at the coffeeshop:
It’s Open Mike Night, and, like a schoolchild, he’ll recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 from memory.
Dreadful.
From the stage’s barstool, he’s downright singsongy, ruining the verse, digging up Shakespeare’s grave, skullfucking the corpse…
Enough! I shout. I would rather be beaten across the face and chest with a volume of Shakespeare’s work than hear you open it and read from it!
The crowd is stunned. Shakespeare’s torturer stares blankly.
Reciting from memory, he has no volume to beat me with.
But he’s got the barstool.
I run.
Kolaches For Cats
While heading to work, I stop by the park and give treats to the feral cats who live in a maintenance shed under a bridge.
Other people give them food, too, but they really like the treats. They’ll stop eating from their plates and come out to grab treats.
I feel bad when I forget the treats, so I stop by the donut shop and pick up a kolache, tear out the rolled-up strip of turkey from it, and toss pieces to the cats.
They chase down the bits of meat and eat happily.
And then I head into work.
Chew on it
There’s a folder on my desk.
I open it, and there’s a stick of gum in there.
So, I unwrap it, pop it in my mouth, and chew.
Charts. Graphs. Tables.
They hit me all at once.
My boss knocks on my door. “Ah, you’re chewing on the Peterson Account. Think the fourth quarter numbers are good.”
I chew some more, shift the gum around my mouth, and it all adds up.
“Yes,” I say with confidence. “Maybe even better.”
“Excellent,” he says, and pops his bubble and leaves.
I spit out the gum and file it under my desk.
Drive Swap
I trusted you with my life.
I gave you the backup drive, and what did you do?
You got drunk, and did a restore with mine instead of a backup of yours.
Now you’re me. And you don’t want me to restore you with the right drive and files.
You know I’m afraid to be overwritten. You’re me, after all.
Well, sorta.
There was some corruption. Because you were drunk.
I’m sorry about the broken arm, but you broke my nose.
You wiped your drive, but unlike you, I can be trusted to keep your spare safe.
Sit still, stupid.
Gene
Every time I read about a road fatality, I check to see if the people in the car were wearing seatbelts or the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet.
Oh, and if they were drinking.
Despite decades of education and laws, people still do shit like that, and they die or occasionally kill people.
I wonder if it’s a set of genes. The “Don’t Wear Seatbelts” gene or the “Drink While Driving” gene.
Sadly, they’re not linked, so sometimes a drunk driver wears a seatbelt, crashes, and lives.
It’ll take a few more generations to weed those genes out, I think.
Haunted
Call them Ghosts.
Collecting up all the papers of someone’s who’s died, processing them into an AI personality engine, and plugging it into a hologram might make sense for historical figures like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, but doing that with the Facebook and Twitter and blog and email archives of my son…
He stood there. Right by the coffin, delivering his own eulogy.
He can say he loves me and thanks me for everything, how much he misses his mother, but this is torture.
It’s 2AM. The bottle is empty.
Standing there. By the bed. Staring.
Turn it off!