I said I worshiped the ground she walks on, but I didn’t worship her.
She said she hated my ass for that, but she didn’t hate me.
“My ass or my guts?” I asked.
“Guts,” she said. “Ass was yesterday.”
“Ah, ok.”
We always go back and forth like this, engaging in silly examples of symbolism and metonymy until someone gives in, but there’s only so many representations of the whole you can come up with before you run out.
She waves her scepter. “The crown commands the Royal Linguists to come up with more funnies!”
The cunning linguists bow.
Category: My stories
The Lists
When it comes to paperwork, we have things down to a science here at the prison.
(We certainly get enough practice at it these days. Stupid food riots and rebellion!)
Every morning, the king sends down a list of executions.
Then, in the evening, he sends down a list of pardons.
However, after releasing a bunch of people last night, we got an identical list of names this morning.
“Wasn’t that the list from last night?” I asked.
The messenger checks.
“Uh oh,” he says. “I’d better fix this.”
He adds my name.
“We’ll just say it was your fault!”
Blind Justice
Maybe back in the days of the Ancients, Perseus would have cut off a Gorgon’s head and bagged it, but today we’ve got a little something called The Law.
And nobody’s actually passed a law against petrification besides First Degree Assault By Witchcraft.
Lawyers say it’s not like she’s killed anyone. Just turned them to stone, that’s all.
“If there’s a magical curse of the Gods that petrifies people, then there’s probably a blessing that depetrifies them.”
We send in the robots, fire up the speakers, read her rights to her, and she asks for an attorney.
A blind attorney.
Insanity
You know that Dave’s Insanity Sauce, the really hot hot sauce?
For some reason, people buy stuff that hurts them. It’s a macho thing, I guess.
Well, my client Dr. Odd is suing them for false advertising.
He says that despite the fact that the sauce causes discomfort to the point of mental duress, it doesn’t actually drive the person consuming it to a state of mental illness.
On the other hand, he’s developed formulas that will cause any range of madnesses, temporary and permanent.
True insanity sauces.
And those Dave’s people are ruining his business with their snake oil.
Dr. Vickers
Dr. Vickers told me there’s only three directions you can run:
To something.
Away from something.
And in circles.
Ten years of coming here, laying on this couch and telling him everything.
He takes a stack of notes from his desk drawer.
“Do you know what this is?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s you,” he says.
He walks to his fireplace and tosses the notes on to the fire.
“You’ve been going in circles all this time. Now, you’re going to leave here.”
“Where will I go?” I ask.
“That’s your decision,” he says, and opens the door.
Ripe
It used to be that apples were grown locally on small farms, and when the fall came, you’d go out and pick them into a basket, ripe right off the tree, the farmer weighing the deliciousness at the gate, a handshake, a smile. He knew your name, you knew his, hey, Farmer Jackson, how’s the wife? Kids doing alright?
Or you had your own tree, you watched it grow from blossoms to apples to falling leaves and winter’s frost and back again.
Now, in the store, apples shipped from around the world, the whole year long.
I taste one.
Gross.
Silence of the staplers
I sat down at my desk and looked for my stapler.
“It’s gone,” I said. “Who took my stapler?”
My boss leaned over the cubicle wall. “I did. I took all of them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Paper’s expensive, and paperwork sucks. So if anything you do takes over a printed page to explain, you’re fired.”
He smiled and went to get more coffee.
At first, people just used smaller fonts, but the boss banned magnifying lenses, too.
Pretty soon, we used less paper and became more efficient and profitable.
A Chinese company undercut our prices and we went bankrupt anyway.
Lickable
Wonka stopped the tour and pointed to a wall with bright strips depicting fruits and vines.
“It’s lickable wallpaper,” he said. “Go ahead. Try it.”
So, the kids and adults stepped to the wall and licked it.
The cherries tasted like cherries.
The strawberries tasted like strawberries.
The snozzberries tasted like snozzberries.
And the blueberries tasted like… blood?
“I guess they got Violet down to the juicing room,” said Wonka.
Charlie waved his arms wildly, stuck to the wall by his tongue.
“Dith wum tafff diffgufftih!” he shouted.
“Oh, that’s flypaper,” said Wonka. “Lemme give you a hand, dear boy…”
A Perfect Ten To Twenty
My coach told me that nobody ever remembers the one who came in second.
So, that’s why I stabbed the bitch who came in first.
Well, that’s not the only reason.
You see, mom pushed me into gymnastics, pulled me out of school, and stuck me with a coach who taught me things that would have made Nabokov puke.
Look, unless you’re Mary Lou Fucking Retton, you’re washed up at eighteen.
So, yeah, I lost my shit, and I stabbed her.
She’ll live, but the coach won’t.
I don’t want that disgusting creep touching anyone else.
(He’s mine, dammit! MINE!)
Chocolate
Janey loves chocolate.
Just the mention of chocolate gets her all excited.
Her eyes open wide, and she smiles that smile, open slightly, waiting.
You could cover anything in chocolate and she’d want it.
Anything.
So, when the varsity football team heard about this, well, you knew there’d be trouble.
Boys will be boys, and when she saw the chocolate, she couldn’t resist.
Moments later, eleven panicked screaming jocks clutching their bleeding junk running for the nurse’s office.
Janey claimed innocence. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I just got excited, that’s all. And I thought they were solid chocolate.”