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.
Category: My stories
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.”
Cheaters
The big Necromancy test is tomorrow, and the Wizard Academy wants to ensure that nobody cheats on it.
All potions must be mixed fresh the day of the exam.
No special talismans or charms allowed.
And any attempt at cribbing spiritual energies from a classmate are strictly prohibited.
This is enough to keep most students on the level, but there’s always a too-clever-for-their-own-evil pupil ready to break the rules to beat the grade curve.
To convince them to play it fair, they tell the students that they will be working with the corpses of cheaters from years past.
PENCILS DOWN!
Safe To Eat
I had to look twice to make sure I read it right.
Sure enough, the recipe called for Silly Putty.
“Is that shit safe?” I asked my wife. “I mean, can anything which picks up ink from the funnies be considered safe to eat?”
“Well, the package does say it’s non-toxic,” says my wife.
“So is a bucket of pinballs, but you don’t see me stir-frying them with snowpeas and carrots.”
“Mmmmmmm pinballs! We have ranch dressing, right?”
I closed the cookbook, put it back on the shelf, and headed out to the old-timey game arcade to shop for dinner.
Buffalo
Long ago, I sang “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam!”
Well, I fell behind on my payments and lost the place.
Yeah, I thought a home where the buffalo roamed would be great, but it turned out to be a real stinker.
There’s no phone lines out here. Can’t even make a lousy cell call.
No power, either, although with the skies not cloudy all day, I have solar panels and batteries that work pretty well.
Water? Nope. And the skies aren’t cloudy, so no rain.
And then there’s all the buffalo shit.
They can have it!
Weightless
A poet once described being in love as feeling weightless all the time.
So, when I got a chance to ask a crewmember of the International Space Station if they felt like they were in love, I thought they’d say “Yes, all the time!”
Instead, I got a visit from a security team, checking me for adult diapers and asking to see the trunk of my car.
“You don’t own duct tape or other kidnapping implements, do you?” they asked.
I shook my head, then looked up. “Well, I own duct tape,” I said. “But not for that.”
They left.
Synesbleedathesia
Ever hear music so awful it makes your ears bleed?
Or see something so awful, it makes your eyes bleed?
Well, that’s to be expected, but it’s when you hear something so awful it makes your eyes bleed, that’s a crosswiring of the sensory organs.
Since Synesthesia is when auditory stimuli cause you to sense smells or see visions, or seeing colors when you see numbers, we’ll call it Synesbleedathesia when one sensory input causes another to output blood.
As for hearing things or seeing things that make your ass bleed, well, that’s salmonella.
Stop eating raw eggs, you idiot.
Her eyes
Her eyes are so beautiful, so deep, and so bright.
I hired an artist to create glass eyes identical to them so I can carry them with me wherever I go.
A peek now and then reminded me of her beauty, like carrying a spring of lavender for the scent.
Then, when she died, I paid a taxidermist to have her mounted, and those glass eyes became hers for eternity, unblinking… staring at me across the room.
What? You think me a monster for doing this?
Wrong! Look upon her yourself! Was she not the finest bird you’ve ever seen?