We’re in a drought. It didn’t rain all summer.
Until now.
I can hear the thunder… the rain… the screech of tires…
Going to work will be interesting. People forget how to drive.
And other things. Like how to use an umbrella.
I looked around for mine, but couldn’t remember what it looked like.
“Honey,” I said to my wife, holding up an object. “Is this an umbrella?”
“No, that’s a cat,” she said. “Put her down. She doesn’t like being picked up. Or getting wet.”
I put the cat down, let her scamper off, and resumed my umbrella search.
Category: My stories
Out Of Network
Growing up, my pediatrician was Dr. Mengele.
Yes, it’s true. The infamous war criminal who did medical experiments in the Nazi concentration camps.
Sure, he went under the name Dr. Sherman, but he couldn’t fool me: he was Mengele.
How did I know?
Well, instead of “Feed a cold, starve a fever” he’d say “Gas a cold, gas a fever.”
When I sprained my ankle, he prescribed gas.
Same with upset stomach, chicken pox, and everything else that happened to me.
The worst part of it was that he was outside my Dad’s HMO network, so the co-pays were murder!
Freedom Riders
They called themselves the Freedom Riders.
No, I’m not talking about the brave who rode interstate buses to break up segregationist policies.
I’m talking about the passengers on Kendargu freighters who, despite paying a fortune for passage, suffered cramped and horrible conditions in the ships.
So, they put together a plan to break out of their tiny cabin mid-voyage.
The cabin was cramped because temporal and inertial dampers take up a lot of room.
Those that didn’t get phase-shifted to jumpspace ended up as that messy paste spread out on the cargo bay walls.
Oh well. Go get some mops.
The Prank
It was your typical kindergarten classroom.
Art supplies, colorful dangling mobiles, and a lot of construction paper cutouts.
On one board, a bunch of colors spelled out:
Red was red
Green was green
Blue was blue.
That weekend, Mom dragged me to a hobby shop.
I begged for construction paper letters.
When April first finally rolled around, the teacher left the room, and I took down the colored words.
Then, I added my own:
Blue was red
Red was yellow
Yellow was green
I got sent to the principal’s office.
But not for the prank.
They thought I was color-blind.
Mother’s Day
We watch the suntigers weave among the clouds, chasing each other.
Every so often, they fight, and a glinting tooth falls from the sky.
Picking through the underbrush, we collect them in baskets and return to the archmage’s hut.
He looks over our harvest, tosses away the fractured ones, and spots a good solid crystal.
“Perfect,” he says.
He places it over the eyes of our mother’s corpse, chants something, and then holds the crystal up to the light.
Mother’s battered face appears on the opposite wall.
“Parker the Butcher,” it says.
The killer is arrested, and justice is done.
Change Bulbs
Instead of going out to lunch, I eat carrots and celery at my desk at work.
Then, when I get my lunch break, I go for an hourlong power walk through the tunnels under Downtown Houston.
During one of my walks, a crew of three men had spread a tarp on the floor and were changing lightbulbs.
But they were moving the ladder out of the way when people approached, not rotating it as one guy on it held the bulb.
Why they had the tarp on the floor, I never asked. I just walked back to work and pondered.
Separate Volume
It started when the Oxford English Dictionary created a separate volume for epithets, slurs, and “dirty” words.
Some words were moved from their main volumes to the “ghetto” volume without much fuss, such as “nigger” and “faggot” but others were debated heavily before their demotion.
The collection grew from a pamphlet to a booklet, then a book, and eventually outweighed the main set.
The Polite Laws are next. The segregation of words are to be enforced in public.
Maybe even private, depending on how effective the public ban is.
Me, I think censorship of words censors ideas.
Fuck that noise.
Hole in the ground
Bobby wanted to dig a hole to China.
His mother said it couldn’t be done.
So, instead of digging to China, he dug a hole to Hell.
That wasn’t so hard to do, really. Just took him a few minutes dripping some blood from his fingertip on to his trowel.
The trowel bit into the dirt, drew out a clump, and a large blast of fire and heat exploded from the back yard.
Bobby, his mother, and the house vanished instantly.
After a day of infernal madness, the government sealed off the block and said “It’s just a gas leak.”
The Turkey
The farmer has fed the turkey every day, and the turkey has every reason to believe this will continue on forever.
So, when the farmer loads the turkey on to the truck and takes him to the butcher, the turkey is thinking “The butcher is going to feed me?”
The butcher approaches with a knife, raises the blade, and then hands it to the turkey.
“Nobody will suspect you,” he whispers to the turkey.
Then he pulls out a photograph of a rival butcher.
“I want no witnesses.”
The turkey nods, and then says “So, when do I get fed?”
Likeness
The Devil can quote scripture to suit his own purposes, but not after Disney released their Bible movie.
“You can’t copyright the Bible!” howled The Devil.
“You’re quoting the characters in our movie,” said the lawyers. “And that getup with the horns and the tail… that’s a close likeness to the Mr. Scratch character.”
“OF COURSE IT IS! IT’S MY LOOK!”
Despite his best efforts and the assistance of Daniel Webster, The Devil lost.
He grumbled, and then realized… searching… searching…
He tore up his contract with Michael Eisner.
“Suck it!” he laughed, turning on CNBC to watch the carnage.