I’m not sure about the science of it, but every time we see a rainbow here in Skittles Valley, it rains bits of colorful candy.
Everybody runs around with buckets, catching the candy.
When all of our silos are full, the candy company comes around and buys up our annual harvest.
However, every now and then, there’s a double rainbow.
Nobody’s standing around with a camera shouting “WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”
Instead, we run to our cellars and wait for the storm to pass.
Glass breaks.
Wood splinters.
The winds howl.
What does it mean?
Insurance rates are going up.
Category: My stories
What On Earth?
Everybody’s going to the new salon on Fifth Street.
For some reason, it’s all the rage, but the styles they come up with are dreadful.
“You look like you stuck your finger in a light socket,” I told my friend. Her hair was standing a foot tall from her head. “What on earth made you do such a thing?”
Then I caught a sparkle inside her hair. The updo was meant to conceal an antenna.
But there was a fully-exposed pod on the back of her neck. No coverage at all.
They might conquer earth, but they’ll never be in-style.
Hear The Horns
The world is out of sync.
Maybe God got the speed of sound and the speed of light got mixed up this morning, but now I hear things before I see them.
The alarm going off before the clock showed 6.
Birds singing on empty telephone wires.
I try to cross the street and I hear cars honking, the screeching of brakes.
But it’s a red light. The WALK sign is lit.
I am crushed to the curb.
Hit by a car?
People shouting. Sirens. Unseen hands lift me.
So much pain.
I still haven’t seen what hit me yet.
Laminated
Flat Stanley became flat when a bulletin board fell on him.
You believe that he went on a series of wild adventures, right? Catching art thieves, sliding under doors, and mailing himself to far-off distant lands?
What really happened was a quiet, closed-coffin funeral.
His little brother Arthur was traumatized, shipped off to a mental hospital.
Every time his parents visited, he’d hand them another book he’d written about Stanley.
Alive. Adventuring.
Under his hospital bed, they found crushed and laminated mice.
“Experiments,” said Arthur, grinning
He escaped last night. Stole a steamroller.
Oh my God! The Mall!
Stop him!
Pulsation
“Pulsation: Pulsation is the act of pulsating,” mumbled Dictionary.
Dictionary is Steve’s little brother. He’s retarded or something, but special.
You can tell him a word, and he’ll give you the definition.
We ask him a few bad words and laugh at him.
Then we ask him a few nonsense words, and he holds his head and screams.
But then, hearing “Zuatha” he stopped.
“Zuatha: Zuatha is a insectoid hive-mind species that has developed faster-than-light technology and routinely observe-”
That’s all Dictionary said before the room was filled with a bright white light.
The light vanished.
And so did Dictionary.
Induction Core
I slice a lemon in half, open it up, and scrape out pulp with my fingernail.
It takes a long time to finish a lemon this way. Takes a lot of patience to do it.
Every few tries, the pulp bursts and sprays.
Slowly. Patiently.
A delicate touch helps.
I watched the old man scrape the other half of the lemon with his thumb as we watched the sun set, his eyes never leaving the horizon.
An hour later, he hands it back to me, picked clean.
“Tomorrow, bring a lime,” he says, and he walks back into the shadows.
Majestic
I have never understood the song “America The Beautiful.”
Yes, this country has its beautiful places, but what is so majestic about a purple mountain?
All the mountains I’ve ever seen have green, white, brown, grey, and black on them.
Never purple.
If I saw a purple mountain, I’d think it would look like a gigantic bruise.
Like someone punched our country in the face or something.
How is a gigantic bruise from getting punched in the face majestic?
Oh, so you think I’m overthinking this?
Fine. Let me punch you in the face. See how majestic you look then!
Elves Live
Happy The Elf woke up in the North Pole Infirmary.
His head hurt. Everything looked weird.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You had a rough Christmas,” says the lab technicians, putting equipment on a cart. “Everyone did. But you’re all fine now.”
Happy looked around and saw all the other elves in the Infirmary, in various states of stupor and lucidity.
Santa watched them through a one-way mirror.
“Poor bastards,” he said. “They have no memory of the Hell I put them through every year.”
“And neither do you, you old bastard” said a technician, sliding a needle into Santa’s neck.
Can you keep a secret?
Can you keep a secret?
I can’t.
That’s why whenever someone says they want to tell me a secret, I stick my fingers in my years and jump up and down, shouting I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
This makes things difficult at work. I work for the government.
Well, used to.
Because they say I can’t keep a secret.
Sure, I say I can’t, but then, I’ve never given any away.
That’s what my lawyer says. He says I have a good case.
The government wants to settle out of court.
If we keep the terms of the settlement a secret.
She Sparkled
I saw the strangest thing in the paper today.
The theater critic reviewed a local production of Shakespeare and was unsparing in their attacks on one of the actors.
Despite the slowness and awkwardness of the venue, the set design did get praise.
But what was most curious was their gushing praise for a local performer of renown, going so far as to say that they sparkled, not just in the play, but everything they did.
They were in the audience, not in the play.
I’d tell you who said this, but they’re just a critic: nobody remembers their names.