Category: My stories

The Camp

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I saw him in a bar. He was the bartender.
Turned out he owned the place.
Thirty years ago, he had a gun to my head, laughing as he pulled the trigger.
The gun was empty, the bullets fired at my family.
All dead, there in the middle of the camp.
Here. Now.
I asked for a beer, he put a glass in front of me.
I drank, pulled out a knife, and stabbed him in the chest.
“How’s it feel to die in front of your enemy?” I ask.
He laughed and said “Ask yourself. The beer is poisoned.”

The Wall

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Just a black angle in the ground, etched marble with so many names.
You could jog past it in less than a minute, nothing but a blur.
The flags at the base of each piece, the flowers.
Boots and candles. Cigarettes and flasks.
It’s the people that make you slow down and stop.
Less and less each year, parents too old to make the trip. Or gone themselves.
Children all grown up. They have children of their own. Easier to just let them learn about it in school.
The wall’s still there.
What was it for? What did we learn?

The Wacky Adventures of Abraham Lincoln #91

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Mary Todd was going crazy, but the analyst was curious as to the source of her husband’s misery.
Abe shrugged off all offers to get him on the couch and work out his issues.
“Perhaps it is something in your childhood?” said the doctor.
Abe laughed. “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life,” he said.
When the doctor left, Abe took out his flask of Zook’s “Crazy No More” Tonic.
*glug* *glug*
“This is the only doctor I need,” he said, patting the flask and heading back to his office.

Chipmunk

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I mourned your death, O Furry Little Creature – so small and cute you were.
Day after day.
Year after year.
Century after century.
This ritual never changes.
I hold out the little peanut, you see it and stand up, sniffing the air.
I shake it. You creep closer, slowly, wary.
Almost close enough now. One paw reaches. I toss the peanut behind you.
You start to flee, but you stop. Sniff.
You grab it and scurry away.
To the road. The highway. A truck is coming, but you do not see it!
Splat!
I will miss you, my furry friend.

Hack Writerland

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Sixty-five million years from now, an amber block containing a mosquito will be drained of “author” Michael Chricton’s blood.
Through the miracle of junk science, his DNA will be patched to a chimpanzee’s and grown into a theme park attraction.
From all over, they will pay to see herds of hack writers roam the hillsides, devouring fringe research and vomiting up novel after novel, screenplay after screenplay.
“Mommy! Look at the box office on that one!”
Until a theme park rival tries to steal the DNA and causes deadly violent mayhem!
But that’s a tale for another hack to tell.

Cinder block

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As I hug this cinder block, I ponder our long relationship together.
We’ve been through a lot.
I made a bookshelf out of cinder blocks and slats in college.
The only thing that kept me from being blown away by the hurricane last year was hugging this cinder block.
I take it with me everywhere now as a good luck charm: the movies, the bank, grocery shopping.
I guess bringing it skydiving was a bad idea. I’ll just let it go and meet it on the ground when I land.
That playground down there doesn’t look too full, does it?

America

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Here lies America, and all of America’s lies.
All the lies we told the world and all the lies we told ourselves.
In the home of the brave, we move the fences in and jog the bases to thunderous applause.
In the land of the free, we doubled the price so we could buy one and get one free.
A thumb in every balance pan, a fox in every henhouse.
Eat chicken for dinner too many times and you will discover there are no eggs for breakfast.
Don’t scream at the fox to lay eggs. He has eaten and left.

Miss November

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In the old days, you ran out of film.
Now, with these digital cameras, your battery is always dying.
Miss November passes out, her nose bleeding from snorting enough lines of cocaine to line Ebbets Field.
They got enough pictures to last her shelf life, every angle, every expression.
Everything uploaded, scanned, rendered, and ready with a single click of the mouse.
Backdrops and shadows are her passport, just lay her over, matte, and print.
“What were her dislikes?” asks the publisher, lighting his pipe.
The coroner suggests hard linoleum, shaking his head at the corpse on the bathroom floor.

The Wacky Adventures of Abraham Lincoln #90

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Cows, everywhere cows!
Lincoln couldn’t believe the sheer number of cows roaming through the streets of Washington.
Going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.
“Where did all these cows come from?” he asked, but nobody had an answer.
As always, Abe came up with a solution. He commanded the city to hold a carnival and a massive barbecue.
Under his direction, the cows were caught, slaughtered, butchered into steaks, and cooked in the remnants of the public parks.
A good time was had by all.
Except for the cows, of course.

Devil’s Night

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They call this night the Devil’s Night because kids set fires to usher in Halloween.
One year, they got what they wanted, and The Devil showed up to survey the damage.
“You call this devastation?” He howled. “I’ve seen entire empires laid waste, nothing but ashes from ocean to ocean!”
He spat at on the sidewalk and laughed.
The kids burned more houses, but it wasn’t enough for The Devil.
Cops arrived and arrested the kids.
Instead of becoming Satanists, jail house imams converted them to Islam.
For them, any size fire was fine.
Especially when it involved killing Jews.