Category: My stories

Gandhi did a hundred mile march to the ocean to make salt.
It was a protest against salt taxes imposed by the British colonial government.
He knelt by the shore, pulled out a straining cloth, and laid it down on the sand.
Then he scooped water into the cloth and lifted the cloth to drain out the water.
Leaving salt in the cloth.
Soldiers politely asked Gandhi to accompany them to the local magistrate’s house.
He stood up, brushed the sand from his knees, and walked with them.
The townspeople cheered as he walked past, reaching out to touch him.

The power went out again.
So, the property manager called the utility company.
Who washed their hands of the situation and posted a 4 hour resolution time.
The property manager then called the electrical contractor.
Who, after an hour stuck in traffic, stared up at the pole for another hour.
Then they called another contractor with a hoist and basket.
It took five minutes to reset the relay on the pole.
This whole circus has happened before.
But it keeps happening.
It’s not procedure… it’s passing the buck the same way every time.
And nobody ever fixes the real problem.

I liked the first Dark Tower novel by Stephen King.
Worldbuilding with legends and myths in a parallel world.
So, I pretend the later crazy shit doesn’t exist.
The Matrix ended with the first film.
Kathleen Kennedy never raped another trilogy out of Star Wars.
And nobody ever remade Total Recall, Rollerball, or other perfect films.
If people ask, say “Those never happened.”
Hold a knife to their throat and, with wild eyes, repeat your statement until they agree and slink away like the deluded sad fuck they are.
You know, like how most gatherings at Thanksgivings and Christmases end.

One carried a knife.
Another carried a gun.
The third used poisons.
And the last used his bare hands.
Four bounty hunters, one target, and a huge stack of cash.
Divided… four ways?
No. The one with a knife took a bullet to the heart.
Divided… three ways?
No. The one with a gun choked on his drink and died.
Divided… two ways?
No. The one with the poisons was thrown off a building.
So, the brawler took the bounty?
No. The target paid him even more than the bounty.
And then killed him.
Another four bounty hunters were called.

It is tradition to carve magic spells into the walls of a king’s tomb.
When King Foldo died, we did no different to his tomb.
So many spells we carved, so many wishes:
Thank you, O king, for your benevolent rule.
Protect the soul of our king.
Bring our king back to us.
May our king watch over us for eternity.
Allow the king to guide his descendants as they rule us.
Too many spells, it turned out.
Foldo’s mummy, compelled by all these powerful spells, roams the land.
He hunts us down, hoping to earn his release and rest.

The great orator, Patrick Henry, stood before the Virginia Convention, exhausted from his speech calling for sending troops to fight the Revolutionary War.
But he was not finished.
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” he exclaimed.
A bony finger tapped his shoulder.
It was The Angel of Death.
The Convention fell to a hush. Henry pissed himself.
“How about both,” said The Grim Reaper, brandishing his scythe. “Where do I sign up?”
Death fought valiantly in the war, but was rather reckless, felling men on all sides.
Civilians and livestock, too.
As he did in all wars, I suppose.

Freddy was rich, but he wanted to get richer.
His business partners got in the way, so he got them out of the way.
Freddy’s lawyer got the sentence knocked down from twenty years to five.
But it didn’t matter. A guard beat Freddy to death in the first week.
The insurance company refused to pay out Freddy’s life insurance.
Freddy’s wife used Freddy’s lawyer to sue to the insurance company. And the government.
She’d already been talking to him about divorcing Freddy, but now, she got the best of both worlds:
Freddy gone, and a whole lot of money.

As the pandemic swept across the world, the race for a vaccine began.
Production lines came to life, gambling on various candidates so they’d be ready with supply.
Company after company released their testing results.
Many successes, with few or no side effects.
The government bought up the doses, and sent them out for distribution.
Hidden in the herd, a secret contractor’s product, which they allocated to prisons, soup kitchens, and welfare institutions.
While agents shredded records and smashed hard drives, the slow-acting toxin annihilated the so-called “undesirables.”
And the unsuspecting agents, too, for the truth had also become undesirable.

The Writer had a reputation for crafting tales of madness.
He’d submit them to magazines, receiving rejection letter after rejection letter.
Then, he’d wait a few months before resubmitting the work, with a note attached:
“I have made the edits that you requested.”
Not that he’d made any changes.
It was just a bluff to see if the publisher would assume they’d asked for edits before making an offer.
Which more often than not would work.
The Writer chose the best of the offers, and knew to focus his efforts on that publication.
Careless, gullible, and generous with the pay.

Nobody ever asked me to sign their yearbook.
And nobody signed mine.
Because I don’t have any yearbooks.
Either I threw them out or didn’t pick them up in the first place.
I don’t really care about anyone from high school.
It was a horrible place. And I’d rather not remember anything about it.
As for college, it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t bad at all.
And I had a lot of photos from college saved up.
Which I lost in a fire.
The college yearbooks are all scanned online.
I have them bookmarked.
But none of them are signed.