Category: Elisson

Vinnie horsed the duffel bag onto the counter.
He yanked the zipper, displaying the bag’s contents to the proprietor, an elderly Chinese who had been doing his best to ignore the red splotch on the side of the bag. It glistened wetly in the fluorescent light.
The old man handed Vinnie a cardboard stub. “You come back tomollow aftah five, OK?”
The next day, Vinnie came by at 6:30. He handed over his stub and received two cardboard boxes, each packed with fresh, clean Benjamins, profits from legitimate businesses.
Chang smiled. He owned the finest Chinese money laundry in town.

He had marshalled his forces carefully, exactingly, for just this moment. Patiently building his strength for the perfect opportunity to strike.
Troops massed along the borders. The supply chains were long, but the generals in charge knew the penalty for failure.
His early conquests had come easily, with only token opposition. But recently, his fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. Every battle, a bloody meatgrinder. Every skirmish, a near-disaster.
Retreat, regroup. Retreat again, regroup again.
Well, all that was going to change. Had to change. It was his turn now.
With the next roll, Yakutsk would be his!

It had been three full days since he had last slept.
Damn finals…and that thesis defense. One all-nighter in a row was bad enough, but two? Jesus. His teeth ached as he gulped another cup of the e-Quad’s stinking, bitter coffee.
Eyes…like baseballs of lean bacon. Crusty. Red.
The thesis defense was in two hours. Surely he would do a better job with a quick nap. He laid his head down on the cold carrel desk.
When he opened his eyes, the library windows were dark. How long had he been asleep?
Fuck this train wreck of a college career.

As usual, I’m in the middle of something when they come through.
Thursday, I was pressing a suit. Today, I was measuring Goldberg for a pair of pants. 38 waist, 30 inseam, dresses to the left, if you’re curious.
Hey, I don’t spend the whole day in here. But somebody has to be there to put up a good front, and I got picked. Maybe it’s because, in my other life, I really was a tailor.
But now, six hours a day, six days a week, I’m just the fucking doorman for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

Gart snapped a fresh magazine into his pulse rifle, hoping the soft “click” would not be picked up by the enemy sensors. He raised one eyebrow, sniffing the dank cellar air. It wasn’t getting any fresher in here, not with Jones’s decomposing torso only ten paces away.
It had been a good three days, at least until Jonesy bit it. They had made some real progress, pushing back the Jeffersonians. The city limits were secure – for now, anyway – but someone had to work recon, and it was Gart’s turn to draw short straw.
Sometimes it was hell to be Mayor.

Asparagam stood, staring off into space, a tear running down his chlorophyll-stained face.
It had been a hellish season. So many of his family cut off in the prime of their lives. Flayed. Stuffed into the brightly colored body bags, then trundled off into cryogenic storage.
But he could not mourn for them. That was…forbidden.
It was in the contract. The hellish clothing, perversely constructed of stinging nettles. The omnipresent shit-eating grin. It was all there in green and white. He was sworn to obey.
Just the same, he thought, can’t the Jolly Green Giant weep for his lost children?

Lenny Spiderman was the class clown.
We were kids together, growing up on Long Island. And Lenny used to drive the teachers nuts.
He’d build webs up by the ceiling in homeroom, and then swing up there and hide. Mrs. Hentoff never thought to look up, but he’d be hanging there making faces. It was all we could do not to laugh.
But when he got older, he got serious. “With great power comes great responsibility,” that crap.
Peter Parker? Bullshit for the reporters. It was always just Lenny.
But I’m the guy who got him to use the hyphen.

I was sitting at my desk in the Home Office, pounding out the PowerPoints, when I heard the buzz of a housefly.
We don’t get flies in the house too often. Where had this fucker come from?
As I toiled, I kept hearing the buzz more often. It became evident that there were several flies performing reconnaissance runs through the house. What the hell was going on?
By nightfall, almost all of the flies were dead, their corpses scattered like raisins throughout the house.
Damn. I’m going to have to stop leaving that poisoned raw meat in my sock drawer.

After all these years, you think they’d finally figure it out. But no.
If I had to blame somebody, I’d blame that Cervantes fellow for getting it backwards. But what do you expect from one of these “creative” types? I’m a busy man, and I don’t have the time to explain the intricacies of my profession to every Tomàs, Ricardo, and Hernàndez that comes along.
Especially when that profession is unusual.
Don Quixote is my name. Agricultural architectural restoration is my game.
What do I do?
I restore correct vertical alignment to air-powered size reduction equipment.
Yep. I untilt windmills.

Yesterday, as the Missus and I were on our way to dinner, we saw a car in front of us with a decal in the rear window: Got Jesus?
It was clear, based on its design, that the decal was Yet Another Ripoff of the well-known “Got Milk?” advertising campaign, the one featuring celebrities sporting Milk Moustaches.
The Missus asked: When you Get Jesus, do you get a Jesus Moustache? And if you do, what color is it?
I’m no expert, but I’d say that between Ash Wednesday and Easter, you have a purple mustache…but on Easter, it turns white.