Category: My stories

You probably only know of the two Wicked Witches and the one Good Witch from the classic film, and maybe you know Mombee from the later sequel, but the books are full of spellcasters, sorcerers, and other practitioners of magic.
Ding Dong was especially proud, powerful, and dangerous.
The few who knew of her existence knew not to mention her, let alone insult her.
Munchkins are as ignorant as they are small, so they didn’t realize their mistake of singing “Ding Dong, the witch is dead!”
“No,” a voice muttered. “You’re dead.”
A massive firestorm wiped Munchkinland from the map.

Can you hear the mortars? They’re silent again.
After the bodies were piled into trucks and hauled off, we brought the stretchers to the creek.
Washing the blood and guts off of the canvas, getting them cleaned up for the next wave to come in.
We’d wash ourselves, wash the blood and guts off of ourselves, trying to wash out the memories and noise and smell away.
Wondering when we’d end up on the stretchers, taken down the hill down to the trucks, piled up, our blood and washed off and… and…
Can you hear the mortars? Hear them again?

A government survey found a dozen indigenous tribes living in the rainforest we’d marked for farming development.
It doesn’t take much of a bribe to get the numbers and GPS coordinates.
The army doesn’t patrol out here, so it’s easy to fly in one of our own survey teams.
Handing out blankets and tools and other goods.
They’re most interested in the sugar cubes.
The poison in them acts quickly.
It’s painless, and they die with smiles on their faces.
The next survey will show this area as uninhabited, and after we make the claim, we’ll roll out the machinery.

Fifteen minutes with an epsom salt warm compress, the bump on my cheek comes to a head.
“Wash your hands again and squeeze it gently,” says the virtual nurse.
Yellow and white flow down my cheek, and I wash it out with deionized water and squeeze again until only blood comes out.
Swab it out with a cotton swab, then hydrogen peroxide.
The buzz of the pharmacy drone, it drops off the antibiotics.
“Take two tonight, one tomorrow morning, and use a clean bandage,” the nurse says. “I’ll check in tomorrow.”
And I thank her, and head for the door.

Working from home and walking to stores, I don’t drive my car much.
After three and a half years, less than ten thousand miles.
As little as I drive, I still ran over a nail and had to get a new tire.
I figured I might as well buy 4 new tires, but the store owner insisted I just needed the one.
Okay, fine. Thanks.
A week later, I hit a pothole too quickly and tore up another tire.
And I needed a tow to the tire shop.
He’s still only selling me one tire.
At a time, I worry.

It’s National Lemon Day.
I go through a bag of lemons a week.
They help prevent kidney stones.
Well, the standard ones.
The uric acid ones, you also need to do potassium, keep your pH in check, and avoid foods with purine, and so on.
Every morning, I put 2 lemons on the cutting board.
Ream a half lemon out with every glass of iced tea.
Oh, I drink a lot of iced tea and water.
Because I don’t want to wait 10 hours in the emergency room for a dose of Demerol and a cat-scan.
You know… the stones.

The Flugelheimer Circus Train took the curve too fast and went off the rails outside of Morgantown.
Right out by the ravine, half the cars rolling down the hill into the rocks.
The others like scattered crushed boxes, spilling out broken animals and people.
The few survivors, limping and crawling and carrying each other to the lights of Morgantown.
Ambulances and nurses rushing out, the Boy Scout Troop giving first aid, no comfort to the mangled.
And where was Flugelheimer?
Not in his private car.
He was in Rio with the formerly-bearded lady, living it up with the insurance payout.

I work with a charity that builds schools in poor neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods with run-down schools, not enough skilled teachers, old textbooks, and few after-school activities to keep kids out of gangs.
We get a lot of grant money and celebrity support.
And we use it to build the schools.
The best schools. Beautifully and perfectly designed schools.
Problem is, when we’re done building the schools, there’s no money left.
Maybe enough for a ribbon for a politician to cut.
And run, leaving behind an empty school with no teachers, no textbooks, no afterschool activities.
Except for vandalizing the empty shell.

Lucy was an old Series Seven.
She did good work at the droid shop, and a vintage bot demonstrated to customers a bit of class, as opposed to the new Series Tens in the warehouse.
But she had a hard time holding a charge, and those Series Sevens had an integrated hardwired battery.
A swappable battery was a risky retrofit. Which Lucy declined.
She spent all of her time tethered to a power cord, never going more than five meters from the reception desk.
Smiling, welcoming people, waving people past, and arranging repairs for the broken Series Tens being returned.

There were ten of us Smith kids, and when the youngest Bobby went off to the Army, Mother had herself a bad case of Empty Nest.
At first, she’d bake cookies for all the neighborhood kids, but between me and my surviving brothers and sisters, Momma had a bad habit of dropping things in mixing bowls without looking first, and thank God Daddy said he’d do all the cooking.
So, she put out a bunch of birdfeeders and birdhouses, and the homestead was covered with birds.
And bird shit.
Even more reason not to take any of her cookies, kids.