When my mother had surgery for a kidney tumor, dad and I sat in a large waiting room.
Well, I sat. He paced around. Or napped.
The chairs were comfortable, but couldn’t be moved. And the arm rests made it impossible to sleep across them.
There was no receptionist. Maybe if I grabbed her chair…
Dad got it, propped his feet up.
Stuck his tongue out at me.
The wall had a long mural, starting from a sunrise where children ran out and played, progressively getting older, until old people walked into the sunset.
Where the bathrooms were, of course.
Tag: cliche
Fast As Molasses
It used to be that people would say “slow as molasses.”
But not any more.
Just like all those rare plants in the Amazonian jungle yielding cancer-curing wonderdrugs, there’s a compound in molasses that, when properly refined and then hit with a particle accelerator, can be used to fuel a faster-than-light spacecraft.
That’s right. You heard me correctly.
Warp speed. Hyperspace.
And even with all that particle-accelerator science mumbo-jumbo, it’s still cheaper and more stable than what dilithium crystals would cost.
If they existed.
Just make sure you keep the molasses bottles well-marked.
Pancakes make such a mess in hyperspace.
Itchy Trigger Finger
Stone Ridge needed a doctor, so I hopped on the first train out.
When I arrived, sheriff welcomed me, pointed out some sights, and warned me about Bobcat Murphy: “He’s got an itchy trigger finger.”
Oh. Good.
A client.
I grabbed my bag and headed to the Murphy Ranch.
Bobcat put a gun to my head and said “What do you want, stranger?”
“Doctor,” I said. “Doctor Roberts, and I have a cream for your itch.”
Bobcat sighed. “Great,” he said. He put down the gun and dropped his pants.
Curing his jock itch cured the itchy trigger finger, too.
Stretching It
The day before a pirate raid, you can go down to the beach and watch the men doing their pre-raid warm-up exercises and stretching.
It’s very important to limber up before shivering any timbers, keel-hauling, or walking the plank.
Nobody wants to be in the middle of a raid and then suddenly get a sprain or a charley-horse, dropping their cutlass from a twisted wrist.
And then there’s the basics: port, starboard, bow, stern.
No landlubber mistakes here, mateys.
Is that a stuffed parrot?
Argh. Go requisition a real one.
Either straighten up, boy, or we’re all in deep poopdeck.
Antidepressors
My doctor’s a little weird.
Instead of using tongue depressors, he calls them tongue anti-depressors.
“Because nothing’s more sad than an unhappy tongue,” he says. “I want my patients to be happy, and that includes their tongues! A happy tongue doesn’t mind being held in the face of rumor, and it certainly doesn’t wag along, let alone get gotten by a cat!”
It took a minute to digest all that before I had the nerve to ask “So, what makes them anti-depressors instead of depressors?”
“I soak them in tequila,” he says.
Which explains the lime and salt, I suppose.
The Rock
I bought her a drink, and she told me to go crawl back under the rock I crawled out from under.
I told her that I crawled out from under that rock long ago, and I was much younger and smaller back then. I don’t think I can fit under it.
And to tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure the rock is still there. For all I know, there’s a Starbucks there now.
So, I smiled.
She tossed the drink in my face.
The bartender tapped me on the shoulder. “Three’s your limit, pal. Hand me your keys.”
Linguists
I said I worshiped the ground she walks on, but I didn’t worship her.
She said she hated my ass for that, but she didn’t hate me.
“My ass or my guts?” I asked.
“Guts,” she said. “Ass was yesterday.”
“Ah, ok.”
We always go back and forth like this, engaging in silly examples of symbolism and metonymy until someone gives in, but there’s only so many representations of the whole you can come up with before you run out.
She waves her scepter. “The crown commands the Royal Linguists to come up with more funnies!”
The cunning linguists bow.
The Lists
When it comes to paperwork, we have things down to a science here at the prison.
(We certainly get enough practice at it these days. Stupid food riots and rebellion!)
Every morning, the king sends down a list of executions.
Then, in the evening, he sends down a list of pardons.
However, after releasing a bunch of people last night, we got an identical list of names this morning.
“Wasn’t that the list from last night?” I asked.
The messenger checks.
“Uh oh,” he says. “I’d better fix this.”
He adds my name.
“We’ll just say it was your fault!”
Blind Justice
Maybe back in the days of the Ancients, Perseus would have cut off a Gorgon’s head and bagged it, but today we’ve got a little something called The Law.
And nobody’s actually passed a law against petrification besides First Degree Assault By Witchcraft.
Lawyers say it’s not like she’s killed anyone. Just turned them to stone, that’s all.
“If there’s a magical curse of the Gods that petrifies people, then there’s probably a blessing that depetrifies them.”
We send in the robots, fire up the speakers, read her rights to her, and she asks for an attorney.
A blind attorney.
Dr. Vickers
Dr. Vickers told me there’s only three directions you can run:
To something.
Away from something.
And in circles.
Ten years of coming here, laying on this couch and telling him everything.
He takes a stack of notes from his desk drawer.
“Do you know what this is?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s you,” he says.
He walks to his fireplace and tosses the notes on to the fire.
“You’ve been going in circles all this time. Now, you’re going to leave here.”
“Where will I go?” I ask.
“That’s your decision,” he says, and opens the door.