Sonya was good, her family said, but she wanted to be the absolute best.
“For the best music,” said The Devil, “you must string your violin with heartstrings. They resonate with unmatched beauty.”
So, at her concerts, playing her best, she captured heart after beating heart, luring the men to her home to harvest the strings she needed.
Still, she didn’t sound like the best of all.
The Devil laughed. “They have to be from people you love the most.”
Her mother.
Her father.
Her sister.
Herself.
The Devil laughed at the carnage, rosined Sonya’s bow, and played.
Magnificent!
Tag: tragedy
Cling
Sometimes, we cling to things. Other times, things cling to us.
Usually, it’s easy to tell the difference. But when it comes to Stanley and Life, not so.
At first, we thought that Stanley was clinging to Life.
Then, upon further examination, we saw that Life was clinging to Stanley.
We debated the merits of both perspectives while Stanley shouted “HEY! SOMEONE HELP ME!”
Stanley was clinging to the guardrail, and his grip was slipping.
“Or is the guardrail clinging to you, Stanley?” I asked.
Stanley lost his grip, and fell into the chasm, screaming.
The argument’s moot now, huh?
The Girl Of My Dreams
She was the girl of my dreams.
Every time I’d go to sleep, I’d dream of her.
Adventure.
Romance.
Excitement.
I’d rescue her from all kinds of dangerous predicaments.
Then. when I woke up, she was gone.
“I’ve got to find her,” I said.
So, I looked. Everywhere.
I spent all I had on detectives to search the world for her.
When I found her, she attacked me with a knife.
“Why?” I groaned. “Why did you attack me?”
“You,” she said. “You’re the man from all my nightmares. Whenever you appear, bad always happens.”
And she stabbed me again.
St. Pancake Day
Remember that crazy chick who got run over by a bulldozer in Gaza?
Truth is, she was one of those “late bloomer” girls.
Any bra she owned before she turned twenty was just wishful thinking.
She tried special diets, exercises, and even some weird gels and extracts she got from mail order catalogs.
None of them worked. Not even the hormones that transexuals use as part of their reassignment surgery.
Then one day, she woke up, and she had breasts.
Big ones.
“I’m not flat anymore!” she shouted.
Later that day, she went out to face the bulldozers.
Ironic, yes?
No Contest
I really don’t feel like eating anything.
Everyone’s telling me I’ve got to eat something.
“Here,” says a friend. “Have some pie.”
She puts a pie in front of me.
I don’t want to eat it.
So, I put my hands behind my back, imagine I’m thirteen again and I’m back at the county fair.
I’m in the pie eating contest.
My face goes down into the pie, and I slurp and chomp it up as fast as possible.
Licking the pie plate clean, I look up at my friend.
“ANOTHER!” I shout, laughing.
The funeral caterers only brought one.
Once upon a Tim
Once upon a Tim, there was a happy colony of bacteria.
I can’t tell you where that colony was on Tim, but wherever it was, the bacteria were happy.
Tim, on the other hand, was not happy.
The bacteria were flesh-eating bacteria, and since Tim was the closest flesh to them, the bacteria were eating Tim.
Tim lay in the hospital, nurses pumping antibiotics into his body while doctors prepared for emergency radical amputation.
The bacteria lived happily ever after in a petri dish at the CDC.
Tim, or what was left of him, didn’t.
(Who cares, right?)
The end.
Breaking hearts
She has a reputation for breaking hearts.
Which is why she got pulled off of the artificial heart assembly line and put in the product testing group.
“If you’re going to break these things, we’d rather you do it in a way that helps save lives, not kill people,” said the factory managers.
The curious thing is, when she breaks a heart, analysts look over the heart and can’t find the reason why it failed.
“She had such promise,” says a factory manager. “So much potential. It’s too painful to watch her fail like this.”
And another heart is broken.
Rolling
Prisoner 280 asked the headsman’s forgiveness for stepping on his foot, and she placed her head through the guillotine’s stock.
As the sentence was read aloud, she imagined her husband enduring this same insult nine months earlier.
Unlike the king, her head did not drop into the basket, but sailed over the crowd, spinning on to the cobblestoned street.
The town militia chased after it, but it soon rolled out of sight.
They tossed her body into an unmarked grave, which meant they never knew when it was dug back up.
The resurrectionist rubs his hands together, laughing with joy.
A gift for Valentine’s
When we were married, I swore I’d give you my heart forever.
For health, and sickness.
The doctor said that you needed a new heart, but a bad risk for transplant surgery.
You were way down the transplant list. No point in keeping the battery in the pager fresh.
I went to bed, telling myself that this would be the last sleep I’d ever sleep.
The next morning, I woke up with every intention to kill myself and let the doctors give you my heart.
But you were cold. Still. Not breathing.
You died in your sleep.
Oh, never mind.
Checking it twice
Santa’s making his list, checking it twice.
Too bad for John Bettencourt (now known as Paul Miller of Orlando, Florida) that he doesn’t check with the Witness Protection Program.
John wanted chocolate-covered truffles from his favorite online catalog store, but instead of using a new shopper ID, he used his old one.
Santa didn’t notice. But the crooked defense contractor that John blew the whistle on did.
A box arrived the next day.
“Mmmmmmmm… truffles!” John said.
He opened it, setting off the parcel bomb.
It wasn’t reindeer on the rootops, but bloody bits of John raining down on them.