Long ago, Sally would have had to clean her teeth with a brush, fluoridated goo, waxed string, and medicated rinse.
Now, it’s done with nanobots. Tiny robots programmed to scrub away food particles, eliminate bacteria, and rebuild any damaged surface material.
Everything is done with nanobots. Zapping cancer cells, replenishing muscle fibers, healing bone, and enhancing nerve signals.
They’re not supposed to go into the brain, but they do.
The tooth maintenance routine doesn’t quite work in the brain, neurons sheathed with shiny hard enamel.
Sally collapsed in the mall, staring blankly, with a perfect dead smile on her face.
Tag: tragedy
The Not So Merry Go Round
Here we sit on the merry-go-round.
Where some aren’t so merry at all.
Some kids are reaching for brass rings.
Others hold on and laugh.
And then there’s those crybabies, clutching with fear and screaming:
Moooooooooommmmmmmyyyyyyyy!
I’ll just sit on the bench, wondering.
All those tattoos on the arm of the operator.
The smoke oozing out from the machinery.
The gears grind louder.
Which the music almost covers up.
It’s a lot happening at once.
I just want to sit here on the bench.
And watch everything go by.
And listen to the music.
With a few folks, humming along.
Timeshifted
When the time machine exploded, the research team told you I was dead, my atoms scattered throughout history.
I was badly hurt, sure, but there’s great medical care in the future. All kinds of advanced Star Trek stuff here.
You can hardly see the scars from where they regrew my arm, and this new eye is as good as the old one… even better, with the anti-aging treatments.
If only you’d have held on. They could have cured that cancer.
Instead, I wasn’t there to help you though it.
You killed yourself, and I’m laying a flower on your grave.
Uncle Artie
Uncle Artie was a man of the carnival. He traveled the country from coast to coast so many times, and there wasn’t a sucker’s dollar he couldn’t take.
When he died, his body was cremated and the ashes put into one of three urns.
His lawyer shuffled the urns around, and we chose.
Aunt Gladys came up empty.
Shuffle again. My dad thought he had it. Nope.
Unlike those two, Artie taught me all his tricks. I had the winner, and walked away with ten million dollars.
And his ashes.
(Don’t flush them all at once. They’ll clog the drain.)
The Council
The Emergency Council of Hedgehogs was convened under the giant oak tree in the deepest part of the woods.
Panic ran rampant as teddy bears were stumbling around drunkenly after their picnic, grabbing hedgehogs and tossing them around.
It was decided that an emissary would approach the mommies and daddies of the teddy bears, pleading for help.
But instead of putting the teddy bears to bed to sleep off their stupor, the mommies and daddies got drunk and threw the hedgehog emissary around, too.
Angered, the hedgehogs burrowed deep under the giant oak tree and set the woods on fire.
The Balloon
There was once a balloon in Balloon Land who was unlike the others.
He was filled with mustard.
They all floated around and laughed at him.
So he rolled away, far away, until he reached the Kingdom of Hot Dogs.
Frightened, the balloon began to cry, and mustard dribbled on to a hot dog.
It made a pretty yellow squiggle.
Another hot dog saw this. “Put one on me!” it said.
All the hot dogs wanted squiggles, and eventually the balloon ran out of mustard.
“What good am I now?” it cried.
The hot dogs sacrificed it to their god.
I Am Cancer
I am cancer.
I will take your hair and drink your strength.
I will use your body as a battlefield, fighting you to the death.
I will hide behind you as doctors try to kill me, and you will suffer along with me.
I may take your skin as a trophy, rob you of your eyesight, and maybe take an arm or a leg if I feel like it.
I can take everything you have and everything you are.
Except one thing: those who love you.
I can never take them from you.
But I can take you from them.
Waiting
Bruwyn didn’t come home last night.
Usually, he’s the first to come home, but Myst came home first.
Finding a black cat at night is impossible, of course, but you can’t just sit down and wait.
Walking around, I hear what I think is his collar, but it’s just crickets and frogs.
So, I come back home, Myst and Nardo wait up with me.
If he can’t come home for whatever reason, I hope he knows he’s loved and missed.
And if he doesn’t want to come home, well, cats are cats, and I hope he’s happy wherever he is.
The Book Of Life
All across the world, Apple and Google fanboys are clutching their chests and keeling over dead in the streets.
Why? Every year, The Lord writes our names in The Book Of Life.
He adds those who are born and scratches out those who died.
But this year, he’s catching the e-publishing bug and giving up on the ink and paper.
He’s worked up a file and sent it to Amazon for publishing on the Kindle.
He thought about making an app for Android and iPhone, but those smartphone owners are a bunch of annoying cocksuckers, so he’s left them out.
The Mechanical Arm
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The mugger tried to take the girl’s purse.
She fought back.
And lost, with a bullet in her heart.
Despite the fact that the girl in the street was dead, her mechanical arm was still running.
The AI routine was cycling through idle behaviors, drumming the fingers on the ground, opening and closing on its own.
She liked to wear gloves, so the lifelike sleeve with the tattoos ended up convincing the mugger that she was still alive, so he shot her a few more times.
The hand kept moving, twitching, and the mugger picked up her purse and ran.