Tag: tragedy

Tuesday Tax

605018

He goes door to door, collecting the Tuesday Tax.
Sometimes, it’s a chicken. Other times, it’s a flake of gold.
I pay with recycled motor oil.
Nobody ever pays the Tuesday Tax in cash.
The law doesn’t require it, so people take their frustration out on the Tuesday Tax Man with the most difficult of barter to exchange.
He writes his collections in a huge ledger, tears off a receipt, and drags everything back to his truck before moving on.
We found his body the next day, silver bullet in his chest.
He wrote the receipt in his own blood.

Hostage

605014

I was moving music between computers when I came across a file I didn’t recognize.
Virus scan: Safe.
So, I opened it and heard the most hideous scream.
“HELP ME!” it said. “THEY’LL KILL ME!”
The file was called “Sound File” and there weren’t any tags on it.
And I didn’t know who it was.
So, I deleted it and didn’t think another minute about it.
Severed fingers and ears started showing up in the mail. Bloody ransom notes.
But who they belonged to, not a clue. Everyone I knew was okay.
I’d call the cops, but… I’m busy.
Sorry.

Wth Daddy

639160

Little Terry was only five, but when mommy asked her what she wanted to do, she said “Go to the moon with Daddy.”
Her mommy smiled, made sure her daughter’s wig was on straight, and checked the IV.
Terminal cancer, while Joe was training.
Two years later, he was wrestling with the controls of the lander.
The retrorockets weren’t firing.
The vessel was falling.
Alarms screaming in his ears, lights flashing everywhere.
Everyone watched on TV.
Except for his wife and daughter.
She’d been cured of the cancer, his wife had divorced him.
She still would get the life insurance.

Everyone’s dying

639166

On the first night of Christmas, my true love gave to me… a cough.
By the fourth night, the virus had spread throughout the neighborhood.
And on the twelfth night, the CDC put the city under quarantine.
Men in Hazmat suits go door to door, picking up bodies and handing out drugs that we know won’t do a damned thing to cure this superbug.
The news says that it’s in Boston, Chicago, Moscow, Tokyo…
The Chinese deny making it. The Arabs blame “Zionist scientists.”
Everyone’s dying.
So is the fire. We put the suicide capsules in egg nog, and drink.

The Elders

639160

The tribal elders are angry.
Schools, telephones, roads, Internet.
All are broken, slow, outdated.
The Bureau ignores them. The utility representatives ignore them.
“No budget. Go away.”
So, they come up with a plan.
They follow bureau chiefs and utility executives on their vacations.
They perform rain dances and ruin the vacations.
No helicopter tours. No skiing. No scuba diving. No sight-seeing.
Just restaurants, museums, and the hotels.
They are still ignored.
So, they dance harder. Angrier.
Lightning storms and a hurricane come.
The surviving chiefs and executives yield.
Schools, cell towers, roads are all built.
The elders smile.

The Death of Walter

639169

Walter ran with a tough crowd.
They were the Boston Mafia, jogging through their Framingham neighborhood in the morning, bodyguards forming a protective cloud.
Once, Walter was out jogging on his own, and he crossed paths with that Mafia group.
The bodyguards checked him for weapons, recognized him from the travel agency, and invited him along.
Now, in an era of online airline reservations, Walter still got steady business from this group. Cruises and extended vacations, a little something extra for a private villa for a week.
And Walter never testified against them.
They killed him anyway.
It’s only business.

Funeral barge

639163

I watch a milk carton boat float down the bayou, a dead hamster laying inside.
I walk upstream until I come to a house.
A boy on the front steps, crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“The hamster died,” he whines. “Mom beat me.”
I knock on the door, and a woman answers “What do you want?”
A younger boy is behind her, also crying.
“Why did you beat a kid for his hamster dying?” I asked.
She says “It was his little brother’s. Now butt out.” And slams the door.
I walk down the steps, and punch the kid in the face.

2000

639154

My grandfather owned a wholesale grocery warehouse.
In his office, there was an antique cash register and an adding machine you had to pull the crank to get the numbers out of.
I calculated how old I’d be in the year 2000.
Then I did it for my brother.
And my dad.
And my mother.
When I wanted to do it for my grandfather, he chuckled and said he didn’t think he’d be around for that.
“But, Grampa.”
He was right. Ten years short, seven kinds of cancer ganged up on him.
Nobody knows where that adding machine ended up.

Seasick

639157

I don’t like boats.
I get horribly seasick.
I’ve tried drugs, but those seasickness drugs make me even sicker.
So, I stay off of boats.
Recently, I was diagnosed with cancer.
The chemotherapy made me really sick.
So they gave me anti-nausea drugs.
When the treatment was over and the doctors told me they couldn’t do anything else, I didn’t know what to do.
So I got on a boat.
And I felt fine.
“Give me more of those pills,” I said. “Enough to last me.”
So they did. Thirty yellow pills.
And I’ve been on the water ever since.

The Pie Man – For Soupy Sales

639161

I never got the humor in someone getting hit in the face with a pie, but the old man on television got hit constantly with pies and people loved him for it.
Every show he was on, you knew from the moment he appeared on camera, he wasn’t going to leave without pie in his face.
Even at his funeral, it was an open casket ceremony, and he was smacked in the face by half a dozen mourners.
Two or three pies get smacked against his headstone every night.
Me, I’m stuck washing them off.
Still nothing funny about it.