Tag: society

The Salad Races

639135

We both order club salads and watch the lady behind the counter pull out two metal bowls.
The race is on.
She grabs twice the usual amount of ingredients each time, dividing them between the bowls.
Lettuce, chopped ham, eggs…
It was neck and neck until it was time for the dressing.
“One scoop or two?”
We both said one. Two would slow us down.
She mixes things up, scraping the bowls loudly with the salad tongs.
Bowls are poured into plastic clamshells.
And I get the first.
Victory!
I celebrate with a lap around the restaurant and leave.

Apartment Circus

639166

I couldn’t stand to see the carnival rust in the junkyard, so I bought it.
How you fit all that into a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan, well, that’s my secret.
Kids line up at my door, and I sell tickets to the rides, the midway games, and the various tent acts.
At first, the Condo Association protested, but now they’re all in the show: the fat lady in 5H, the super’s a sword swallower, and 16A tells fortunes.
It’s a good crowd tonight.
I adjust my nose, check my floppy shoes, and lead the clowns into the center ring.

The Retarded Twins

639167

Julie and Judy were indistinguishable from each other for 80 years.
Usually, you can tell twins apart, but these two were exactly alike.
Including their mental retardation. So severe, their father walked out when they were 5 and their mother dead from suicide on their 10th birthday.
They were dressed in the same clothes, played with the same toys, and babbled the same babble.
They spent their lives in institutions together until one died.
Nobody knew which one, so they tossed a coin, declared Judy dead, and life went on as normal, or what passes for it for a retard.

April White

639161

I knew this girl. Her name is April.
But she was born in May.
Her full name was April White.
Except, she was black.
Her whole life was a bunch of opposites, one after the other.
Some folks could handle them and others couldn’t.
I thought I could, but each time I thought I knew her, she turned out to be someone completely different.
So, when we were supposed to be coming closer together, we ended up drifting apart.
Until one day, she was gone.
Or was I gone, and she was where she’d been all along?
I’m so confused.

Small Safe Town

639165

There aren’t many secrets on an orbiting research platform.
It doesn’t matter how big we build these. Even a few thousand onboard, it’s still like a small town. Or a research center.
Word passes fast.
It’s also hard to keep secrets about problems with the space station. Everybody is critical to keeping this machine running.
Those that aren’t, they can still sense trouble. Engineers needed for their experiments are busy doing something else.
Plus, when it’s something navigation-related, everyone notices different views out of the windows.
We’re all packing, preparing for evacuation.
But smiling. Like a small, safe little town.

Rite of Passage

639165

Some societies have complex and deadly rites of passage. The elders really bust your ass.
Others require that simple rituals be performed. That kind of cake walk makes for a weak man and a weak tribe.
The times sure have changed since my tribe roamed these lands, before fences. Before the white men came.
My great-grandfather had to hunt ten rattlesnakes on his own. Now, my grandson gets a hundred bucks worth of chips and is told to make it last the evening.
Otherwise, we’ll throw a rattlesnake at him.
Maybe the times haven’t changed all that much after all.

Kim

639153

Kim never wears orange now.
The last time she did, she looked like a pumpkin.
“PumpKim,” they called her.
That got her mad.
Everyone who called her PumpKim, she punched in the face.
Sure, she was fat, but in all the years she exercised to try to work off the weight, she got strong, too.
Lots of broken noses later, she ended up in jail for a year. It was supposed to be 30 days, but someone called her PumpKim in jail and got shivved.
I hope she’s not listening to this podcast. I don’t want my nose broken again.

Wyvern

639156

Every week, the townspeople bring meat to my cave.
Sacrifices to the dragon, they say. Keep him from burning our village, like in ancient times.
I laugh.
I am no fire-breathing dragon.
I’m a wyvern.
I don’t breathe fire. Sure, my tail has a deadly sting, but it’s not like fire.
I wear the long-deceased dragon’s snout as a mask. The townsfolk feed me at night. That helps with the disguise.
When a champion comes uphill to slay the dragon, taking off the mask
gives me a few moments of surprise.
Enter sting, exit champion.
The freshest meat of all.

Demolition Derby

639166

Hey, man!
Bored with football?
Tired of all these baseball players juicin up?
Hockey not bloody enough for you?
Lemme tell you about a new sport: communication satellite demolition derby!
All it takes is override commands, some maneuvering propellant, and a decent grasp of orbital physics.
There’s nothing quite like watching two expensive chunks of metal surrounded by gigantic solar arrays smashing into each other, leaving tiny sparkling fragments to cloud the the skies for all eternity.
Call your friends. Point your telescopes to the sky. Place your bets.
Then put on your crash helmets and watch the aerial carnage!

Sabbath

639157

Servants are unreliable.
When the Sabbath comes, you cannot depend on them to do work.
Unsupervised, they do such a poor job. And they steal.
So, we decided to build robots to do the Sabbath chores.
It wasn’t enough to program them with the ability to cook, clean, and mend. They must do it the right way. We also filled them with reason and piety, all of the Talmudic Law on a chip.
The robots worked great. They freed us to do so much.
Until Sabbath. They joined us in prayer, reached for their own switches, and turned themselves off.