Category: My stories

Eight and Ten

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Everything in Mathematics is pretty much known these days. It takes five hundred pages packed with formulas to come up with something unknown.
And those panel discussions are really boring.
So, I came up with a simple and fun one: “Why are hot dogs sold in packages of ten and hot dog buns sold in packages of eight?”
Wow. You should have seen the fistfights.
Then, Weird Al Yankovic, yeah, the musician, steps in and says “I just give the extra 2 hot dogs to my dog.”
He won the Nobel Prize for that.
(And gave it to his dog.)

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.

House Guest

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I watched the ragged homeless guy haul refrigerator boxes out to the weedpatch by the train tracks.
Then, it was shopping carts full of broken appliances.
Item after item, he hoarded into a pile until I got curious.
There, in the tall grass, was a magnificent palace, constructed of junk and litter.
I was buzzed through the gate and met him at the front door.
“This place is amazing,” I said, and he gave me the tour.
A pool.
A ballroom.
A movie theater.
He smiled. “Now that I’ve got the guest house done, I’ll work on my mansion next.”

The Ghosts In My Pants

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Most ghosts appear as sheets flapping in the wind, but the ghosts that haunt my house appear as torn and worn-out pants flying around.
At first, I found them frightening, but in time I’ve grown used to them.
They’re even somewhat ludicrous when I think about them.
Especially when they fly around with their zippers undone.
“X Y Z,” I say to a passing ghost, and the jeans hover there for a moment before zipping up.
It goes back to moaning and flapping around with the others.
The laundry promises to exorcise them this time.
Just like “no starch” right?

Rehab

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Things got crazy at the party. Talia overdosed on longevity drugs and went into a coma.
We handed her off to the Sleeping Beauty Ward. They gave us an estimate of 80 years before she’d come out of it.
Eighty years?
They handed me the bill for her babysitting, and I scraped up most of it.
A kidney and some skin for burn grafts covered the rest.
That was 79 years ago. Vital signs say she’ll wake up soon.
Never did find anyone else, too old for her now.
I wrote one last note and walked to the termination center.

The Dead Bird

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I’ve had this bird for years.
Used to be pretty with bright white feathers.
One morning, I lifted the cage’s cover and it was lying there on the bottom of the cage, ugly and dead.
I was about to open the cage when I saw it twitch.
I’d seen this in the news: zombie birds.
If it hadn’t have twitched, it would have bitten off a finger or two.
I padlocked the latch to keep it from escaping.
Now, it just claws and bites at the bars of the cage, getting scrawnier and uglier over the years.
Fifty bucks? Deal.

The Great Claw

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The Great Claw wobbles over our ravaged city.
Every now and then, it descends and grabs at a car or a building and yanks it up into the sky.
Invading the world wasn’t enough for the aliens, so they put it up there to torment us.
“The rest of the world is dead,” said the message. “But you’ll keep us amused while we extract the necessary isotopes for our next journey.”
Scientists at the university tried to come up with defenses, but The Great Claw ended those plans.
It rained bricks as the research center was hauled up… and up…

The Last Photograph

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The Conquest Museum on the Zagitz homeworld has many exhibits, but the most popular is the last remaining human DNA sample.
Drones guide their podlings to the guarded platform for a peek at the vial in magnetic suspension.
The thing is, that’s not the real sample. It’s just for display purposes.
Some claim that the real sample is in a research asteroid where the government is cooking up new batches of humans to stage fake invasions.
But the truth is, there’s no human DNA left. The humans were annihilated decades ago.
The conspiracy theory makes a good bedtime story, though.

Bystander

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Who names a child Innocent Bystander?
I look over the victim’s medical records and shake my head.
A car jumped the curb and mowed down a bunch of kids on the sidewalk.
They all suffered broken arms and legs except for one: little Innocent here, laying on the gurney.
His parents have asked for no autopsy. It’s obvious that the driver is to blame for the kid’s death, right?
Except that he’s not.
The kid was standing in the middle of the street, and the driver swerved to avoid him.
Afterwards, Innocent was beaten to death by an angry mob.

Do you trust these pancakes?

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The courts upheld the ban against pancakes last year.
Now, the only place you can get pancakes is an underground grill.
Or, if you risk it, at home.
“We’re making waffles,” I tell the grocery checkout girl as she holds up my maple syrup bottle suspiciously.
The government says that waffles are a gateway breakfast food leading to pancakes, but I disagree.
I like waffles.
I like bacon.
I like orange juice.
But pancakes? No. They don’t hold butter or syrup like waffles do.
She bags the eggs, flour, and maple syrup.
I’ll make waffles.
But after that? Who knows?