Category: My stories

Edison The God

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Thomas Edison invented a time machine.
Some say it was really Westinghouse. Others say Tesla.
Nobody sees them anymore. Imagine that.
With his time machine, Edison brings back advanced medicines, powerful weapons, and amazing technologies from the future.
He recruits the most powerful minds from the past.
Edison is unstoppable.
With his unsurpassed knowledge of science, he has rendered himself immortal.
We call him “The God of Menlo Park.”
Why he keeps coming back to here instead of remaining on his journeys, we don’t know.
It’s sentimentality, I suppose.
He frightens us, and we have no choice but to obey.

The Beavers

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Hey, be careful when you go inside.
It’s dark in the house.
The power was cut off a week ago.
Sure, we pay our bills, but the electric company has yet to fix the fucking lines.
Beavers chewed down the poles. Then they dragged them off to the river to build a dam.
It’s a big river. They needed a lot of wood.
Power poles, telephone poles – the beavers took it all, leaving us in the dark and without phones.
Nice and quiet now. So we go down to the river in the evening and watch the beavers build.

Sexy Burrito Of War

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At a fast food Mexican shithole, well past midnight, I’m looking up and down the menu.
Breakfast tacos. It’s what I always get-
WAIT!
What the fuck is a Sexy Burrito Of War?
I ask the guy behind the counter, and I can see his knuckles go white as he grips the register.
“You want the Sexy Burrito Of War? Seriously?”
No, I just want to know what the fuck it is.
Maybe I’ll want it if it sounds good. Maybe not.
I have to sign a release form. Run on a treadmill.
Maybe I’ll just have some breakfast tacos.

Shutterbug

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A while back, I had to go to a place and shoot pictures of an awards ceremony.
When I got there, I realized I had forgotten to bring any film.
I walked around, pretending to snap photos, but all I was doing was pressing the shutter.
No film, no photos.
So when the ceremony was over, the organizer tapped me on the shoulder and said “I guess there won’t be any pictures.”
I held up my camera. “I took a lot of photos,” I said. “Just gotta develop the film.”
The organizer reached over and took off the lens cap.

The Chicken Password

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Ever forgotten a very important password?
I once forgot the password to a secure system that didn’t have a way to recover the password.
It was so secure, the software author couldn’t even get into the system once it had a password added to it.
In the end, I had to go to a hypnotist to get them to dig around my mind to find the password.
They snapped their fingers, and I thought I was a chicken.
“Bawk!” I screeched, and I flapped crazily around the room.
The hypnotist typed in “Bawk!” and the system booted right up.

Swine Flu

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The Big Bad Wolf didn’t care about this whole Swine Flu scare. He was hungry.
So he huffed, puffed, and coughed for about a minute.
A window opened in the straw house, and the first little pig laughed.
“Caught a bad case of the flu, wolf?” he asked.
The wolf grabbed at him, but his muscles were aching badly and he missed.
Two more pigs walked up behind the wolf.
One hit him in the leg with a piece of wood, and the wolf fell down, howling with pain.
The other pig hit him in the head with a brick.

Stick it to The Man

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Things are always getting worse for me and Joey.
Joey lost his job. My hours are getting cut back. The apartment’s a wreck.
Nothing ever works out for either of us.
Joey’s always saying we gotta stick it to The Man.
But Joey never says how we’re supposed to stick it to The Man.
What glue sticks it to The Man?
Do we use staples and thumbtacks?
And what exactly is “it” we’re supposed to stick?
Joey says I’m too literal.
I say Joey needs to provide concrete examples.
He shrugs.
Is this how The Man sticks it to us?

April White

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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.

Liberated

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We were liberated by the British.
The Americans, they bring doctors. They bring food. They bring water. They bring medicine. They bring trucks and jeeps. They talk and they cry.
The British, they bring nothing. Not even clothes.
I ask one for food, and he turn his back on me. He get into his jeep and drive off with other soldiers.
I cannot eat freedom. I cannot wrap myself in freedom.
We wander in the street, the forest.
We do not know where to go or what to do.
It starts to rain, and we open our mouths to drink.

Maggots

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I was in the hospital, laid up with a broken leg when the word got out that zombies were on the loose.
No guns. No machetes. Just fire extinguishers and the occasional bone saw.
That’s when it hit me.
“Maggots eat dead flesh,” I said. “Release a bunch of maggots and they’ll eat the zombies.”
The nurse went down to the stockroom and brought out three trays of maggots.
“Is that all?” I asked. “I was hoping for huge barrels full of the things. Maybe fill a moat with them.”
No.
Bar the doors. And pray the army shows up.