“And they lived happily ever after,” said the prince to Doctor Odd. “We want that.”
The princess agreed.
Doctor Odd put together a pair of Eternity Machines, wired up the royal couple, and threw the switch.
All lights blinked green, and a pair of glowing crystals slid down a chute.
Doctor Odd added them to his dining room chandelier.
As for their bodies, he fed the prince to his pet wolves, and the princess was fitted with an artificial mind.
Doctor Odd dressed her as a maid, and she kept the lab clean and tidy.
Until the wolves ate her.
Tag: sick
The Language of Ice Cream
My car got a flat tire right outside of an ice cream shop.
Is this the universe’s way of telling me that I should have ice cream?
You know, Galileo said that the language in which God made the universe is mathematics.
What if he was wrong? Maybe the universe was written in the language of ice cream?
If so, ISO-639 should include a language code for ice cream: ic.
And you could tack on dialect codes for different flavors, such as ic-rr for Rocky Road.
A rocky road that flattens your tire in front of an ice cream store.
150
Sesquicentennial is a silly-looking word, but we here in Ocean Falls take everything serious.
Miss Liza has been teaching the schoolkids to count to 150.
That counting came in handy for the whipping of Fred Murks, the town drunk. The kids counted out loud with every crack of the whip.
Except for Little Fred Junior. He screamed in horror at the sight of his father covered with gashes and blood.
Fred only took seventeen lashes before dying.
“There there, Little Fred,” we said.
And then gave him a bottle of gin.
You know. So he can practice. For the Bicentennial.
Thanklessgiving
When I hear the phrase “heavy with child” I imagine a large burlap sack stuffed full of babies.
Juicy, delicious fat babies.
So… so tasty!
Sadly, Old Doctor Parker doesn’t go door to door anymore with his burlap sack. His heavy, squirming burlap sack.
For a while, though, you could call his office, and he’d let you in the back door, and you could pick out the one you wanted.
But the angry mob, waving their torches and pitchforks, made quick work of Old Doctor Parker and his shady “day care center.”
We’ll settle for turkey this Thanksgiving, I guess.
Message
Staples in my skin.
All over my body.
I am on a towel, on a table.
You pull them out.
Slowly, with pliers.
Dipped in the alcohol.
Slowly, you pull them out.
My eyes, closed.
They’re everywhere
How did this happen, you ask.
When did this happen?
You pull them out.
Hold the cloth to the spot.
Stop the bead of blood.
They’re scabbed over, grown over
Dig gently. Pull them out.
Slowly.
You hum a soft tune.
I feel nothing.
Did you drug me?
Or is it just the tune?
Staples.
They spelled a message.
That I cannot read.
I loved the princess…
I loved the princess, but she warned me about a curse some witch put on her.
“Anyone who falls in love with me will turn into a chicken,” she said.
“Bawk,” I said. Which, if you understand Chicken, means: “I’m already a chicken. What the fuck do I care?”
Sadly, she didn’t love me back. Unless you consider the being breaded, fried, and served with coleslaw and biscuits to someone who says “God, I love chicken!” kind of love.
I don’t.
But when the princess was breaded, fried, and served with coleslaw and biscuits…
God, how I loved the princess.
Ninja
Picture a ninja in your mind.
He’s wearing a black jumpsuit with a scarf for a mask and swords on his back, isn’t he?
Well, that’s wrong.
Ninja are supposed to be invisible, so they’re not going to wear something that identifies them as an assassin.
Instead, they’re going to wear ordinary clothes so they blend in with the scene.
A suit in a business setting… shorts and a t-shirt at a casual setting…
And, yes. A Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland.
Or, so I thought.
But in my defense, it’s hard to read the intent of those freaky assholes.
Shapes in the fire
Sometimes I like to start a fire in the fireplace and stare at the shapes in the flames for hours.
After a while, the flames tell stories, and I find myself in a magical land of orange and yellow and red.
In that land lived a beautiful princess in her magnificent castle. And both were engulfed in flames.
So were her horses. And her car. And her friends.
That’s when the shrieking of the smoke alarm pulls me out of the story.
Before I can pull out the battery, my sister screams.
Yeah, I threw her Barbies on the fire.
Aborted
Lawmakers in Ohio just passed a law that requires women seeking abortions to see a sonogram of their fetus before they can get an abortion.
And in Florida, they make them climb a 25 foot rope. Without using their feet, too.
Just to outdo them both, Texas is pondering a rule that requires written permission from the fetus himself or herself.
Somehow, in all this madness, California decided to open the gates and legalize everything.
First, Second, Third Trimester? All’s legal!
Which, if you consider how awful most Californians are, it makes you wish they’d done that a lot sooner.
The Crooked Tree
Tom Waits used to tell the story of a forest full of tall, perfect trees, and one fucked-up crooked tree among them.
The perfect trees all got on the crooked tree’s case.
“Be like us!” they said. “Grow tall and straight and perfect like us.”
The crooked tree laughed, and just got more twisted.
Eventually, the perfect trees were all chopped down for lumber.
Tom said that the lumberjacks left that crooked tree alone, but we all know that Tom’s a liar.
That tree got chopped up for firewood, and popped and hissed as it burned in the logger’s camp.