62. Lunch Hour Divorce
May 31, 2008
Half an hour in which I also have to eat.
That’s how long I have to divorce my wife.
I’m very particular about proper nutrition and sleep. This is one of the reasons she has to go. Always snoring. Always wanting sex or a dinner out or a show past eleven PM.
It’s more than I can take. Especially tonight, when I have a big presentation at the office tomorrow. I can’t check into a hotel, because they’re even worse: adjacent tenants flushing the toilets at all hours. I can’t tell her how important it is to me, and cross my fingers: it’s more important than that. Even if she did manage not to get in my way, I would be awake all night wondering how she would screw it all up for me.
Accidentally, of course. She doesn’t mean to do it, poor thing.
So I drive home and put lunch in the microwave, a potato with cheese and broccoli. I go to the washroom, urinate, and clean my hands, careful not to get my shirt cuffs wet. I call around the house: Mara, are you home? But she is nowhere.
Out of the house! Why on earth would she leave? She has nowhere to go.
Deep breaths. She has meddled with my plan. Maybe she even knows. Read the rest of this entry »
61. Fetus, Model Boats, and Melons
May 30, 2008
Julia was so upset to be pregnant. For weeks and weeks, she put off thinking about it. But then, finally, she said, “Well, I can’t do this. I will get an abortion.”
When the doctor was finished and Julia had gone home, the sad-looking, wet little fetus amazingly got to its feet and started talking. “Hello, doctor,” it said. The doctor dropped his clipboard. There were so many reasons this should not be happening. The doctor took an abrupt leave of absence and adopted the I guess you should call it a baby. Adopting the I guess you should call it a baby into his bachelor’s home took much less red tape than he had expected, and that very afternoon they were home.
After a long, coherent conversation over cups of water, the very smart fetus said, “And that’s why women should be allowed to do what they decide. Please heed my words and not the prescriptive morality my sentience my inadvertently support. Your line of work makes the world a better place.”
The doctor had always liked building model boats inside of bottles. So he retired to do that. Everyone was entitled to his opinion; the doctor had decided to make his opinions mostly be about different kinds of glue and balsa wood for the rest of his life.
The doctor named the I guess you should call it a baby James. James grew up to be a perfectly normal adult who farmed melons, which he didn’t like all that much, but it was okay.
i don’t even know if i should be posting this. i think i was attempting to channel kafka… and, you know, write something that reads like an allegory but has no clear moral… or has, you know, like two clear morals that contradict each other?
because… that’s funny?
image: voteprime on flickr
60. Candle Party Sabotage
May 29, 2008
I just couldn’t stand her candle parties anymore. She was a perfectly good roommate in other ways—cleaned the bathroom every week, paid her bills, didn’t eat my cereal. But when she would talk like a sales associate and make me smell every one of her 79 scents—and then try to recruit my friends—I started plotting a way to make it stop.
I ordered a few grams of sulfur powder off the internet, mixed it into a glass of water, and waited for her to leave. When she went to dinner with her boyfriend, I carried all three translucent tackleboxes down from her closet shelf and into the kitchen. I brushed some of the solution on each and every candle, letting it dry completely before replacing the tealight in its labeled compartment. Her car was just pulling up when I replaced “White Tea and Ginger,” which was now “Spoiled Egg Sandwich and Ginger.” I latched the three cases shut and shoved them in her closet.
Her “candle parties” stopped being so successful. When the checks stopped pouring in, she stopped selling, and I enjoyed the peace of no longer having “offers” hurled at me every day.
I was eating cornflakes and reading the paper one morning, when FedEx brought a large box to the door.
“Tupperware,” it said, on the return address.
image: Bern@t on flickr
59. The Gym Robbery
May 28, 2008
“Well, I guess I got to go to the gym, so I don’t start being shaped like a potato,” I said.
“Whatever, baby, see you later,” said my husband, who was distracted. He was making blueprints for his bank heist.
I grabbed my effects and headed for the gym in my ostentatious super-Hummer that runs on water and silent wishes that it go real fast. No living mechanic can fix my super-Hummer, but it has never needed fixing.
I was running on the elliptical, listening to my iPod, when a bunch of robbers came in the front door.
“Keep quiet and give us all your valuables!” said their leader. He was holding a gun. One of his employees was holding an open pillowcase. Yes, it was a real pillowcase. It had daisies on it.
Talk about a perfect crime: all those mp3 players, and all our tasers and pepper sprays were down in the lockers!
That is, it would have been a perfect crime, except that I know like eight kinds of martial arts. I kicked the guns out of their hands, and I knocked them out with some more kicks.
The city gave me a big sack of reward money, so my husband decided not to rob the bank after all.
THE END
image: Jeremy Brooks on flickr
#58 has been removed by the author
May 27, 2008
#57 has been removed by the author
May 26, 2008
56. Sugar Mines
May 25, 2008
The world was full of sugar. That’s why the flowers and grasses popped up as cakes and toffees and boxes of grape juice: caves underneath the soil were full of raw, crystalline sugar and rock-hard dried molasses. Materials from these massive underground sugar deposits developed colors and textures when exposed to the sunlight. They washed up as jimmies and sprinkles on the beaches. The natural waterfalls were fountains of cola and butterscotch.
Some of the mountains were full of glitter, too. People melted down the glitter to make things like rainbow blasters and hovercars.
A long time ago, some people tried to mine the sugar caves. This happened around the same time that they discovered that sugar was delicious. The first person to think of mining and exporting the sugar was Wallaby Nightstick. Read the rest of this entry »
55. Kiss Raffle
May 24, 2008
“Here, Amy, let’s give people these raffle tickets I just found.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re bored.”
“Oh yeah. OK.”
Amy and Kel left their dorm and started passing out raffle tickets to everyone they saw. Kel kept half of each ticket in a big jar. People peered at their tickets and put them in wallets and pockets.
“When’s the raffle?” everyone asked.
“At five in the quad,” Amy said.
Five rolled around, and they had no prizes to give away.
“Do you have any beer or cigarettes in your room?” asked Amy.
“No, I want those for myself,” Kel said.
“Well, we could make it a kissing booth, and the winners could win kisses.”
“That sounds great!”
There was a mini crowd waiting in the quad, and Amy and Kel drew tickets and called out numbers. People got to choose between kissing Kel and kissing Amy when they won. When Kel and Amy had had enough kissing, they said the raffle was over, and then they went home for beer and cigarettes and kissed each other.
image: alykat on flickr
54. Checkers
May 23, 2008
It was summer. Pete and his imaginary friend went into the barn to play checkers. It was yellow in there, and a little dusty. Pete’s imaginary friend won, but that was cool.
Then they drank mint juleps.
image: glynnish on flickr
53. Wheelchair Seat
May 22, 2008
The buses where I live have these fold-up seats in the front, so a wheelchair can fit there, and if there are no wheelchairs then there’s room for more people to sit down. I don’t know, maybe they have those in all cities. I’m just saying that’s how it is here.
So I’m riding the home from work a few weeks ago, and the bus is mostly empty because it’s not a popular route. We do stop to pick up somebody though, and it’s this guy with a pink tie-dye shirt and one of those paper Tyvek hats like you wear when you paint houses. After he pays his fare, the guy notices that those three wheelchair seats just happen to be in the “up” position. I guess this is greatly agitating to him, because he sighs loudly, tries to make eye contact with all five or six of us who are riding, and pushes the seat into the “down” position. Then he goes to sit in the back row and falls asleep.
This is all kind of annoying, because he’s so aggravated about it and there are lots of empty seats, but whatever.
The best part was that right after this dude did this, we stopped and picked up a guy in a wheelchair. So the driver had to flip the seats back up anyway.
image: georgeogoodman on flickr
