FAST FICTIONS ———————————————————— a short-short story everyday

    Once again – and for the very last time – I’ll come out with the honest to goodness truth. My name is Greg Pitter and I’m a dentist working just outside of Detroit. In the medicine cabinet of my bathroom, I have a collection of approximately 300 teeth – most dentist’s do collect teeth they just don’t tell you about it because they don’t want to creep you out. Each tooth has an identity of its own, a personality from the dips and falls of it edges. I look at a tooth and I feel like a Michelangelo looking at a slab of marble. I see its hidden potential, its hidden expression.

  Over the past two months the stories that I’ve put up on this blog are from the point of view of these teeth. One tooth has a George W  Bush look to it and another tooth seems like its from the mouth of a computer programmer. These stores are giving a voice to these teeth. Yes, it’s crazy but I challenge you to look deep into the eye of your dentist the next time you’re under the drill and tell me there isn’t some glint of insanity in what you see.

  So anyway here’s today’s story based on an angry little tooth…

Teeth into Revenge 

     Once his stupid door slammed and we heard the crash of his body falling onto his bedroom floor, I knew it was go time. Tom held up the block of cheese and looked at me. I just looked straight back at him as I took the instant camera out from my backpack. Tom took his inhaler out of his pocket and huffed a couple lungfulls of the stuff. 

   “What if I need to do this while we’re up there ?”

   There was no way that he was going to chicken out with a lame-ass excuse like that and I told him so. Besides, Mike was so blotto to the world that nothing would’ve woken him up. A team of retarded, cross-eyed elephants charging a gang of monster trucks in order to hump them to smithereens wouldn’t have woken him up. At the tender age of16, my stupid older brother was already a drunk. 

     And to think that mom and dad had left this jerk in charge of us for the weekend. 

     Tom tip-toed behind me as I charged up the steps towards my revenge. When I opened Mike’s door I was body-slammed by a wall of boozy stank. The big A-hole himself was spread-eagled on the floor with his face scrunched up on its side. On all four walls, there were posters of big-boobed models in bikinis just stared straight ahead as if to say, “Yeah we knew you were a dick-weed all along.” 

    I clenched my teeth in rage and joy. I thought of what he did to me three months earlier.

    “Are you sure you want to go through with this ?” Tom whispered.

    I took the cheese and plate from Tom who looked like he wasn’t going to make it into the room and stuffed the camera in his hands. “Just get a couple shots okay ?”

    He nodded quickly a couple times and his glasses slid down his nose.

    I knelt down next to fat face, slipped the plate beneath his cheek and then stuffed the cheese into his mouth and started grating it against his braces. Flecks of deformed cheese strips fell out onto the plate.

    “Take the pictures,” I said to Tom and he obediently started snapping away.

     The plan was to sneak the best picture into the bottom of the pile of grated cheese that Mike would be using the next night for his romantic taco date.  We’d also sprinkle some of the braces grated cheese into the pile. When Mike and his hot date got to the bottom of the pile of cheese they’d see where most of it came from. At the sight of the picture, she’d probably barf all over the jerk.  It would be amazing. 

   My false teeth started to shiver with joy at the thought of what was going to happen. This was my first act of but there were 31 other stabs at revenge that were in store for my brother. One for every tooth that I’d lost because of him.

    

   Yes, the one and only Marc Bell and I say, “Enough with this silliness already.” Over the past two months I’ve been writing different posts under different identities as text versions of a pop-up graphic novel that I’m working on. “Old Style Camera Fandango” begins with the story of an underground Barbie Doll dealer. When you turn the page another story pops out about a Barbie Doll collector and then within that pop up, there’s a page that you can turn to reveal another pop up story and so on and so forth. Yes, it’s complicated and convoluted – I’m getting a headache just describing it – but once all the stories are revealed and read, the entire book resembles an old style camera with today’s story as the lens. 

   Enjoy…

Won’t Get Stymied Again

“It’s like drilling for a rainbow or an iceberg in the sun.”

                                                               Robyn Hitchcock

  I moved into 356 Shrimpy Streeet without expecting much. I was in a new city but I’d heard that everyone was a snob and it would take at least a year for anyone to have a beer with me. Unfortunately, all the bars, crowded along one downtown street, were fake Irish style pubs with clean floors and gussied up servers so I didn’t really have that much to look forward to. My bachelor apartment was clean enough though with lots of hot water and a fridge that didn’t freeze my lettuce.

    Down the street from where I lived there was a strange building that reminded me of a church. Or at least part of a church. Come to think of it, that building reminded me of an addition to a church that I saw in my hometown of London, Ontario. It looked like a well built shanty. A big block of rooms to hold lots of people. The shanty on Shrimpy Street had a sign out most nights: Paul. It was a tiny sandwich board with the name Paul written out across it.  On my way to get the bus I passed it a couple of times and whenever it was out there was a room on the second floor with a light on. I saw the back of somebody’s head through the window. I felt like a creep looking in but then after the third of fourth time I figured this looky-loo business was set up.  “Paul” was the guy seated at the table and he wanted people to see him. Maybe, he wanted people to come in. That was a theory I had. 

   My job at the hot-dog stand in Stanley Park was okay but I only had a couple coworkers who I almost never saw. I’d flown out across Canada to serve up hot-dogs to tourists in an incredible setting but most nights I spent watching European movies at home. I was starting to wonder if maybe I’d flown in the wrong direction. 

     One night while walking home I passed the House of Paul and the sandwich board was out and the head was in the lighted window and I thought to myself: Fuck it. I’m going to go into that room and see what he has to say. Maybe he has a beer waiting for me. Maybe this is the exciting side to this city just waiting to happen. The one thought that niggled in the back of my mind was the fear that he was peddling some kind of religion. Maybe there would be free snacks. 

    The door – as always – was wide open and I stepped in with a loud Hello.

    “Come on up,” I heard from the top of the shag-rugged stairs. The building smelt musty and my feet sunk into every step as I walked up towards another open door. I felt like I was trampling on wigs from the seventies. Wigs used to sop up beer spills. No maybe it wasn’t that gross but it wasn’t a pleasant. Although come to think of it, compared to the slickness of the rest of the city it was kind of refreshing. Different for sure.

    At the top of the stairs was the room which was pretty much how I’d imagined it. A long table with a bunch of empty chairs along it and one guy with his head hanging over a bunch of papers. 

   “Look at this,” he said as he screeched his metal chair back to greet me.  He sat perfectly still in his chair with his back held up straight. Suddenly his leg jerked like it had been hit under the knee with a doctor’s toy hammer. It wasn’t conscious. I could see that. 

    “Isn’t that something ?”

     I nodded yes and felt a little disappointment. My hopes weren’t too high so they didn’t have too far to crash.

    “You know how I do it ?”

     I nodded no.

     He fanned the pieces of paper out across the table so that they were all visible. There were detailed drawings of some complicated contraption that started with a toilet and led – through a series of pulleys and levers and gears that became smaller and smaller and smaller – to a sketch of a tiny device in his knee. 

    “When I flush my toilet in the morning, the displacement of the water at the back will trigger this ball to roll down this gulley and then…” he spent at least ten minutes explaining his creation which finally ended with the sound of the screeching chair combined with all the other potential energy from all the other balls and pulleys to result in a charge that knocked his knee. He had created a device that combined and explained the relationship between classical Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics. It was kind of interesting but the results just didn’t seem that spectacular.

   And I found myself looking out the window, wondering what was wrong with this city, wondering if it was time to look into airfares elsewhere. 

    “Paul” stood up to explain his theories even more emphatically. I stepped back to lean on a chair. It screeched and his knee kicked out from beneath him. He fell back into his chair.

   That was kind of funny though.

  Finally. I’ve been writing stories under various names for the past two months and today is the day that I can finally come out with the truth: I’m a pathological liar. I’ve been in jail in Manitoba, Canada for the past five years and I’ve been trying to get a handle on this very serious problem.  After all I was in jail because of all of these lies. 

  A couple of years ago I accepted the weekly counseling that’s offered here. The counselor isn’t very good but he knows the basics. Actually he’s a retired psychologist with Alzheimer’s who comes in every Monday evening and asks me what I need help with.

   “Lying,” I tell him.

    “Are you telling me the truth ?” he asks every single Monday and then he laughs. The truth about lying, I get it but it lost its laugh-appeal after the first month. I try to smile at his monotonous stab at a joke. I know he can’t help it. I tell him my name and then he explains some theory of the self which is always the same but I guess I need this information drilled into me. I listen. It helps. 

   This blog has been a kind of exercise in trying to exhaust all the lies in me and I guess today was the day that I tuckered out. No more lies. I can be honest.

  My name is Troy Craig and I’m no longer a liar.

  Here’s something that really happened to me…

The Spoon Impersonator 

   The entertainer on stage clears his throat into the mic. A phlegmatic rattling shakes the large speakers flanking the stage and three people in the audience smile wryly. There are fourteen other people in total, most of them sitting solitary at tables. A couple of people are sharing pitchers of cheap draft but everyone else is nursing something smaller. One man gets out his ear-plugs which he was hoping he wouldn’t need.  Another man at the other end of the scattered collection of little round tables takes a deep breath and sits down across from a girl in heavily framed glasses.

    “Funny guy,” he says to her.

    “Huh ?” she asks.

     “The impersonator. That’s a great impersonation of a spoon.”

     “He hasn’t done it yet.”

     “Well when he does do it, it’ll be great.”

     “It’s so bad it sucks.”

     He doesn’t know how to respond and holds his glass up to his mouth like he’s appreciating its bouquet but really it’s a gin and tonic.

     “I mean it’s so bad that it’s not even so bad that it’s good. It’s beyond that. It’s beyond good and evil. It’s Nietzschean. It’s amazing.”

     “Come here often ?”

      She adjusts her glasses and leans into the table. Her sleeve tattoos peek out from beneath the sleeves of her retro floral shirt. His heart beats visibly beneath the pocket of his cotton sleeved shirt. 

    “You stare at me every Monday that I’m here so you’d be the best judge of that question.”

   He fights a desire to run from the table, from the pub and the world of people entirely. But where would he go, he tells himself. Every country has women. Jail he thinks. No jail has bitches. They’re even worse. He gets carried away by the panicky tangents of his thoughts. He drinks the remainder of his drink, ice and all. 

    “Yeah, you do come here often.”

    She decides that she’ll take him home. She’s always wondered what it would be like to fuck a rabbit. There might be something enjoyable. I’m not like a serial killer or anything but it would be interesting to tie him up afterwards and take some pictures, she thinks to herself. If he is a shitty lay, then he’ll be too ashamed to come back here.

   She tests him to see how much give there is to his will.

   “Can you get me a drink ?” 

   On stage, the performer curves his arms up and because of the strange and lengthy shape of his body and the imaginary space over his head that he forms with his arms he actually becomes a spoon. Between bursts of clearing his throat he makes puerile and dirty jokes about soup. 

   It gets everyone in the mood.

   For something.

   There’s been a lot of shenanigans on this blog with a lot of wild claims and I want to say that the President of the United States is actually behind all this blogstuff. Yesterday, I said I was Osama Bin Laden but that was because I’m trying to smoke him out of his hole, you know get him to respond to this blog.

   Well there were forty people that come to this blog yesterday and none of them were Nasty Old Osama. Before yesterday I was trying to make these entries seem artistic and  that was because I was trying to smoke the art-fags out of their holes. You know, get the young intellectual pinkos who gotta think about everything to come out and comment. And then we could nab them when they commented something bad.

     When I was a young boy my daddy read to me bedtime stories about McCarthyism. I sure do miss those days. Maybe that was when I got the literature installed in me, you know that was when I soaked it up real good and that’s why I’ve got this itching to write. (Okay I got ghost writers to write the entries on most of these blogs but I did watch while I gave them a framework for them to write inside.)

   Anywho, I’ve got one story that was mailed into me by a young boy from Winesburg, Ohio. Here’s all the literature that you need to read. This and the Bible.  This, the Bible and the Anti—Terrorist Bill. No don’t bother reading the Anti-Terrorist Bill. It’s really long. 

  Read this…

  

The Day George W Bush Defeated the Terrorists

     The day that George W Bush defeated the terrorists was a cold day. There were white clouds in the sky and the weatherman said that it could rain in the afternoon. Most people were going about their daily affairs in the city of Baghdad but of course not everyone was busy getting groceries or taking the kids to school or going to work to make money for the family. Some people were sleeping in until ten or eleven. These were the terrorists !! 

    The day that the terrorists woke up extra late was an ordinary day in Baghdad. The terrorists woke up late because they had used all their alarm clocks in bomb devices. That day they were going to go to the market to buy more alarm clocks but they had to go in disguise because they knew the Americans watched the alarm clock dealer in the market extra carefully. The terrorists woke up at twelve o’clock that day because when you don’t get up on time you want to sleep in later and later. After months of living without an alarm clock you can actually sleep in until the time you have to go back to bed. That was the kind of life the terrorists were living. No life worthy of a decent human being. 

   On the day the terrorists woke up at twelve o’clock, they had their disguises laid out next to them. They woke up and didn’t say anything to each other because they were trained to say only the most basic things. All these basic things began with “Allah willing” and you can’t say “Allah Willing Good Morning” because it sounded dumb even to the terrorists who were dumb. Without saying good-morning or brushing their teeth or eating breakfast, the terrorists got up from their carpets on the floor and put on their disguises. They had a giant camel costume that they were going to use to go to the market to buy the alarm clock. One of them dressed up as an old lady in a black bed-sheet and the other four terrorists climbed into the camel costume. 

   The day that the terrorists went to the market dressed up as a camel was not a good day to be a terrorist because George W Bush was dressed up as a camel too !! He knew about the terrorists because he’d been sleeping on the roof of their house all night waiting for them to make their move. He also brought a camel costume which was built with American technology so you only needed one man inside to control everything. George W Bush was in his camel costume when he came up from behind the terrorists. He mounted the other camel in order to trick the terrorists into not knowing what to do. The terrorist dressed as an old lady tried to shoo George W Bush away but he continued mounting and humping the other camel in order to make other people on the street laugh and say things like “Allah willing that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in my life” or “Allah willing who has ever seen a camel mount another in broad daylight it’s time we veil our camels too !!” The fake camel penis that George W Bush was using to probe around the insides of the other camel had a nozzle at the end where deadly gas came out and then killed the terrorists hiding inside the camel.  When the camel collapsed on the street and people were amazed to see a camel hump another camel to death, George W Bush trampled the other terrorist and then secretly – when no one was looking – grabbed the terrorist’s cell phone.

   “I’m in Baghdad now and I’m coming to get you,” George W Bush texted into the terrorist’s cell phone and he sent the message to every single terrorist in the world. He also included a picture of the scene of the dead terrorists who had tried to crawl out of the camel costume. He also explained how he killed them. When the terrorists around the world saw this scary message they all strapped their bombs onto their bodies and ran in the direction away from Bagdad where they could safely blow themselves up without getting humped to death by a camel.  The last seconds of all their lives were filled with fear and respect for the cleverness of George W Bush.

   On the evening of the day that George W Bush defeated the terrorists, the sunset was streaked with red bands that went through the clouds and some people said that it resembled an American flag flying in the sky, waving goodbye. 

   Yes, I know it’s ridiculous but I’ve been writing all these entries under various names in order to perfect the various disguises that I have in a suitcase which I keep with me at all times and let me tell you it’s no easy shakes being an international man of mystery, disguised as Tom Cruise or a ten-year old Korean boy or even just an ordinary Septic Tank Repairman. I mean with the beard thing. That suckers hard to hide. Usually I tuck it under my armpit but when it’s released it feels like a baby monkey is swinging from my face. Not very high on the list of things that turn women on. Ah well in Paradise, the virgins don’t even mind body odor I hear. A beard that smells of b.o. actually turns them on.

   That’ll be the day-hay-hay when I die. (Buddy Holly was no Muslim but most of his performances did face Mecca. A little known fact that you’re not going to learn on MTV. This is true of several other Infidel rockers from the 50’s. Happy days indeed.)

   In the same way that Hitler was a misunderstood art school drop out, I’m a failed stand up comedian. Yes I did the circuit of small underground clubs in the 70’s but nobody laughed at any of my material. I would hold up cotton, polyester, burlap in front of some packed crowds but nobody really got it. (Badum-Bum – who is actually my nephew, well he would come up on stage after I made those gags but people still didn’t get it) I would have done better in America in the 50’s. Time traveling Muslim comedian. Hey there’s a sit-com idea for Fox !!

   Since the stand up thing wasn’t panning out I decided to try my hand at something else.  Well you know the results.  It’s hard to forget those early days though and sometimes while I’m crouched in a lonely cave or wooing some chick at Cannes (while disguised as Tom Cruise), I think of what could have been. Today I’d like to go back to some material that I think is a little more on the ridiculous side than anything. Something dug up from the past. 

   And remember, please laugh at people’s jokes. Those jokes are all that they have.

  

Built Out of Funny Bones

     From where she was teaching English in Taiwan, Flora flew over to Thailand to renew her visitor’s visa and it was in Bangkok on the second night of her stay where she met the man of her dreams. Two dangerously hammered Canadians had asked her if she took debit cards and where they could swipe them, when Al, a Thai resident who worked at a hotel, slide his foot in front of them. The first drunk toppled over and pulled his friend down with him. Flora walked in the other direction with her hero walking alongside her. 

   “Don’t mind the idiot foreigners,” he said in his soft Thai accent. “They’re just filling the quota of retards that our country has to let in under international agreements.”

    Her heart beat a brand new tune.

    On subsequent visits to Thailand, Flora met up with Al and soon they were in love. He took her south of Bangkok to visit his parents who lived on a warm beach. It was unlike anything the native of Alaska had ever seen in her life. Three weeks later, she watched in shock as the blue line spread up the pregnancy strip. She stepped into the living room and held it up to Al.

   “Ah the dip stick of truth,”  he joked and it felt like something inside of her moved.

   Over the course of her pregnancy, Al played all his North comedy records (Monty Python, Steve Martin and Cheech and Chong) and placed the speakers right up against her growing belly. When the baby was born in a taxi cab on the way to the hospital, the baby seemed to laugh at its arrival into the world. The cab driver, who’d delivered it with the help of an emergency delivery kit kept under his seat, laughed right back.

   In the hospital, the doctor scratched his head under the light of the x-ray. He laughed and laughed. “You’re baby is made entirely out of funny bones. It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s made of nothing but funny bones.”

   They all laughed and then the doctor got serious.

   “Of course that means he’ll never be able to walk.”

    Flora and Al were silent.

    But as the months and years passed, Jack, named after the cab driver who delivered him, made everyone laugh and forget his misfortunes. His laughter and jokes became the stuff of legends.

   I fail to understand why previous writers on this “blog” abandoned their real identities so readily. The truth, you see, is that this website has consisted of different authors each day but every single day these so called writers have pretended to be someone else.

   Let me explain.

   This morning, as I had my servant, Manfred, read to me my emails, an odd proposition came out from the blogosphere.  “I am emailing to present to you an interesting experiment on the web. Everyday at fastfictions.blogspot.com there has been a different writer contributing a story which is completely different from the last. Today is your day to add a story. Please post one story for today and then email the password of this blog to a random stranger. If you don’t do this your legs will swell, your tongue will burn and you’ll pee out your bum for the rest of your life. Keep art happening !!” 

    Instantly, I spat out my tea in wondrous surprise. “Chain mail tactics being used for the advancement of literature ?!” I shouted through a misty spray of Earl Grey. I was indeed taken aback but after some time spent in quiet contemplation, I realized that I was up for the challenge but I would forgo the trick of writing behind a mask.

   My name is Thurston Foster Carlston and the world shall hear my literature roar !! 

Taking the Madman Out for Tea

   For reasons too laborious and lengthy to enumerate within the tiny confines of this tender tale, my brother’s wife had become a widow while still in the bloom of her life. Sadly, our family’s fortunes were in a steady decline and there was no prospect of ascent in much the way a chimney sweep will snack on his cookies while at the bottom of a chimney that takes a week or two to clean. Under these conditions, with growth spurred on by adolescence he might increase the circumference of himself to such a size as to be inextricable, unmovable. Add to this metaphor three other people and you have the conditions of our family. Indeed, we felt short of breath with worry at times. As if we were all squeezed in at the bottom of a chimney.

    Two months ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I had the occasion to take my sister-in-law out for tea with a most curious gentleman. He was a man of independent means and I was pushed by a hitherto unknown temerity to take my sister to meet him. Perhaps, cupid would also be in attendance I thought to myself. That this man was a strange creature who spoke in bursts of babble-talk was not lost upon me, but – as the poet says – love grows in strange places. Or does he say “groans in strange places” ? No matter, here was a chance to vastly improve our family’s future.

    Sir Cruise, a man of short stature but with large features of the face, shouted some obscenity after we sat down to tea. 

   “I fucking love tea. I love it and you know it’s only the Scientologists who can really appreciate tea. Enjoy it as it should be enjoyed. For what it is,” he drank back his tea as if he were a sailor swilling beer and then he sprayed it up into the air. “Yeah. I love tea !! Yeah I love it.” 

    I was in a quandary as to what to do. Would a life of poverty be superior to my sister-in-law’s betrothal with this madman ?  I looked to the silent blue sky and wondered.

   Dearest Reader: In the next serialized installment of our tale would you prefer to see the two potential lovers 1) separated, 2) betrothed to one another or simply  3) thrown together in a hay loft in an entanglement of passionate love-making ? 

  As always: you make the call.

   

  Since I’ve been getting more comments than usual and I don’t want to upset any of my readers any more than I already have, I will leap over this whole nettlesome issue of identity and tell you who I really am. Over the past month I’ve been a white man dressed up and made up to look like a black man who is poorly dressed and made up to look like a white man. I’ve been going into public places to write my daily blog under different characters in order to explore the issue of race and identity. It’s going into a 500-page book which will be about being a white man seen as a black man who’s trying to look like a white man pretending to be somebody else. Yes, even I still get a headache trying to figure out the layers of selfhood involved in this experiment. The important thing is that I’m refuting the notion that race is a black or white kind of thing. Believe it or not there are some people who still laugh at jokes that run along the lines of, “And then white guys are the ones who (insert any lame observation about the way you once saw a white guy lift a video off the shelf), but black guys are all like (insert any other way that videos can be lifted off a shelf)” 

   I’m a psychologist at the University of Northern California and this is today’s story…

The Day the Colors Bled

    On April 1st, people all over the world started feeling funny, a tingling sensation somewhere inside that no one could place exactly. Friends got into fights over whether the pinprick of feeling was in front of or behind the stomach. Even doctors disagreed while they scratched their heads or asses in front of rows of illuminated x-rays. By the end of the day, this odd phenomenon was dominating everything from headlines to diaries to the conversations of beggars and billionaires. 

   On the sun’s next run of 24 hours around the globe, people started to panic as the humming sensation spread through their organs and bones. “Jesus Christ is coming back to earth as it has been foretold by the book of Revelations. The scrolls that John eats in chapter 12 symbolized the way that Jesus would come back through our bellies,”  shouted one preacher from a pulpit in Vermont. “We are all getting sick from the debris of the spy satellite shot out of the sky. I have the cure. The antidote is to swallow this tiny particle from another spy satellite that crashed in Canada in the fifties,” shouted a retired scientist on television. He was selling each particle for a thousand dollars. He figured that if he could make enough money by the weekend, he’d fulfill his dream of flying to Vegas for the day. “This is the wrath of God. He’s killing us all,” screamed one doomsayer from a sidewalk corner in London. “This is the wrath of Allah. It is Allah who will kill us all,” screamed another preacher from across the street. Enraged at each other’s ignorance, they ran at each other and where both flattened in the middle of the street by a double-decker full of Muslims, Jews and Christians who were in London to attend a conference on “Finding Middle Ground in the Kingdom of Heaven.”  The spreading sickness had put an early end to the conference. 

    On the third day, people’s skin started to itch and then on the fourth day vision was affected. Schools were closed, businesses shut down for the day and windows began to get smashed. Police, security guards young and old and the military were called out in full force. People left baseball bats by their front doors barricaded by chairs and old computer monitors. On the fifth day, people woke to the horrible sight of their skin-color splashed across their bed and blankets.  Thousands woke up to the end of their life, as the sight of black or white or whatever other color you call yourself, spread out like a mold across previously blue or yellow sheets. Over the course of the day, a person’s color seeped out from their skin and into their clothes or even the floor at their feet, leaving a path of color that spread and spread and spread. By the end of the day walls and streets were turning red or yellow, black and white and even precious jewels were changed within everyone’s sight. When people realized that they were in the path of a color change slowly coming towards them, they panicked and race riots started to break out around the globe, dazzling the night sky with flames.

    The sixth day was the sadness day in the history of the world: “The niggers’ ink is spreading.” “White cracker honkies are playing white out on the world.”  “Yellow people’s pee is seeping everywhere.”  “If red gets on you, Injun blood will drive you crazy too.” Murder was the disorder of the day. Weapons were unleashed as countries feared the worst from their neighbors.

   Weeks later, as the unrelenting flow of seeping colors bled completely into one another, a radiant glow grew into the fabric of every object. The vivid colors of a sunset glimmered from everything.  The survivors wept at what the rest of the world had lost. If only they had known, people muttered within mouthfuls of tears.

      Okay, okay, okay. You deserve the truth for having hung in there so long. After over a month of posts where I’ve claimed to be somebody different everyday – Tom Cruise, an underground Barbie doll dealer, a washed up punk rocker, a ten year old from Korea – well it’s time I come clean. 

     I’m a lowly retail employee and I work at London Drugs in Vancouver, BC. I’m just really bored with my job. I make myself look busy by typing away at one of the many computers that we sell but really I’m just making shit up. I’m just killing time.  Here comes my manager, I’ve got to write this quickly.

    I’ve told him I’m a programmer and I’m trying to debug the computer with this brand new computer language that looks a lot like regular English. He’s such an idiot.

    Anyway here’s the story of the day. I’ve written it based on a homeless dude who always sneaks in the store and tries to sleep in aisle B, shampoos and soaps. Okay enjoy…

On the backs of the Poor

     The rich have had their way with me let me tell you bub. The riche are not only getting richer but also more perverse, more fucked up. They are getting so stinking loaded that they’re entering brand new categories of psychological disorder and how wouldn’t you get a little messed up mentally if your net worth was equal to a small country. L’etat c’est moi, is what that template of insanity Napoleon said hundreds of years ago. How many economic Napoleons are out there these days ?  These new style Napoleons are so crazy with money that they have to invent brand new ways to humiliate the rest of the world in order to prove their superiority. The sad thing is I didn’t have any money at the time and I didn’t know what else I could do. I was on my way to a shelter and when the limo pulled up, I knew I was in for some kind of wild ride. The window went down and the limo driver asked if I wanted to earn a generous amount of money. Generous. What a word. Print that word on our money. A generous fifty. A generous ten. Yeah right. So much went through my mind at that second. I imagined getting tortured for some geezers viewing pleasure or having to perform some unspeakable act with an animal. I mean, this is what goes through your mind. You think the worse when a limo rolls up and asks if you want to make money. There are plenty of other way more handsome men out in that sea so why have you pulled up alongside lowly old me ? But he pulls the wad of bills out right then and there and I’m stunned, looking at a stack of fifties that amounts to the grand total of my earnings over my entire life so I get into the limo and I’m suddenly in another world. The windows are so dark even on the inside that I don’t see where we’re going and we drive and drive and I had no idea where we were going. When we finally settled at our final stop, I was almost dozing off. The seats were really soft and it was so warm back there. Nothing like the streets. I got out of the limo and we were inside a huge garage so I had no chance of guessing where we were. I was taken through a long hallway that was basically wallpapered in paintings and the carpet was so soft. If I could walk on carpet like this I could handle the stress and shit of being the president of some huge multinational. Okay so the limo driver takes me into this room where there were three people with all these little things that looked like lego toys or something. Little buildings and cars and everything but they weren’t lego when I saw them up close. They were just little models and one of the three was like, “Okay sir please get down on your knees sir. Sir. Sir.” She was talking to me like I was the King of England but if I had been the King of England she wouldn’t have been asking me to get onto my hands and knees. I thought of the money which wasn’t yet in my pocket and I knelt down. I had to take off my shirt but nothing else. They starting sticking the buildings on my back and then they airbrushed the rest of me. It was really cold. I saw something that looked like a little red bridge that was stuck on my lower back and then there were all these little trees that followed. It pricked a little. Finally, they asked me to crawl out of the room into another room. It was humiliating, being told to crawl like a dog but what could I do. I was intent on getting that money. I crawled out into some kind of cage where there was another guy with what seemed to be a model of a city on his back. There were a couple of really rich fucks – or should I say my “patrons” – seated outside of the cage. “Ladies and Gentlemen. The battle you’ve all been waiting for. San Francisco versus Los Angles !!”  We had to fight. I was San Francisco. And that was the start to the strangest year of my life. Night after night I fought in various costumes and disguises. Yeah rich people are getting more and more perverse but what else are they going to do with all that money ? 

     Help people ?

   I’m actually a bus driver from Vancouver, BC with aspirations to being a fiction writer. While I pull away from a stop or throw a drunk off the back of my bus the only thing that keeps me going is a strange little story in the back of my mind. It’s also been fun to try to write from different points of view.

   Well anyway here’s today’s short-short story….

The Bus with No Number

   A few guests at the wedding had gone from drunk to worse and were now squeezing onto a westbound bus. Heath held tightly onto the lucky bouquet that his girlfriend had caught and then almost vomited upon. Ashes from the cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth occasionally snowed upon the blue and red petals.  Heath and Samantha pushed through the stand of people to the back of the bus where they sat down on two surprisingly empty seats.

    “Throw it. Let me catch it again.”

     Heath set it down on Samantha’s lap.

     A waft of fetid booze stumbled across their faces and a gnarly nose emerged from between two buts.

    “Oh yeah a wedding is fun, isn’t it ? Oh I love weddings.” Seated on the other side of the bus, he still managed to stretch his legs or neck or something in order to ooze his way through the people standing in the aisle. “It was such much fun I did it four times in my life.” 

    Samantha and Heath smiled fading smiles.

    “Oh yeah, I’ve been around the block a couple times. The strangest thing that happened to me though…” and he leaned in even closer as if his neck were made of rubber,” was getting on a bus with no number.”

    The bus lurched to a stop and the standing passengers rippled movements from the front.

    “I was in a hurry to get to work and none of the buses were stopping but suddenly this one guy – packed to the rafters with people mind you– stopped right in front of me. The doors opened and the driver looked at me. It was strange. I’d never seen a bus with no numbers at the front or side. There wasn’t even a space for there to be bus number but like I said I was in a hurry so I jumped on it. Put the change in and off we went.”

    Samantha and Heath stared at him out of politeness.

    “Problem was the bus never stopped. We drove for days and days along the same stinking route.  Once in a while somebody would pull the dinger to request a stop but we just whizzed by it. Somebody would shout, “That’s my stop,” people would chuckle and that would be the end of it.”

     His eyes were heavily hooded with flesh but the rest of his face was gaunt. 

     “On the fourth or fifth day, I was getting so thirsty and hungry I thought I was going to die. Everybody else was doing fine but not me. Oh that was the hardest time in my life. Worse than my second marriage. So at a red light I escaped through an emergency window. Yeah they work.”

    Samantha and Heath nodded their understanding.

    “The emergency escape windows work,” he whispered as he receded back between what appeared to be a pair of different bums. 

     Samantha and Heath sat in silence.

   On this day, three years ago, I came very close to strapping dynamite around my midriff with the intention of running directly into the path of a truck piled high to the rafters with McDonald’s hamburgers. This would have resulted in a hail-storm of all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce and cheese. This would have been my end. At the time I was dressed up as Ronald McDonald and as I had no change of clothes I had to spend an hour on the bus in that stupid costume. But I got to do a lot of soul searching.

    It’s a story too long to get into here but I had a series of epiphanies, a coming to my senses that afternoon and over past three years I’ve been trying to find my way back into society. Over the past month I’ve been writing a story everyday under a different name because I’m exploring protest in these non-violent means. I still hate McDonald’s but I no longer intent on blowing any of their property up.

    Some mornings I wake up from a nightmare of my body parts flying up into the air alongside chunks of frozen patties intended for McDonald’s. I wake up and shout, “I’ll have a happy combo !!” Life is still tough but I’m getting by.

   One day at a time.

   Here’s today’s hold on sanity…

The Murderer and the Know It All 

   In the middle of the field the two men stand nose to nose. Wind blows the surrounding barley so that it leans towards the setting sun. The sky above is a light blue. The men’s faces are red.

   “You’re a goddamn murderer,” the one snarls at the other. “There’s nothing in you but hatred.”

    “You’re wrong,” says the other. He tries to take in a breath deep enough to satisfy his lungs but his heart is beating at such a frantic pace that it will need more and more oxygen. He stretches and then circles his toes in his right shoe to alleviate some of the energy. He tries to stand perfectly still.

    “You were born a murderer and you were raised a murderer. Your food is murderer food,” he spits this out with venom but they both stare at each other wondering what murderer food might look like.

   “Murderer food ?”

    “Murderer food is one of the six food groups. But there are also murderer restaurants and in some grocery stores there are aisles with murderer food, aisles that are kept separate from the rest of the store because nobody wants to work the murderer aisles and so they stock the shelves with those robots that are used to dismantle bombs. The murderer food group is also kept separate from all the others out of similar fears.” His lips move in a paroxysm of rage but the rest of his body holds firm and fast to the belief that he’s absolutely right. In fact, his unflinching stance is proof of his correctness. 

   “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

    “You’re a stinking murderer. Your mother is a murderer and she bore you in her murderer womb.”

    And so the one man, who’s finally been pushed to his limits, takes out a knife from the back of his jeans and stabs the other in the middle of his stomach. He pulls the knife up his belly while looking deep into the man’s dying eyes.

   “I’m not a murderer.” 

     As the spirit slows slips from the man’s body it whispers out, “I told you so. I knew I was right. I was so right.”