“Don’t forget to F.O.I.L,” Mr. Larson reminded his students as his marker slithered across the whiteboard like a snake. He transcribed several equations but Maia only jotted down two of them. Sure, one of her ears was listening to her teacher but the other was in love with the sound of her pencil as she filled her notebook with intricate portraits.
Many of her classmates had the privilege of being immortalized by her graphite, but her favorite subject, by far, was Kaito Ito. He sat two rows down and one across, and Maia would sketch the back of his head all day if she could. A tiny smile played with her lips as she shaded in his thick black hair and added a few wrinkles to the edge of his blazer.…
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Jeremy
gazed down at the shapely pale nude woman on the queen bed, her eyes closed,
and her long auburn hair spread about on the flowered pillowcase like a Playboy
centerfold. What’s going on, he
wondered. Just yesterday he and his wife
had fought about the two of them not having sex and here she was stark naked
before him, rather than fast asleep in her usual overlarge white t-shirt that
hung far below her plain white cotton panties.
“So, are you trying to tell me something?” Jeremy asked, with a slight smirk on his face.
Catherine, his wife of 14 years, opened her eyes and with a blank bland expression said, “No, I’m just hot. It’s hot tonight.”
“I see,” he responded, as he stormed out of the bedroom and bolted back downstairs in such a rage that to have remained would have meant an involuntary manslaughter or temporary insanity plea in court.…
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I gather up the words. They are everywhere.
On table tops, in the deep recesses of my mind, written in
foggy breath on winter windows, behind the curtain, on scraps of paper, taped
to the washing machine, magnetically clinging to the refrigerator, etched in
black ball point inside matchbooks.
I gather them, carefully considering each one. They beg so. Distractingly.
Pick me. Pick me, one squeals.
I say, “You are a noun.”
And it screams, “I could be an adjective if you work hard enough. If you are creative enough you will weave me into the flow, feed me to the hungry bowl of story, gulping back millions of us everyday.”
And I say, “Whew. Hold on. Let me get another cup of coffee first.”
They do not wait.…
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Note: a Troll Kerfuffle is a baked good that half the people served will politely avoid and the other half will insist that some authoritarian action must take place to ensure no one will ever have to be offended even knowing such a baked good exists.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup of indifference to logic
(there is no substitution for this, even if forced)
1/2 cup of self-righteousness
1/4 cup of indignation
1/4 cup of capricious behavior
1/4 cup emotional instability
tbsp. of diversion from original
intent
splash of umbrage
dash of social justice
just a pinch of outrage for taste
(warning, some recipes call for a gallon, use sparingly)
Mix all ingredients together to a
batter and begin beating. This step alone may take years to force the batter to
submit.…
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Once upon a time,
there were three little pigs. Each of the pigs feared the big bad wolf that
would terrorize them by crossing the border from where he lived to where they
lived. To protect themselves, the three little pigs formed a committee and paid
for a focus group to provide politically correct solutions to their problem
about the undocumented wolf.
The first focus group
advocated for giving the wolf whatever he wanted because it was not fair that
the pigs had so much and the wolf had nothing. The first little pig asked, “Why
should I give the wolf everything I worked so hard for, all my life, to
acquire?” The head of the focus group denounced the first little pig as a
racist and a speaker of “hate speech”.…
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Yes, I too was
supposed to die like the rest of them. By all means I should have been
incinerated in that hellfire; vaporized in the blink of an eye. But no, nothing
of the sort happened to me. Only, the life I had lived till then turned, in one
screaming flash, into a memory of something that had perhaps never existed. That
was thirty-three years before. Or was it thirty-three hundred? I stopped
counting time long ago.
Everything changed
that day. For one, I stopped chronicling my life on the Internet – yes, it was
destroyed too, contrary to the designs of the smart-asses at DARPA who had
invented it – and started scribbling in this tattered notebook I found
somewhere afterwards, my handwriting growing smaller and smaller as days and
decades crawled away and its pages started filling up like nothing on earth has
filled up ever since.…
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When I was a little girl, I never learned to crawl. I learned to walk and then I learned to fly. My parents were very proud of me. They said, Go far, but watch for sharp winds from the East. So I would leave my home and go everywhere. I would go west where it was warmer and south where it was drier, and up a long way until I got cold. I have seen islands and I have seen deserts. I like them all but I like meadows the best, especially in winter when they turn flaxen and silver. I can see trails of vole urine like neon, and although the world is big and all mine, in the distance the mountains are like the sides of a crib of the earth to hold me.…
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