Fork Tender

Ceelie was always one for a boiled potato facial over the steel pot on the stove.  I don’t remember a time I didn’t warn her that she would burn herself.  She’d laugh, her eyes squinting against the steam running up her face like a waterfall turned back on itself.  Salting a piece of raw potato, [...]

Spring Cleaning (135 words for a reason…)

The room was filled with words.  Not books, words.  There were words to be tripped over and words to be sat upon as a chair, a ladder, a protrusion of significant magnitude.   (It’s funny how they always arranged themselves in hackneyed double entendres like an old whore trying to look younger by applying clownish amounts [...]

Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (a review, a summary and a punny 100 stones)

Crane’s “The Open Boat” went swimmingly.
The only named man died.  The captain
Bossed everyone else around.  They
Still called him ‘sir’.  Funny, the traditions
We hold on to, even in a dinghy, even
With the phosphorous of a shark fin
That visits nightly.  The captain held the water jar.
Maybe that was his job.  The jar survived
When they went overboard.  [...]

Buoyant Blessed

She never believed in a different river.  This water, as the property of the mass, was the same river as yesterday, the same molecules.  At which angle she approached was the only variant, but since the river was the same that didn’t matter.  It was still wet. 
She swam upstream but it may have been downstream.  [...]

And Here Lies a Product of Minimum Wage

I’ve never been in a war.  Not personally.  I suppose if you count my involvement in changing the channel during Desert Storm and again for this battle for Iran’s ‘democracy’, I suppose I’ve been involved.  I’ve waded through the many parasite infested mud puddles that bosses like to call ‘safe work practices’ and I’ve made [...]

Public Service Announcement

I am speaking to you.  This is important.  Pay attention.  The following message is vital to your health.  There is a book of stories circulating that contains dangerous material.  Pay attention.  This material will cause the reader to become so engrossed in the words that they will be susceptible to any subliminal message.    This is [...]

Thrash and Roadkill

He passed the age to thrash one night on the highway.  He wrinkled his nose as if he smelled skunk faintly, stinkweed maybe.  In a moment it was gone.  His mouth opened, tongue lolled toward the front of his puffy face.   
These scars are stories, he liked to say to first time but soon forgotten friends.  [...]

S’more Procrastination

There are 177 words left today and I’ve run out.  I can’t concentrate, there are marshmallows cramming out every last available parking spot upstairs.
And now I’m thinking of Ghostbusters.  What ever happened to Rick Moranis?  Sigourney Weaver’s parents must have been flower children.  What type of name is that anyway, Sigourney?
And now I’m thinking of [...]

Foiled Again

She was determined to make up a story without introspection.  Already, reading her last sentence, her previous thought, her prior promise, she had already failed. 
“Foiled again!” she yelled throwing herself off a twelve story building. 
Just at that precise moment, some big helicopter that she was sure had a more technical name with fancy dashes swooped [...]

Blisters

When the strip of skin came curling off the bottom of her foot it reminded her of slicing hard cheddar (of shaving chocolate for cake) though the texture was as rubbery as beef jerky.  It was the damn boots, the ‘clonkers’, her son called them, the steel-toed wonders that protected her from nothing.  There was [...]