Mitchell's Keys

Mitchell had a drawer full of keys in his garage that his family never cleaned out after he died. When we bought the house, Cheryl plunged her hand wrist deep in the keys and said, "I'm not sure how I feel about living in the house of a madman."

At that I let out a great meow and pranced about my kingdom singing out, "I am the Mustard King!/So born by birth!/Come now all you merry kitchens/And press upon my girth!"

Cheryl then sighed and bent to clean up the feces I had thrown.

Dinah, Edgar, Herbina, Clint, and Kluckonamus Rex

Really, Dinah had nothing against eggs. It was simply her husband's love of them that bothered her. Ever since that day in the park when he found an abandoned robin's nest...

He took the eggs home with him, incubated them carefully in a shoebox, and a few days later they were the proud parents of hatchlings.

They brought them worms to eat, Dinah and Edgar did. They helped them through the first awkward steps of flight. When at last the day came to set them free, they were both upset. Edgar cried, most unbefitting a military man like himself.

He had become unbalanced after that, buying eggs from the store and incubating them, holdign maternity clothes up to his belly in Wal-Mart when he thought Dinah wasn't looking.

He removed the shelves from their refridgerator, poured out the milk and trashed the butter. He filled the fridge up with cartons and cartons of eggs, whole cases, everywhere they could fit. He called them babies. "We're saving babies."

When she told him that the eggs couldn't hatch, he told her that someday egg hatching technology may advance to a point where we can revive eggs from the store and their hatchlings could go forward in the world. Like cyrogenics.

She left him on a Tuesday, wearing a hat with pretty flowers in it and carrying the suitcase they had taken to Rome. Her sister, Herbina, gave her a ride to town from the base.

She never told him she was pregnant, and raised the child in Tuscon. She named him Clint, after Edgar's father. Youbng Clint would never know about his daddy, but the two would meet 300 years later, after they were each revived ina cyrogenics lab, coincidentally from the same freezer. They awoke to a world inhabitied by billions upon billions of chickens, preserved by the Edgar Winters foundation and hatched when medical science could revive them.

Edgar was givena place in the High Court of the Chicken King, Cluckonamus Rex and Clint was sentenced to death in by incubation.

Neither was ever aware of their shared connection.

Doogie Reflections

If Doogie Howser was so damn smart, why did he only write about girls in his journal? I mean, is Wanda the only thing that occupied his mind? "Hey Doogie...AIDS! Lots of people still have AIDS, think you could help us hammer out a cure?

"Can someone get Doogie laid so we can make some medical progress here? Find hima hooker who likes big-headed minors. Better yet, make sure the hooker has AIDS, then maybe he'll work a little faster."

If I was a genius, I hope I'd be the kind that could build jetpacks, not the kind that graduated high school to become a doctor at sixteen.

The End of Rasputin's Anecdote

So I said to Nicholas, "Wait...you said we should star a Jewish program? I though you said pogrom! Dude, my bad!"

I cannot die.

Juanita's Birthday

"Today is my birthday!" Juanita cried, spreading her arms to encompass the sea.

I rolled my eyes, because this was her 22nd birthday in one month. I hated her, and her ridiculous birthday parties.

I refused to keep typing her story, forever stranding her and myself on that seaside cliff. The reader went to their deathbeds without an explanation of the curious words spoken that day.

Joanie

When Jesse first asked Joanie to the prom, she said no. She thought she could better.

Well, one 3rd degree steam burn and massive reconstructive surgery to the face later, she realized she couldn't and said yes.

In a show of unity, he wore a face mask with his formal wear.

But halfway through the night, it became itchy and he took it off, then declined to dance with her.

There she was: barely able to see throught the sweaty slots in the fresh bandages her mother had so lovingly wrapped around her head, stumbling around the dance floor to Chumbawumba's Tubthumpin'.

She fell into the fountain. Some people laughed; Jesse helped her out and drove her home. He didn't get a kiss good night, and when she offered, he didn't want to feel her up.

They let her make a special speech at graduation, and though her bandages were ready to come off, she left them on.

No one really remembered what she was like before the accident, but she did get a scholarship.

She says she might take like, nursing or something.

Drago's Victory

From the outset, Drago demanded complete honesty from Bridgette. All he had found instead were lies, damned lies.

"Bridgete, all this time..have you been a cat?"

Bridgette spun the piece of yarn between her paws and looked up at him from under the bed. "Meow," was her only reply.

Drago reached into the nightstand and wrapped his fingers around the cold Luger inside. Once he had taken it from a German officer, still warm in the fields of Bastogne. Now he put it to his temple, squeezed the trigger, and was never decieved again.

The Inhumane Contents of My Pail

I always played at this one sandbox in the park. It was under a tree, away from the other sandbox, which was closer to the swings. That other sandbox was the happening sandbox. The sandbox the kids with cool toys went to. They had their little motorized toys and talking teddy bears, and I had my pail and spade.

While they were off playing with each other, I was building empires and destroying civilizations, torturing rebels to find the locations of hidden armies, defiling peasant women and forcing them to bear my child to breed the baseborn filth out of existance.

Then a leftist revolution led by a charismatic, compassionate leader would emerge. Slowly, the message would spread to the people and the reign of terror would end in a bloody coup. They established an agrarian economy, living peacefully off the land.

Then I imagined that the troops from my sandcastles were marshalling to destroy the troops in the other sandbox, to burn the bougeois filth and liberate their lands as well.

This was a plotline I spent an entire week playing out. Then, the following Monday, it rained. The Tuesday afterwards, I found that all the other kids abandoned the soggy sandbox near the swings for my dry one under the tree.

They were all just there, playing with their motorized bulldozers and remote control cars. And my kingdom had come to ruin, overrun by tourists and refugees. The revolution was crushed by overpopulation.

One kid, Tucker Knowles, I think, asked if I wanted to play with him and his dumptruck. I gave it some thought, then I dumped a pail full of weekend cat turds on his lap and went to go sit by myself.