Dani J Caile
Jan 14, 2016 | 1st pages, Humour
Mud Day
001
Scrunching up her nose and pouting her lips made Tracy look almost normal, for a human.
“A little more basil, I think. Too much of an aftertaste of rosemary,” she stated. Unfortunately, nothing helped the old crone's smell, as Tilotes the cat rubbed his nose on the floor. Straight out of a dead man's toilet. The odour oozing from the cauldron in the middle of the old girls' small, dark, dank hut didn't help matters, either.
“Right, will do,” replied Shirley, taking a large bowl of herbs from the pantry and searching for a bunch or two of basil. Tilotes watched Daphne, his owner if he had to choose from them, sleeping in the corner, snoring away.
“Ooo, those look like a nice pair,” remarked Tracy.
“Long time since I've heard that one,” retorted Shirley, the bitch of the three.
They cackled as only they could. Woodpeckers paused in their work as Tilotes licked his fur. It needed licking, oh, how it needed!
“What about now?”
Tracy sipped the concoction once more, and her tongue hung from her mouth like an old worn out dog's.
“Oh, absolutely not. Scratch the basil. Try coriander.”
“Okay.” Shirley went back to the pantry. “But wouldn't coriander interfere with the…”
“Oh, ah!” Daphne suddenly jumped up and slithered around like a snake, but still able to sleep and snore.
“Eh? What?” Shirley turned around to find an even bigger problem than Daphne ’going into one’, and she jostled Tracy around to face the unexpected visitors.
They both immediately copied Daphne’s crazed antics and put on their roles as mad witches, which wasn’t so hard to do. Tilotes saw the massive dog pulling on its lead as the two men entered, and he scampered away into a corner. Frightened? No, of course not, merely a strategic retreat…and a chance to play with the mites living under the crapper.
Fred J. Fox
Jan 8, 2016 | 1st pages, Humour
THE AFFAIR
Frank Carter called his wife Betty from the office, told her he was working late and wouldn’t be home until later. That was fine with his wife because she was working the late shift at the hospital and would be leaving shortly anyway. She told him there was some lasagna for him in the fridge if he wanted something to eat when he got home. Leaving his car in his usual underground parking spot, he left the office in a taxi. With the car still parked underground his colleagues would see it and assume he was still there working. It was always good to have someone from the office to back up your story if required. The taxi dropped him off around six thirty at her door.
It was already dark out and he shivered as he dashed from the taxi to her front door, trying to avoid the snow and slush on the sidewalk. It was going to be a cold evening outside but a hot one inside he hoped. Frank was 35 years old and had been married for a little over seven years and never thought much about extramarital affairs. He turned his head to follow a beautiful women if one walked by, but what man didn’t? He particularly admired the set of “twins”, as the guys in the office referred to them, carried around by Heidi, the receptionist in the office. Sure, he would have liked to have gotten to know them better, like all the guys in the building, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen since she was happily married, so she said.
No, he had a steady nine to five job as an assistant manager with an insurance company and was just drifting through married life in suburbia doing his time until he could retire. Until one day, while golfing with his friends, he was hit by a stray golf ball that came from the fairway next to him. As he stared angrily in the direction of the errant shot he saw a blond racing towards him in a golf cart. She wanted to see if he was hurt and to apologize. There was something about her that made him very nervous and wickedly attracted. Beautiful women did that to him. Unfortunately this attraction made him feel hideous and given a choice between him and a Troll under a bridge, he was sure she would choose the Troll.
A kind of sexy beauty that made even his golf balls harder than they already were. A woman who played sports was a real turn on for him, especially if she played golf. His wife didn’t play the game. He wanted her to learn but she had no interest in it at all. Melisa Lonsdale came up to him in the club house after the round and offered to buy him a drink to once again apologize for her errant shot. When she spoke Frank struggled to look her in the eyes rather than her breasts. After his first drink, the ratio of breast to eyes began to increase even more. She was married to a cop, no children and worked as a real estate agent. She lived just three streets over from Frank. After a few more drinks she let it be known that although she had been married for six years, her life was boring. Hubby was always out on the job; never home.
Frank rarely thought about his life all that much, but in her presence, suddenly his life was boring as well. She was in a hunting mood and didn’t have to fire a shot; Frank instantly turned himself in. She was a sizzler and excitement had once more found its way into his dull little suburban life. That’s how it all got started and it had been going on now since last summer. Frank rang her door bell with anticipation. He couldn’t wait to get her into bed. He’d been thinking about it all day at work. The door opened.
“Is he gone?” Frank asked in a low voice.
Darrell Mangum
Dec 15, 2015 | 1st pages, Humour
Introduction
You can do it!
I have a good friend that likes to hear me tell a joke. Whenever we’re together with other people, at the office or in a party, this friend will encourage me to tell everybody a joke.
I’ve asked him to tell a joke of his own from time to time, but he won’t. He says he just can’t do it. He’s wrong. Joke telling is just a skill, like playing the piano. You can learn to do it if you want to.
Jokes are everywhere. Everyone tells jokes, everyone hears jokes.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration.
I see and hear jokes everywhere, because I’m looking for them. Someone else might say that there are no jokes anywhere. They don’t see or hear jokes at all. They’re not expecting jokes. They don’t notice a joke when it happens right in front of them.
I know people who never tell jokes, and I know people who never seem to understand jokes. I don’t like them any less, but I do worry about them. They don’t need jokes, or they don’t like jokes, or they don’t understand jokes. All in all they don’t think jokes are very important.
But jokes are still there. Jokes are everywhere. No matter how many times I have heard really bad jokes told, I wouldn’t be offering this instruction if I didn’t think you could learn to tell jokes.
And remember, it’s not the jokes, it’s you.
Yes, there are really bad jokes out there.
But the bigger problem is that people don’t know HOW to tell jokes.
Telling a joke is a simple thing, it happens all around us all through the day. Comedians on TV tell jokes, our family members and friends tell jokes. I’ll wager that we hear dozens of jokes a day, though the art of it seems to elude many people. Any time someone says something with the intent of making someone else laugh or smile, they’re telling a joke. I watch people attempt to tell a joke and not succeed more often then I hear someone tell a really funny joke.
If you’ve been told that some people just don’t have the talent to tell a joke, don’t believe it.
Are you telling any of these jokes? Are you understanding them? How do people react when you tell a joke?
Some people are poor joke-tellers because they haven’t learned yet to tell a joke correctly. There are wrong ways, and right ways. There are “do’s and don’ts”. Some people can figure it out for themselves, and some need proper instruction, like the kind you’re reading right now, and lots of practice. It also requires focus and attention to detail.
Some of you already think you’re funny. You think you were born that way. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t. You need to understand that there are different kinds of funny. When people say, “That’s funny”, they might mean:
funny – ha ha, or
funny – clever, or
funny – sniff sniff.
Todd Stockwell
Dec 10, 2015 | 1st pages, Humour, Religious
1
I live in a shack on the outskirts of paradise, and I’m lucky to have it. It is stark, rectangular, made of a thin yet sturdy wood. Outside my window is a blue meadow surrounded by low hills of a bright orange grass, colors not seen on the Old Earth. In the distance I can see the great houses of the meek and humble, and further still, the mansions and estates of the children, saints, and martyrs. And I am glad for them.
***
I have a new body. We all have new bodies. Had I known I’d be getting a new body, I probably would have eaten more junk food. There isn’t any junk food here. We could have it if we wanted, I suppose, but nobody wants it now that we know what it actually tastes like. It tastes like poison, like antifreeze or drain cleaner might have tasted to us back then, back on the Old Earth, where our bodies had been acclimated to the chemicals in these foods since birth to such an extent that most of us believed junk food tasted really, really good. So good, in fact, some people would get into their vehicle in the middle of the night, drive to an establishment that sold such food, order two cheeseburgers, french fries, a large soda, and some sort of cake or pie to boot.
Even if there were junk food here, it wouldn’t affect the new bodies. Nothing affects the new bodies. There is no physical pain here; nor is there death. And there won’t be any, not for a thousand years—992 to be exact.
***
The new bodies are pretty neat. They glow kind of like a light under the water or like an old casino sign.
***
I’m different than I was; it’s not just the new body—I’m a different person, more childlike I suppose. Not like the selfish, spoiled, adult child I was on the Old Earth. Christ said you have to be like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That might explain some of what I feel.
***
My immediate neighbors are folks like myself who made it into paradise by a spider hair. We had heard about Jesus and God and everything but chose to ignore it all, preferring to lie, and steal, and cheat, and cuss, and fornicate, and on and on. That is, until all the crap came down, and we suddenly found Jesus.
These neighbors live in shacks like mine. Well, not exactly like mine. Some people have painted or added little doodads here and there like they did on the Old Earth. It didn’t help then and it doesn’t help now. A shack is a shack is a shack….
I thank the good Lord every day for my shack, my undeserved patch of paradise.
***
I hardly know anyone in my neighborhood. Like on the Old Earth, nobody really wants to be friends with their neighbors here either. It would be like staring into a mirror all the time. Who the heck wants to do that?
Most of my friends didn’t make it into paradise anyway. They are waiting out the thousand years with Satan in the pit. Then there will be a final judgment and one last chance at salvation. But there isn’t a lot of hope for them. A person can’t hang out with a guy like Satan for a thousand years without picking up more bad habits.
***
Yeah, there is a devil and hell. There is Jesus and a new kingdom on a new Earth, and heaven and angels, and all that other business in the Bible that nobody has to guess about, or argue about, or fight about, or kill each other over anymore.
***
Even though I live in this shack, I get to visit my daughter Sophie in her big house. All the children were given big houses when they arrived here. God figured they deserved them after living with adults who beat them, abused them, starved them, lied to them, or did any number of awful things to them.
Xenia Brettell
Dec 3, 2015 | 1st pages, Humour
STORIES:
Lads with learning difficulties: One of them goes by the title of Big Ben, as he is very strong. Another, Officer Andy as he likes to report everybody to the police. Nina, Mark and Jay are personal assistants of Officer Andy and Big Ben. Nina is Captain as she likes to have everything in order. Mark is Wheeler as he loves to ride his bicycle and Jay is known as Play Dough because he tries to please everybody. Together they are the Perfect Difference Five.
1. Big Ben’s New Glasses – I have been writing this story because my friend Big Ben wears glasses and sometimes cannot find them.
2. Coaster Calamity – Both Lads love to go to the leisure park, and love to make plans about what they will do there during summer.
3. Big Ben and the Parrot – Big Ben has a habit to repeat everything after everyone for fun.
4. Trouble in the Park – This Story I wrote for the lads to show them what can happen when they mess with water balloons!
5. Time to speak to Bessie! – The dog Bessy always walks with the lads in Cannock Chase – they love her!
6. The Horses Sloppy Licks – to show Big Ben not to run ahead of us all!
7. Cinema Reality – Lads love to go the cinema, and never stop talking about it!
8. Mermaid Madness – This is the story about how my Nan loves to take the lads to go swimming, fishing holidays and the seaside.
Richard Seaman
Nov 30, 2015 | 1st pages, Humour
Introduction
By Doug Richards
I’m Doug Richards. I’ve narrated this collection of stories. Together, they tell my story of the Block. The Block was a place and more than a place from 2026 through 2076. Happenstance and fortune brought the folks in the Block together. Their community bound them. These stories begin in that time just over 50 years ago when almost everything in the economy was broken. Everyone suffered when the markets tanked, hitting a bottom that no one believed existed, and then stayed on that bottom without rescue from the government. Those were the years between 2022 and 2025. The time when the US government finally admitted that it was broke.
What was that old expression? No good deed goes unpunished. Maybe the punishment was for how it was done. I have no argument over the good that was wrought to bring about world peace. How was it done? I think this description says it best: The three nation’s with the biggest sticks teamed up to force global nuclear disarmament, answering one country’s resistance by nearly blowing it to smithereens just to prove a point to everyone watching. Point made.
For the world of Islam, making that point ignited the real jihad. Unfortunately, jihad was declared in the shadow of North Korea’s nuclear lunacy and against a world wary and fed up with extremist rhetoric and glorified acts of terror. The United Nations hunted down the jihadist leaders and their followers and had them summarily dispatched. I include this brief review of history for only one reason. To remind the reader that this time of great economic despair came not from acts of calamity, but from unintended consequences created by acts of humanity.
The world had achieved peace but at such a cost as to send its warriors back to a pauper’s homecoming. Today, we as a people live and benefit from the space economy. Our commerce is driven by it. But the world required years for this new economy to be established. The socioeconomic infrastructure needed to support it took a generation to complete. Before the underpinnings were fully in place, society recovered, but slowly so.
For the portion of this country’s senior population retired and living on a fixed income, their plans, their dreams were shattered. For many, the value of their lost dreams was placed as high as the value of life itself.
The stories that I tell in these pages, however, recognize the value of life at any age and one’s ability to always live it, love it, and thrive. At times I referred to those little victories in life as old glory, pride in the accomplishments. I don’t spend much storytelling time on the stuff of getting old, the “life happens” stuff, and even less time on the dark stuff that happened to seniors before the Block. Folks in the Block got sick, had all the aliments of old age, and passed on when their time came. In the meantime, they lived. Every passing in the Block was a celebrated victory. Life was life. It happened and then you moved on. We in the Block beat the odds and got happy. Those are the stories worth telling.
I hope you enjoy my telling. —Doug Richards, 2077
