Category Archives: Stories

Worlds Apart

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photoOn Not being Quite Specific Enough

An Athabascan lady and a young Mauritian man

Met on the bus while shuttling to the airport in Japan

And planned a summer get-together in the town of Dent,

But didn’t think of all details—yet still, one day they went

To meet each other in that little place—the town so small

They didn’t guess there would be need for detailed plans at all—

Sadly, the lady was in Minnesota, with no clue

Her friend was off in Cumbria, the Dent of English hue,

Completely unaware as well that continents away

His lady-friend awaited him, unknowing, that same day—

And so they never met again, each sad the other failed

To know how much they’d hoped to meet, and what it had entailed

To reach their distant rendezvous and keep their destined date,

And neither learned there were two towns named Dent until too late.photo

Possibly in Your Best Interest

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The Kicking of Buckets, and How It is Done

In case a brown recluse spider should come to call on you and with her magical spells weave for you mystic sleep—

In the event that any sharks should smell your yummy blood and render you a permanent fixture of the deep—

Lest some great venerable tree should fall full upon your pointy head and leave you feeling just a little flat—

Or a once-dormant volcano barf its hot majestic load of smoking lava directly onto the brim of your jaunty hat—

Should any untoward or fearsome thing befall you or a tragedy untimely bump you off, I’d feel so sad and even a little guilty somehow

That in my concern for you and to prevent your facing any such future griefs, I feel it’s best that I help you to kick the bucket Now.pen & ink drawing

Mayday! or, How Telecommuting Saves Lives

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digital image from a photoWhen Face to Face Meeting is Obsolete

The business is dead! It’s technology’s fault–

the lighting, AC and the big central vault

Are scrambled and frozen and jolted and jammed–

the intercom’s buzzing, the plumbing is dammed–

Email is blacked out and the network is fried

and what’s in can’t escape or what’s out, get inside–

Alarms are all ringing but signals are dead–

the boss would’ve canned me and then had my head–

The one thing that saves me (although you may scoff) is

she can’t recollect how to get to the office.digital artwork from a photo

Side Effects Make a Changed Man

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Beastly Discovery

Mild-mannered Monsieur Ste-Hilaire

Went out one night to take the air

And came home newly sharp and snarky

(Full of mischief and malarkey);

I think that maybe in the park, he

Might have met a succulent

Voracious, wild and truculent,

That bit his elbows, left and right,

Infecting him that very night

(As you’d imagine, quite a sight)

With psychedelic thoughts to itch

Him to a highly fevered pitch

Wherein he met another world

And in its vortex, seeing swirled

(The way such rarities are hurled)

Strange creatures in bizarre parade,

He loosed the window, threw the shade

Upon it open just to share

With us the beastly thoughts in there

(Effects of which you’re now aware).digital illustration

The Fantastic is Surprisingly Real

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pen & ink drawingDefying Probabilities

The most improbable outcome

Of delirious, fanciful dreams

Is not the impossible can’t-be

That perpetually it seems—

And I can prove this conundrum,

In my personal life, is true,

For it happens that though it’s wildly unreal,

I’m actually loved by you.digital artwork from a drawing

On Thin Ice (Advice to the Peewee Hockey Player)

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With special love to all of my Canadian friends!digital image from a photo

Out Cold

Do not the hockey puck invite

Your flaxen brow to cleave

By wearing not your shining helm;

And do not tear your sleeve

Upon the blade of someone’s skate;

And don’t assay to test

Opponents’ blows, save if you wear

A Kevlar hockey vest;

Avoid, if you are able to,

A stick thrust at your sternum,

For whacks like this are undesired

Even by those who earn ‘em;

Above all things, I recommend

You not enrage the goalie:

Though wounds are bound to happen here,

Some risks are just unholy.digital image from a photo

Dream Dancers

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digital artworkCountdown to Dreaming

What sprightly sprites, by noon and night, what fairies of the air

Dance in my dreams? To me, it seems there’s always someone there

To twist and twirl, to whiz and whirl, to pirouette, jeté,

To bow and bend and to transcend mortality this way.

No one can see this dance but me, and only when I slumber,

When forty winks or nap, methinks, begins to unencumber

The dancing denizens of sleep, my own replacements for mere sheep,

And I must count them, lest my deep repose should lose their number.

Un-Appetizers

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You may not be the least bit surprised to hear that I was recently duped by a fast food commercial (yes, I do eat Junk Foods of many kinds) into thinking that a special treat of theirs was going to be worth trying. Not only was it worlds from what was portrayed (as the old Norwegian-joke goes: ‘What was wrong with it??? The food was terrible! And the portions were so small!’), it was accompanied by a zippy little packet from the counter container marked Honey, which on closer inspection turned out to be not honey but ‘Honey Sauce’–a packet I was too fearful to open after reading the long ingredient list wherein honey fell fourth to three of the other four sweeteners, barely before water and a list of preservatives impossible to spell.

I was tempted to go directly home and swill real, pure, local, raw Texas honey straight from the bottle, but I resisted. Needless to say, the packet of Mystery ‘sauce’ (I still find it kind of amazing that it’s even legal to call it that, let alone Honey Sauce) went instantly to the circular file, followed in short shrift by the remains of the appalling main dish, and I went off to cleanse my palate at home. You’d think I’d be smarter by now. Sigh.digital artworkFasting Food

Silly me! I thought Fast Food

meant eating something raw and crude,

Something exotic and delicious,

not appallingly pernicious,

But cooked and primped and sauced to serve

as amuse-bouche, starter, hors-d’oeuvre,

Not some spectacular, emetic

parody of dietetic

And comestible delights—

it seems to me, Fast Food, by rights,

Should be what shows up close to hand

in finished form and on demand,

Unsullied by the attitude

of what we often call Fast Food.

Hot Flash Fiction 5

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The Duchess was inordinately fond of animals. Though her courtiers would never dare say so to her face, they imagined she ought to have been born a zookeeper, or at the very least a farmer. This idea was strengthened, especially, by the fact that it always fell to the housekeepers and servants to make the palace tidy enough for Her Ladyship’s dainty passage through life and to freshen the air when the royal menagerie had pranced, prowled or otherwise paraded through its rooms and left unseemly gifts along the way. The Duke, who was as allergic to all things animal as the Duchess was attracted, considered for some time whether he oughtn’t to have a team of expert taxidermists and artisans solve this problem once and for all, creating a large display of preserved zoological beauty that might be both lower maintenance and less powerfully scented than the living creatures populating his estate indoors and out, day and night.digital collageUnfortunately, the Duchess’s sisters who lived in the east wing of the palace did not support the Duke’s enthusiasm for the design, making noises of disapprobation at least as loud as the Duchess’s favorite dogs’ barking or donkeys’ braying. Perhaps, the Duke thought, he had been a little incautious in discussing this artistic concept with his secretary while within earshot of the sisterly ladies-in-waiting, for they both appeared quite ready to dash off squealing with rage to their unsuspecting sibling, or at the least, to imitate the household fauna in some other impolite fashion.digital collageAs it fell out, the Duke, however incautious he may have been in heat of the moment, was not without the wit born of hard experience. Working swiftly with his retainers, was able to resolve the situation quickly and suitably merely by shifting the subject of the new art to a slightly different one featuring the Duchess and her sisters. As an added benison of this resolution, it was discovered that he wasn’t allergic to winged or four-legged pets after all. The palace staff found maintaining the menagerie surprisingly less onerous afterward as well, even with the added curatorial duties of dusting off the Duchess and polishing her sisters from time to time.

‘On Pouvait Dire . . . ‘

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‘Ah! non! c’est un peu court, jeune homme!
On pouvait dire…Oh! Dieu!…bien des choses en somme…’

digital artworkWould that I had the miraculous gift of the silver tongue–it’s said that the genuine Cyrano de Bergerac, the writer and duelist enshrined in fiction as some sort of demigod of dramatic speech, was in life something quite near to it as well. As a youthful admirer of the romantic dream, I memorized Rostand‘s most famed soliloquy of Cyrano’s (in English, naturally), but what remains after so many years have passed is not so much the poetry of his slick speech; it is instead a deeper sense that for all my staring at his nose along with everyone else I managed to miss the point.

The story is told in fictional form to so exaggerate the majesty of his nasal promontory that all we see in most readings and performances onstage is a caricature or cartoon man, led by a nose of bowsprit proportions and foolish improvidence to oversized action and wildly improbable joys and sorrows as a result. These kinds of things do happen to real people in real life, of course; even the real man behind the character was larger-than-life in both nose and existence, according to what we know. He did, if his contemporary portraits are anything near the truth, have a substantial prow, and we have his writings–satirical pieces to classical tragedies–to prove that his wordplay was quite substantial too.

But what perhaps ought to be said of him–whether real or imaginary–is that he was a bit of an outsider by virtue of looking Different, and his response was to fight for respect, both with his rapier and his rapier wit. [Given the historical man and the possibility that he was (not surprisingly, given the era and culture and his reputed exploits) syphilitic, he may well have experienced life completely without a nose if he lived long enough.] It’s easier to label and classify others on the basis of unpopular appearance or differing from the currently decreed norms than it is to cultivate what we have in common. Yet we can learn from some of our outlier counterparts if we will stop, for a moment, being so mesmerized and distracted by what makes them seem unlike us, what it is that we have and value in common. Best if we do that before losing the duel.

Though at least, if the duel is purely verbal, there can be some entertainment inherent in getting taught a lesson. I can live with being the unarmed woman in a battle of wits, as long as I get to keep living long enough to laugh about it. I may not be a genius, but that, my friends: c’est mon panache!