I. Man: Magnet of Tragedy
Mitch bought a new boat. His wife liked it. “I like this boat,” she said. She was blond. She was killed after being struck by lightning while wearing her lightning-rod costume aboard the boat during a thunderstorm. It was a real tragedy.
“It’s a real tragedy,” people said to Mitch. He solemnly nodded his head.
Mitch got a new wife. Her hair was brown instead of blond. “Your previous wife had different-coloured hair,” people would say to him, and he would nod. He was a man of few words.
Mitch’s new wife was eaten by a flying shark while partying on the deck of the boat. “When did sharks grow wings?” Mitch wondered to himself, crouching in terror behind the steering wheel.
“Two dead wives,” people would whisper to each other whenever they saw Mitch in town and happened to be travelling in pairs. “Both mysteriously died at sea.”
Mitch married for a third time, to a redhead. In addition to commenting on her hair colour as compared to the hair colour of his previous wives, people would say, “Don’t take her out on the boat!”
She insisted on going out on the boat. Mitch feared the worst. But she wore a rubber hat and carried a spear that she used to kill all the flying sharks. “What are we going to do with all these dead sharks?” he wondered aloud. They were really piling up.
II. The Pitfalls of Literacy and Boredom
Alice sat in the dentist office’s waiting room. She picked up an issue of Bazooka Joe Magazine and flipped through it. It was mostly about gum: the discovery of South American gum trees by Arturo Gumminicci III in the late fifteenth century; new inductees into the Gum Hall of Fame; an obscene centrefold featuring this year’s Miss Bazooka Joe; and, of course, some comics.
The first one featured a boy and his dog, both covered in mud. The boy’s exasperated mother stared down at her son and said, “You’re filthier than the dog! Maybe I should give him your dinner! Which, incidentally, is dog meat.”
Alice frowned and flipped the page. Another comic.
In this one a man was sitting in a doctor’s office. He said to the doctor, “Doc, it hurts when I do this,” while holding his arm at a weird angle. In the next panel, the doctor is shown stabbing the patient in the throat.
III. The Girl with the Incredible Legs
Clara leapt over the neighbour’s fence. “Look at that girl go!” her elderly neighbour Sam said to his wife Bernadette.
“Why do you stand there at the window all day?” Bernadette asked. “I’m at my wit’s end!” She threw a dishtowel on the floor.
Clara leapt over another neighbour’s fence. She was chasing something, but she couldn’t remember what — a bee? A bird? An idea? A mystery concerning a dark secret from the past?
A school bus full of children marvelled as Clara leapt over a suburban house. “Wow!” most of them said. The cool kids said nothing, just sort of squinted, unimpressed.
Clara’s bionic legs were working out well. She was at a concert recently when a much larger man started sexually harassing her. She went to kick him in the balls and accidentally bisected him. Barely anyone noticed as his body comically split into two equal halves that fell in opposite directions. Clara just turned away like it had nothing to do with her and pretended to be really into the music. But for leaping purposes, the legs did okay.
“Are you going to pick up that dishtowel?” Sam said to Bernadette. “I’m worried that the dishtowel is a metaphor for our relationship.”
Bernadette stared at the dishtowel and angrily shook her head, though Sam couldn’t figure out if that meant she wasn’t going to pick up the towel or if it meant she disagreed with the relationship metaphor or maybe it was something else. You could never tell with women.
IV. A Nice Game of Pick-up Sticks
Bobby had heard about a game called pick-up sticks but he wasn’t sure how to play it. He wandered around his neighbourhood looking for sticks but a witch had put a curse on all the trees and they screamed whenever you pulled off a leaf or broke off a branch.
There was a man selling ice cream out of a truck on the corner. “Do you know where I can find some pick-up sticks?” Bobby asked the man, who shook his head.
“I know where you can buy some delicious frozen treats,” he said.
“Fuck off.”
The ice cream man started to cry.
Bobby started going door to door, asking people where to find pick-up sticks. An elderly woman that lived in a converted attic finally gave him a cardboard tube of pick-up sticks.
“Have you read Mother Night?” she asked, as she rocked back and forth in her wooden old-lady rocking chair. “By Vonnegut.”
“No,” Bobby said. “I’m eight.”
Bobby gathered the usual gang: Phil, Teddy, Alice, Susie, the Fukisawa twins, Gerald the hobo, Omnibot5000 the boy robot that the Ludlows had built to replace their dead son, and pop star Rihanna.
“HOWDOYOUPLAY,” Omnibot5000 said in his robotic monotone.
Bobby showed them how to play, and they all enjoyed a nice afternoon of playing pick-up sticks.
V. The Field of Childhood Regret
Two children, Franklin and Gar, discovered a mannequin in the field behind their home. It made the front page of the newspaper: MANNEQUIN FOUND IN FIELD. When the reporter asked them how they felt upon discovering the mannequin, Gar said, “We thought it was a dead body, and we were pretty disappointed to learn it was just a mannequin.”
The mannequin was naked, its arms and legs splayed in a sexually suggestive position, a single pair of frilly pink underpants wrapped around its head.
“Who would do such a thing?” cried Marta, the owner of the department store from which the mannequin was stolen. “It was a new mannequin. It barely had time to put on this fashionable yellow vinyl raincoat from LaGuerte, on sale this weekend for an incredible thirty-five per cent off, before it was ripped from the comfort of its home, had God-knows-what done to it, and dumped in some field to be discovered by a couple of unattractive kids in the slow class at school.”
After walking away from the reporter, Marta was crushed by a falling piano, but her death made nary a ripple in the media, as all anybody cared about was that stupid mannequin.
Leo Lederhorn, a local artist, created a sculpture of the mannequin wearing a sash that read NEVER FORGET and installed it in the town square.
When Franklin got older, and the clear blue sky of day receded into the oranges and purples of twilight, he would remember, with a lump in his throat, the image of that discarded mannequin, the touch of the field’s warm, dry breeze, and the feeling of innocence lost.
VI. Two Cops Investigating a Double Homicide
The detective surveyed the motel room: two dead bodies, hacked into unrecognizability. “What a waste,” he said, referring to all the unconsumed booze the murderer had left behind. He ran his thumb along the neck of a half-empty bottle of Heineken.
“Are you going to be whining about booze all night or are we going to solve this case?” asked his partner, Foxy Buttons. She wore a short leather skirt that was more of a belt than a skirt, and she had legs that went on for days. Her black lace bra was visible beneath the plunging neckline of her white shirt. And her full, luscious lips were covered in cherry-red lipstick.
“Get off my back,” the detective said. Then he thought, And get onto yours.
“Pervert!” Foxy said. The detective kept forgetting she had psychic powers. The alarm clock next to the bed flew from the nightstand and hit him square in the face. She had telekinesis as well.
VII. Stacked Taxis
Twelve taxi cabs were stacked on top of each other in the middle of a busy intersection, and nobody could quite figure out how it happened, or what to do about it. “Would you be willing to let your car remain here as part of a permanent art installation?” asked some annoying intern from the mayor’s office, from atop a ladder. “We could be known as the Stacked Taxi Town.”
Bruno, a grizzled veteran driver in a newsboy cap, grumbled unintelligibly at the intern. He honked his horn, a force of habit, and stared out the window. He could see a male executive and a foxy lady executive having furtive sexual intercourse on the table of the third-floor conference room of the Hapley-Shipman offices across the street.
What a day.
He’d been sitting at the breakfast table that morning, reading the newspaper, golden rays of sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, the metallic wind chimes above the door of the backyard shed tinkling in the distance. His wife, without a word, carried two suitcases past him and walked out the front door. Not unusual, because she was a suitcase saleswoman, but in her rush, she’d left her eggs Benedict untouched. It’s not like eggs Benedict was easy to make!
“What did he say?” some other annoying intern shouted from the fire truck below.
VIII. They Came from Earth
The spaceship the Jensens had been travelling on for three years was the last to leave Earth. Pop Jensen had dug the pieces out of a scrapyard and assembled it himself. His family had lost the lottery. With billions of people and only thousands of spaceships, there was a limited number of seats off-planet before the Rapture happened. Pop Jensen remembered seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as his ship pulled away, happy to have finally beaten religion with science.
They landed on the Earth-like moon of a planet that looked like a giant, swirly purple sea. “Pretty,” Ma Jensen said, as she unpacked the picnic table on a grassy clearing.
Billy Jensen ran toward the nearby lake, his bright orange water wings already around his arms. “Now hold on!” said his father. Pop Jensen unfolded his portable underwater telescope and stuck the end of it into the lake. “Just as I thought,” he said, his face grim. “The fish on this planet are really dumb-looking.”
Luckily his wife had packed a decade’s worth of fried chicken into the ship’s deep freeze. Billy’s younger sister Lilly sighed — she hated fried chicken! She was a super-racist little girl.
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