Momma loved to criticize. Dad would say her heart was in the right place, but that didn’t stop him from blowing his brains out in their master bath the night of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. But he didn’t die right away. He ended up in the local hospital connected to various wires and machines. Momma said he couldn’t even kill himself right, and once again she’d have to clean up his mess. She pulled the plug on him three days later and afterward stopped by Kohl’s for a new bathroom rug.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
After she finished with him, she started on me. I couldn’t say, think, or do anything right in her eyes, and boy did she let me know it! Dad deserved a medal for lasting a quarter century with her on his back. I lasted less than half a year. This morning she complained about the laundry I’d separated, said a chimp could tell colors from whites. My hair was too long. My girlfriend was too fat. And didn’t I know the proper place to store her four hundred dollar Masamoto cleaver was back in its leather case?
“Everything belongs in its right place,” she said. “Didn’t your father ever tell you that?”
He did. But I guess I hadn’t been paying too close attention. All those years of dad making excuses and I still don’t know the right place for momma’s heart, but her head looks just fine beside the spice rack.
THE END
© Karla Tanay
Charles found himself standing in a bar, not quite sure how he got there.
This in itself wasn’t strange. Lots of people find themselves in bars every day not knowing why or how they made it there. It may even have happened to you.
But Charles felt weird. Something was weird, he decided, given that he just had been about to speak in a courtroom and now stood in a dingy pub. He felt vaguely ill, too, as if he’d been falling fast, then jerked to a halt and was now hanging in mid-air.
He looked around.
The bar looked like a typical drinking hole, familiar from his near-forty years in Chicago as well as from countless movies. Wide windows, beige furniture and warm light bulbs under low, green shades. Neon signs advocated beer brands along the walls, painting nearby guests in hues of blue and red and glinting off an antique jukebox that whispered in the background.
The bartender, leaning on a marble counter stacked with upturned glasses, was a middle-aged man that looked to Charles as Clint Eastwood’s cheerful twin. Behind a row of beer taps, bottles lined the shelves in front of a large, smudgy mirror. The room was half-full, most people sitting huddled in groups or staring out the windows at people and crawling cars on some city street he didn’t recognize. Some faces looked up at Charles, but soon turned away.
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It’s a pretty long story about how I ended up in this waiting room, so I’ll stick to the condensed version: I was standing in the middle of a seething protest against big government, occasionally bumping into the guy next to me, who was wearing a tricorn hat and screaming away about socialism. I was happily waving a sign that said WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT when, out of nowhere, something struck me in the head from behind. I had no clue what it was, but it didn’t matter. I dropped my sign and crumpled to the ground. It was all very strange. One minute I’m listening to a solution-less speech by a guy who is equal parts ambition and ignorance, and the next minute I’m dead.
The receptionist steps around her desk and says, “Dog will see you now.”
I blink twice in quick succession and say, “Dog?”
“Yup,” the woman replies, “don’t worry, everyone gets that wrong.” She leads me to a door set into the far wall and pushes it open. I’m staring down at a small door next to the main one when the receptionist smiles and sweeps a hand through the air, beckoning me to enter.
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Adam looked down at the business suit his superiors had tailored for him back at home. It was not as though he had green scales and antenna to indicate he was an extraterrestrial. In fact, the legend of the little green Martian was a popular American myth; in other cultures, Martians were blue.
What had brought the first Martian to planet Earth? For the first time in history, the Martian government had begun to fear Earth’s scientific advancements. The Martian leaders had watched with growing interest as their history books recorded the development of civilization on Earth, but humankind’s slow progress had assured them there was no cause for alarm. Not until humans landed a roving robot on the surface of the homeland did the Martians sit up and take notice. The rover was a toy that a five-year-old Martian could construct in kindergarten, but the fact that humans had built it and managed to send it to Mars was a breakthrough. Earthlings were on their way to Mars; nothing could stop them now. It was just a matter of time.
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The worst part about running a shop full of adventuring gear, Gregor the Slightly thought, wasn’t the constant running around needed to put the thing in whatever corner adventurers really needed it in next. It wasn’t even having to memorise the sales taxes of a dozen different kingdoms while trying to locate enough bubble-wrap to pack all the crystal balls properly.
No, the worst part was that some heroes, even when they were getting their brains beaten out by a marauding dragon, wouldn’t understand an opportunity for some heavy duty stocking up on weapons if it bit them. Take the current one. So far, he’d bounced off the ensorcelled shop-window three times, the last time sliding down it spread like a starfish, and had he so much as looked in once? Of course he hadn’t.
Some days, Gregor the Slightly felt like giving it all up. The magical supplies business was just no fun. But then, what other opportunities were there for a wizard so far down the magical pecking order that the best nickname he’d been able to acquire was “Gregor the Slightly Less Green Than Gregor The Green”? None, that’s what. The best he’d be able to hope for would be to go self-employed, and unless you were willing to try the Dark Necromancer bit, there was no money in it. That was out. Gregor was allergic to having his head cut off by adventurers. At least this way, he had a roof over his head, a steady-ish income, and enough magical trinkets to sink a battleship. Or at least turn it into a rather startled penguin.
He just wished that the idiot in the tin-suit would come in and buy something. Preferably before the dragon flame grilled him…
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“Come on. Not tonight,” Elmer Brown pleaded as the cat’s angry moans filled the air for the fifth night in a row. He shone the trembling flashlight in a wide circle. All thanks to a stupid accident! It wasn’t like he’d meant to kick her—she had tried to rub against his leg but Elmer hadn’t seen her in time—and now it had turned into a full-out torment-Elmer-athon.
Without warning the cat attacked, grasping Elmer’s leg and screeching like a banshee called in on her day off. The flashlight fell to the ground and rolled away. His cries of fright turned to high-pitched wails as she sank her teeth into his inner thigh. He swiped at the scruffy black mass but the claws held fast. He smacked again, all the while jumping in circles on his tiptoes and screaming. The claws finally retracted and the cat flew off into the darkness.
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Teddy Ulysses Dunkel felt doubtful about the interview—why couldn’t the technician simply remove his memories of her and be done with it? Of course, the FDA was probably behind the formality of the interview process—interfering government agencies were always tramping on the rights of the little man to pursue his measure of happiness. Something he was currently in short supply of—
“‘Ulysses’ is an interesting middle name,” said the thin man with the moustache in an odd accent, possibly Belgian, or perhaps Swedish. Graced with impeccable posture and fine taste in European clothing, he held a small handset on which he occasionally dabbed a silver stylus. “Is there any familial significance to it?”
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