“You…really think I’m holding… 231 gumballs?” The Jar said, her voice trembling, tears starting to stream onto her ‘GUESS HOW MANY’ sign. “No, it’s not, well, yeah, I guess I do.” “You really think I’m that… big?” I had dug… Continue Reading
When someone popped a champagne cork at the Christmas party, Carl dived under the table. No one said a word. The dairy lot laughed nervously, the butchers raised their eyebrows and carried on with their conversations, and the dot.com drivers… Continue Reading
It was curious, Dr Harold felt, that he should have been working on his Fibonacci paper that December. As a rule, he tried not to notice workplace festive japes. The explanation he felt most comfortable giving himself was that it… Continue Reading
“Twenty lines! By tomorrow!” the Latin teacher shrieked. The class gave out a collective groan. Translating twenty lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses seemed impossible, even with one hundred nights to work on them. I glanced down at my paper to see… Continue Reading
After sex, instead of cuddles, Amy asked for the cat. Lulu protested that they just did this yesterday, but Amy was insistent. So Lulu went to the bathroom, crouched down on the rug, and changed. The thing about shapeshifting was… Continue Reading
Ma hadn’t always been fat. Once upon a time, she’d been a slinky thing who loaded men with bourbon so’s to woo them into her womb, secretly sucking up their seed with a precisely-inserted sponge. She had baby after baby… Continue Reading
Andrew timed it perfect: he opened the front door just at the moment Mama’s thrown picture frame hit the wall right behind Daddy. Neither of them heard him leave. He learned early to get out unnoticed when he wasn’t the… Continue Reading
My mother would start unpacking the Christmas decorations on what we now call Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving when shoppers stampede stores.) The smell of leftover turkey still permeated our house as she filled the air with a regular… Continue Reading
The forest gave a sigh of relief — Paul Bunyan lay sleeping his final rest, his last tree felled. The funeral was almost as large as the legend himself and took place over several days. The will was read and… Continue Reading
“We could always just run it over,” Patricia said. I wasn’t paying much attention. The November sun was smudgy white against a harsh gray sky, and I was thinking how very lonely the sun looked, how barren eons of existence… Continue Reading