by Paul Hawkins
Short and Stupid - Dark Humor Stories for a Rainy Day!
Author’s note: These short-shorts all have a dark humor running through them that I only noticed when I saw them all together. Some have a bit of heart underneath it all, and anyway life doesn’t really suck as bad as they suggest. Usually. In any case they happened to someone else, not you.
--Paul Hawkins, July 2015. Please like my author’s page if you like these stories!
https://www.facebook.com/paulhawkinsauthoradventurerexplorer
Chapter 1: Aladdin’s Genie
He came to my yard sale and offered to pay for an old-timey toaster with $5 worth of nickels. He carried then around in a sock. I was asking $7 for it, but once I saw he was going to pay all in nickels, I agreed on $5.
He said he was Aladdin’s genie and what he was really looking for was his lamp. He had been freed from it many many years ago but life on the outside wasn't so great.
I felt sorry for the guy - he looked rough - not sick or anything, just kind of beaten down. He said sure, the lamp had confined him to a life of servitude when he was living inside it, but he was confined to a life of servitude anyway now that he was outside it, but now he couldn't do magic or anything and his last three marriages hadn't worked out and he was tired of flipping burgers.
I told him I hoped he'd find it. He offered to wait if I wanted to go inside and get a gun and shoot him so he could prove he was invulnerable and immortal. I declined on the off chance that he might not be a genie at all but just some guy who was crazy.
After he had been counting out the nickels for a while, I got tired of keeping up with it and let him have the toaster for whatever he’d put on the table. He seemed pleased. It was kind of a fancy, shiny old-timey chrome toaster from back when folks made toast with style. Maybe he liked stuff like that. Maybe he could find a way to live in that.
Chapter 2: The Haunted Countertops
“My - l just love your new grey granite countertops – they make your kitchen look so lovely. And say, did you hear that somebody’s been stealing headstones from the old cemetery? I can’t think of a more despicable thing to do.”
“I - I can’t either – more coffee?”
“Just a drop thank you… and I’m so sorry you scalded your hand.”
“It’s nothing –my arm just slipped while cooking, I guess. Getting used to these countertops. They’re so smooth and slippery.”
“Yes – but they’re certainly worth it!”
“I suppose so.”
“Well of course they are! Anyway, a person who steals headstones should be cursed for life – cursed I tell you! I hope they get haunted to their graves.”
“No doubt that’s exactly what will happen.”
“It’s time I left for my appointment, my dear. Now do try to be more careful around the house – you’ve been too accident prone lately. You don’t want someone stealing your headstone before your time! Ha ha – well I’m off.”
“Yes – ha ha – goodbye.”
Not much later they made her headstone from a chunk of the countertops, and the spirits were satisfied.
Chapter 3: Fred Hoover: Crime Buster
"Get me $40 in marked ones. I have some very minor criminal activity to investigate."
Such is a typical excerpt from the long-lost transcripts of the FBI's Very Very Petty Crimes Division, opened in 1958 to keep J. Edgar Hoover's talentless nephew, Fred Hoover, employed and out of the way. Closed recently in the wake of a Congressional budget hearing in which some grandstanding fiscal hawk exposed it to utmost ridicule, all that remains of the division now is a warehouse full of brittle tape recordings and boxes upon boxes of very petty documents.
It is sad to think that that the once vibrant law enforcement division is now gone, for back in its heyday, when a marked dollar bill crossed a state border in a barely illegal transaction, such as the purchase of a comic book, French postcard, or firework, Fred Hoover was on it.
All references to this organization have been scrubbed from the internet, but you can sometimes still find a lonely old timer who is willing to talk about his days at the Bureau. It is harder to find anyone who has anything nice to say about Fred Hoover, though. It's always tough working for a relative of the boss. He was too young, dressed too fancy, favored lilac dress shirts and carnations, and in general was a bossy talentless asshole and a bit of a dandy.
He died one day in a sting operation somewhere in one of the smallest towns in Arkansas. He accidentally shot himself while trying to remove his gun from his shoulder holster in the midst of investigating an interstate comic book sale.
Forensics determined that if he had had the full stack of $40 dollars in marked ones in his vest pocket, it might have stopped the bullet. But he was a few dollars shy because he had stopped on his way to the crime scene to purchase some suspicious horehound, bottle rockets, and sarsaparilla.
As for the questionable comic book itself, it featured Mary Marvel on the cover in a skirt that might be a tad too short. The boys at the lab would be able to tell. Sure was showing a lot of thigh, though.
All in all it was a tragic loss – that comic book would be worth real money today were it not for the bloodstains and bullet hole. Oh, and though no one would admit it, more than a few people actually missed Fred. He had made the mundane adventuresome; he lived large; he was fun to make fun of but he pursued ridiculously petty crime with style. After his death the department still chugged on, but its heart and soul had left it, and when it shifted its focus to petty potentially illegal interstate sales of office supplies, no one complained. It was a logical shift in an increasingly mundane world. Fred had been a holdover from a different era, when men lived out even petty details colorfully, and with gusto. RIP Fred Hoover. There’s plenty of lilac buttonhole carnations and four-color comics in heaven.
Chapter 4: Requiem for a Classic Rocker
As a life-long fan of the rock supergroup Journey, Larry had intended his last dying words to be an inspirational recitation of 'Don't stop...believin - hold on to that... feelin." Instead they were “Dear God - no! Get it away! Aggghhh!” [gurgle].
No one knows what he was seeing in his fever dream, for he was in a rather tidy and nice-smelling hospital room with a pretty nurse at his side. One friend suggested it had been his recurring nightmare of finally getting backstage to meet Steve Perry only for the man to turn around and instead be Steven Tyler. In any case his friends accidentally buried him with a Styx Greatest Hits CD instead of a Journey one, which is sad, because he had been a nice if forgettable guy.
They decided not to dig him up to rectify the indignity, but they did call the local classic rock radio station and ask them to play a song in his memory. Because they could not remember which song he had liked, they simply told the DJ "Just play anything classy by Foreigner. It’s what Phil would have wanted."
Chapter 5: Dear American English Teacher
"Dear American English Teacher,
Thank much you for to teaching me English good. Tell many friends you name - for to high praise! Who teach you? I say your name. Good friend! My speaking snow English good - blame you - ha ha! So good. So friend! Much many businesses come your way, many thank yous, good good student. Nice friend – good friend! Have a good loaf."
Chapter 6: Phil Lamont - Attorney for the Damned
Phil Lamont spent his afterlife being the attorney for the damned. Each and every damned person got maybe ten minutes in court to plead his case before Saint Peter, except it was never Saint Peter but some saint from the Middle Ages that no one had ever heard of standi
ng in. It was some guy who had an old-timey Anglo-Saxon name that sounded like a bowl full of consonants.
It was Phil's role to plead the case of each and every one of them - and there was a damned long queue of the damned - And the thing is, they were already damned, so no matter how hard he pleaded, no matter how many rhetorical tricks he tried, no matter how many emotional pleas he made (albeit insincerely), the answer always came back the same.
"Damned."
"Damned."
"He is SO damned."
"Damned."
"Damned damned damned."
"Ten minute recess - nice tie, Phil. How's the wife and kids? Now where were we? Oh yes - damned!"
The trouble is, Phil had been told that if he could ever successfully plead the case of even one of these lost souls, he would achieve recompense for his own sins and get to enter into heaven, so he threw himself into every case with everything he had. Damned fool - didn't realize he was already damned. But damn, Phil - get a clue. You were a LAWYER in your former life.
Damned. Damned. Damned.
Chapter 7: The Slightly Evil Mirror
It was a dusty old round mirror in a baroque frame and was meant for a wall. It had been stored on a top shelf for years because when the last person looked into it, something bad happened to them. It was like an evil or darker reflection of themselves took the moment to leap from a parallel dimension and inhabit them and fog their minds until they went crazy.
All of us in the insurance office were leery of it after that. We put it up high but did not want to break it for fear of letting whatever evil thing that lived in it escape. Rumor had it it was the spirit of the guy who first figured how to skew the actuarial tables, or else his mom. But Larry really needed something to brighten up his office because his desk faced a wall, so we gave it to him. Even if he turned evil, the worst thing he could do was mess up our expense reports, and there was always the chance he would make errors in our favor. Turns out he did – we all made some extra cash for a while until he got fired.
I wish there were more to tell about the mirror, but I don’t know what happened because I went to work for another company that did not make me fill out timesheets and gave me three more sick days a year. You may think that sounds trivial but life is about the little things.
If I had to do it all over again I would not have given Larry the mirror because he had a wife and three kids and did not deserve to get fired over mistakes we could have prevented if we had not unleashed the slightly less efficient version of himself. The extra cash was not worth it – well, I tell myself that, but I was able to get my kids braces and go to Disneyland that year. I guess it is a more difficult call than I thought. Lord knows this world takes a bigger genius than me to figure it out. Besides, I’ve spent all that money anyway so the point is moot.
Chapter 8: The Stupid Super Man
He had galactic powers but the corn-fed good-hearted nature of a big blue boy scout, but when the Super-Powered Man turned evil he destroyed the pyramids - and that was just for starters. He also filled in the Grand Canyon and turned the Great Wall of China into a drainage ditch. I mean he went amok. It took a round-the-clock effort by world’s best scientists to finally develop the procedure to turn the compass in his conscience toward “Good” again.
They shot the ray at his brain and the process was successful in that it made him good, but it left him much, much stupider than before. He rebuilt the pyramids as cubes, but no one had the courage to object. They fell apart five minutes after he left.
In the weeks and months that followed he went around doing more and more good in his very stupid way, and people began to realize that the well-intended but stupid Super-Powered Man was every bit as dangerous as the smart but evil one. But no one dared tell him, and anyways he was still all Mom and Apple Pie and so when he ran for Senate he won. It was in Washington D.C. that his newfound skill to do good in a stupid fashion found its true home.
It was soon thereafter that he realized how inefficient democracy was. This made the Good Super-Powered Man kind of mad, and he established a new good kind of order.
*
Today, thanks to Super-Powered First Leader, the world is a much cleaner and safer place with far fewer people. His arch-nemesis has expatriated to the Moon and made himself a kind of Bonnie Prince Charlie. He now attracts the kind of supporters who used to flock to Ron Paul. He was the first one to discover that the Moon had a big ol’ chunk of Element X at its center, the one substance in all the universe that rendered the Super-Powered Man helpless. Lucky bastard. We keep waiting for him to do something for the rest of us, but you know super-villains - it’s gonna cost us.
Chapter 9: The Dog Tree
When the kids were little their pet dog up and died. This was an unexpected event and it forced the parents to have to explain death a little earlier than they were ready, so when they buried Rex in the backyard the dad said, "Don't worry kids - it's a part of life. Planting Rex means we'll have a dog tree someday. You got to plant a dog if you want a dog tree."
Now he had assumed that the kids were so young they would forget this bit of blarney but they never did, and year after year they kept asking him when the dog tree would sprout, so one night when they were all asleep he went out and bought a tree and planted it where Rex was buried, and the next day he told the kids, "Look - the dog tree has come up! Now quit asking me about it."
This only partly satisfied their curiosity, however, because they were now intent to see what happened when the tree bore fruit. When it finally did they were disappointed but the dad simply said, "Sorry kids - that damn dog must've eaten a lot of apples."
Chapter 10: The Sky Father
Once, upon coming home from his work as a janitor, the skinny divorced man saw his long-haired, shiftless 15-year-old son absorbed in the glow of a video game - as usual - and so he dropped his lunch pail and spread his arms out wide and announced, "From now on, my son, I want you to call me your Earth-Father, because you have reached an age to know that, someday soon, I will introduce you to your real father, your Sky-Father, and you shall achieve an understanding of your true destiny, and a life of great responsibility combined with care-free leisure shall be yours for the rest of your days."
He did not expect his son to believe it but he had delivered it with such aplomb that his son kind of did, for maybe a whole half-a-second, and after the boy realized it was of course all made up, it made the old cruddy house look that much shabbier. This made his old man feel bad and so the next day upon coming home from work he said, "Bad news, son, Sky Brother-in-Law beat you to Sky Dad's inheritance. He and Sky Lawyer screwed you out of it, but you can work with me cleaning up the middle school at night. Pays ten bucks an hour."
The boy worked nights with his dad cleaning the school long enough to save up the money for a banged up pawn shop guitar and a one-way bus ticket out of there. After he’d left, his old man felt lonely, but then he began to feel a strange reassuring comfort that, somehow, the boy had made a major step toward manhood and that this was exactly what Sky-Father would have wanted.
With his son gone the savings in grocery costs let the old man buy beer one notch more expensive than store brand. The days rolled by monotonously. Sometimes after two or three beers and him sitting on the back porch the idea of Sky-Father would return to him, and in his mind he first looked like a gold-robed man of average height – with a tilted chin and a kind of regal nose, maybe – fancy to be sure but not superlative. But more and more as time passed he began to imagine Sky-Father on a grandiose scale, as a big man with a rolling white beard of clouds and his face never quite visible but hidden somewhere in a brightening glow up in the sky that he could never quite look into.
He'd like to meet the guy even though he'd made him up. If he were real he'd be the kind of guy who'd look out for him when the dogs were at his heels and who'd waive his bill if he had to stay at some fancy hotel some night. "Let my friend sleep in late - and comp him breakfast
."
Years later when his son had settled down and married and he and his wife were expecting their first baby, the son told the old man how influential that one stupid story of Sky-Father had been. By then the old man (still skinny but with a pot belly) had talked himself into believing that Sky-Father himself had planted the stunt inside him, knowing the hopeful future it would sow. In any case, it was the closest thing to religion either of those two nitwits ever stumbled towards, but in its own way it was enough. It pleased them to think their fortunes were not merely their own but were assisted by a big, happy, cloud-based compadre.
Chapter 11: Saint Dunstan the Equilibrious
Saint Dunstan the Equilibrious lived in the Middle Ages and was good-natured but not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was somewhat fat and wore the usual brown scratchy cassock and had eyes that kind of looked in two different directions at once, but that was not so unusual back then and in any case is not what he was noted for. Instead, he became famous for his ability to recover his balance even in the most precarious of situations, even when it looked like he was sure to fall. Sometimes it took a good five minutes of stumbling, arm-twirling, and staggering for him to regain his balance, but this only added to the drama, because it made it look like for sure this time he’d fall, but then he wouldn’t. It’s like in the angels would hold him up, but only after letting him go at it for a while.
Because of his extraordinary skill the friars liked to liquor him up and set him to work on the highest parts of the great cathedrals, especially in icy weather, and people would come from far and near to see him precariously tread the scaffolding and almost-but-never-quite fall to his death several times an hour. The bishop saw a way to make a little scratch off this and set a donation basket out front of wherever Dunstan was working. Even a pauper would fork over a dented coin to see him in action.
He lived to a ripe old age and never fell once. In his last few years he could be seen perched high on the cathedral roof, feeding the pigeons and talking with them, as if in a soft-toned, patient language that only flying things and angels could understand. Their chats stretched the time of his remaining days and became his lauds and vespers. It was all highly unorthodox but what was the bishop to do? There was no one brave enough to get him down.
