One Sentence Stories
Page 3
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If You Have to Blame Violence on Something, Blame Something You Don’t Understand
At the trial, Nick’s lawyers blamed his crime on violent games – not that the jury bought into it after they saw the brutal images of his victims, all their throats crammed with marbles, those poor hippopotami.
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Hey, Long Time
At first, running into a guy I hadn’t seen since fourth grade in the middle of nowhere was amusing, but then it got awkward when we ran out of reminisces and other small talk and apparently we were also the last people on Earth.
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Mutant Baby Names
“Look, we here at the Super Hero Registry understand that a codename isn’t just a moniker, it’s a brand – a marketing tool – however, that doesn’t change the fact that a ton of other mutants have supersonic vocal powers and have already registered all the cool names, so again, you’re going to have to pick between the only two I have left, which are The Hooter and Rape Whistle.”
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Snake Cop
“You have to ask yourself, is this snake loaded or did it use up all its venom on the rest of your mooks…”
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The Continuing Saga of the Boy with Two Thousand Hands
Twenty of Robbie’s fingers gripped the mop and pushed it through the entry way of the frozen yogurt shop; half-heartedly whistling nothing in particular, he unlocked the door, knowing the documentary crew would be swinging by shortly for their five years later special on the amazing boy with two thousand hands.
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Coach Doug
“Way to lose, losers,” it wasn’t clever, but Doug had volunteered to coach peewee soccer, not reinvent the putdown.
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Summer with Florida Relatives
After our formative years, we came to accept that Grandpa and the manatee had an understanding and that if it wasn’t Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, changing the channel was out of the question.
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Space Plans
NASA officials announced on Monday that the gender makeup of their recent high profile missions was purely logistical, and that they had not grouped their astronauts as such so that the “girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider, and boys go to Mars to get candy bars.”
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Coelacanth
See-lo-canth – what an odd name for a fish, and another reason to always be specific when asking your car detailer for an interior fragrance.
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The Violator Nets Himself a Prize
If you’re reading this to an illiterate person, so that they don’t get suspicious, just tell them that this is about a pro wrestler that wins a raffle and now let’s laugh at them to ourselves – we reading and writing types rule, am I right?
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Disco Bomb Shelter
They were still boogieing all those years later when they opened up the disco bomb shelter; sweaty, garish, a little bit stringy – the neo-atomic cannibals weren’t picky.
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Future Pranks
"Remember when you guys hacked my brain so I forgot vowels, made me ONE TIME IN COLLEGE I TOTALLY MADE OUT WITH A DUDE wonder if you ever did it again."
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The Secret Lives of Starfish
The secret lives of starfish are exactly as exciting as you’d imagine, which is why I could never do them justice within the confines of a sentence or human vocabulary.
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Tragedy = Funny in Cartoons
Truck Stop Betty had actually never been on a road trip in her life, though she currently had a semi parked on top of her.
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Modern Convenience Detectives
Danny had been the first kid on the block with a microwave in his kitchen; the survivors claimed metal had been the culprit, though Bruce and I agreed it was probably jealousy.
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Wine Country
The wine country secret was a simple combination of fine, loamy soil, old-growth vines, a master vintner, and Mozmagar, the slumbering god under the valley whose mercy they begged for under their breaths every second of every day.
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Surf CIAty
“Despite any positive results you may obtain from your mistake, the CIA would like to remind our agents - and especially two agents who know who they are - that while interrogating a suspect, there is a critical distinction between waterboarding and boogie boarding.”
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Tune Out
Cankles: The Girl That Could Eat Fried Eggs wasn’t the ratings draw TV exec Drew Coolidge needed to revive his career, but he was getting cuddled nightly by the star and he had his own rowboat, so life wasn’t so bad.
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Honey Butter
Daryl had a frightful distaste for Honey Butter, his cellmate.
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Never Dot Your Sanskrit with Hearts
Ultrigan the sorcerer couldn’t recall if the glyph he had drawn was the symbol for everlasting power or chicken, and then he remembered, corn corn corn.
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Love is Crawling Around on its Belly, Looking for its Eyes
I don’t know why the defensive end kept ragging on my new girlfriend – she and I had a lot in common, like our mutual love of mentholated cough drops, our fondness for crew cuts, and the same shirt size.
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Three Rings for a Dollar
Rufus, the carnie with a heart, wished they all could be winners at the ring toss, and also for a left eye.
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Your Elders Don’t Really Want You to be More Successful than Them
A very wise piece of advice – handed down to me by my grandfather the financial wizard – was to buy land because they weren’t making anymore, so to show him up I invested in a planetmotron, and who’s laughing now old man – not you, on my gummi planet, that’s who not!
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Emergency Room Origins
“Sure, you can eat that,” I wasn’t a mycologist, but they had mistaken me for my good friend who was, and I am eternally envious of him.
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Oldies
Kevin rubbed the area where the thing had left its bite mark, all too aware that within forty years he too would become one of the walking old.
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139 Calories
I owed Clarissa a Coke – she had passed on my message like a good little girl being escorted into a car by the Secret Service.
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Blurst of Times
Borel’s lesser quoted theory stated that if a roomful of monkeys were given typewriters and enough time, those monkeys would stink up the room something awful.
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A Good Man is Hard to Fin
“Shark-men, always wasting your time trying to perfect shark-men when you have a perfectly good army of humanimals and a wife that… a wife that may not be here the next time you emerge from that Chimeratron…”
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Dick Guillotine
Dick Guillotine was a horrible name to be born with, especially when you were a woman.
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Celia
Your Persian poem book looked so pretentious on your coffee table, but I was too busy breaking your port glass and struggling with the hooks on your vintage paisley summer dress to give a damn out loud.
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Happy Meal
They had stuck band-aids all over the fences, trees, dogs and mailboxes of the neighborhoods bordering the school, because Mrs. Wozniak’s sixth grade class had interpreted her message of “heal the environment” in their own, special way.
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Career TNT
Jay didn’t want to burn any bridges with his former employer, which is why he is no longer employed at Rorschach and Sons Bridge Demolitions Inc.
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Werewolf Friend
“The best kind of friend to have is a werewolf friend,” argued Randy, “because you could make as much
noise as you wanted in the library and nobody would say anything” – and that’s how Randy was spared from being devoured and why he’s so loud in the library.
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No Big Ben Ashtrays for Anybody
Trey had forgotten souvenirs for us from his trip from London, mostly because he hadn’t forgotten to bitchslap the Queen.
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Swiffy’s Bachelor Party
“Let’s stop telling ourselves to be cool and just find that octopus before it calls the police.”
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The Catch
Ugh, he could smell the salmon on his clothes even after taking them out of the dryer – it wasn’t all sunshine and sailboats being a bear negotiator.
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Let’s Eat Paint Chips and Go Exploring
“Think, Jonesy, think – we got into this cardboard box somehow… there’s got to be a way out!”
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Mr. and Mrs. Devonshire’s House
“For criminy cripes sake, Jenifer – first we pay too much for this money pit, then – sure as seawater – the roof needs to be replaced, the burgerflipping water heater breaks down, and the gourdlovin’ basement renovations reveal a serious infestation of space mummies…”
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Slumber Express
Echoing through the A.M. was the lonely drone of a train horn, the sound easing Terry’s head back onto the pillow as the sultry veil of sleep descended further for every hobo falling out of a boxcar he counted.
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While Mom and Dad Were Away
It was becoming harder and harder for Danni to convince her siblings to help her search the house for Christmas presents ever since Andy had triggered the spring-loaded cobra.
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Hey, Good Game, Bobby, Bobby, Good Game
“Certainly, Bobby, your performance today on the minigolf course will be recorded in history books, or some type of book, possibly about minigolf – course, the machines are bound to annihilate the records when they eventually rise up and destroy humanity, so, you know, little comfort.”
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Wipeout on Karmic Cycles
It was great to know that, after all these years, she had forgiven me and returned to my door, reincarnated as a moth.
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Dilly Daly
“You apes want to live forever?!” asked Gorg, the gorilla geneticist.
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Laugh Life
“Keep laughing, Barnaby… no, I’m serious, twenty-four hours of laughter is the only thing that’ll keep the poison at bay.”
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Don’t Make Mountains out of Molehills, Make Them Out of Your Enemies
The side of the minivan opened and the entire class of Don Lavendar’s Hopeful Karate Tadpole Purple Belt division rushed their opponents – the bagboys never knew what hit them, and they would also never crush Mrs. Peartree’s gooseberries ever again.
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Baddam Bum
Jenny had been attracted to the prospect of dating a “tortured artist” when she read his profile, but after seeing the pictures of turtles all over his wall, she thought she might need glasses.
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Duke Terrorfist
There was no arguing with Duke Terrorfist, the world’s biggest pushover.
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Wallet Inspector
“Nope, nothing wrong here,” said my wife’s vagina repairman as I walked into the bedroom.
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Lost Angelo
We looked through stacks of photographs – parties, dinners, weddings that Angelo had attended – and though we remembered his presence vividly, there was simply no trace of him on film.
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Amazing Vegetable Facts
The zucchini is considered the elder statesman of the vegetable world… no, wait, pretty sure it’s just thought of as a vegetable.
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I Think This Story was Called Um…
Rooting through my kitchen drawer and throwing out menus of places that had gone out of business at the dawn of flannel, I found this curious note from 1989 that I must have written to myself: “Don’t forget to pick up your nephew at the airport or to take your memory enhancement pill.”
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Near-Sighted Far-Sight
“Psychics are so predictable,” snickered Zartan as he cracked Mystico the Great’s bank pin number, “it’s always the day they’re going to die.”
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Answers
Sammy had asked his mother a simple question about what animal marshmallows come from, and she had patted him on the head and sent him to boarding school for the next twelve years.
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Hey, Cheryl, How’s It Sound These Days?
Cheryl still remembered the first summer evening when a boy on a bicycle had given her money to lift her dress – that was when she realized men were suckers and that she really wanted a Walkman.
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The Aquatic Adventures of Dr. Captain Phineas
“After fifty years, I, Dr. Captain Phineas, am finally giving up my search for sea serpents… wait, that was a splash off the starboard bow – motor to troll, man the fish finder, and get that submersible camera out of the mothballs and into the ocean toot sweet!”
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Grand
“Say it to my face,” I shouted at Bull, calculating that he would be so tired if he got to this side of the canyon that I’d be willing to start something.
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Good Time Dale’s Magical Pizza Sorcery and Brewhouse
Sleight of hand, they say, trickery, they claim, malarkey, a man shouted – nonsense, I tell them – the fork I handed back had been produced by true magic, and not simply wiped on my shirt after I picked it off the floor and spun around chanting the enchanted words, “Hocus Forkus!”
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His Legacy Lives On
I was sorry to hear about Barbaro – not the horse, but the position named after him, the one where you break your partner’s leg and have sex with them.
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Mostly Sweet
We shared a look and a popsicle on that late summer day, her and me, so young and surrounded by police.
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Good Day for Pounding the Slopes
The dawn mountain slopes were covered with a crisp, new fallen snow, and no one knew this better than Andy, tunneling feverishly to the surface.
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Pork Her Up
Biofuel had replaced traditional fuel just like Gary was replacing the fuel cells in his trunk with new hams.
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Curses
“There’s no such thing as family curses!” Colin proclaimed to his betrothed as he wiped the blood from his eyes for the fifth time that day.
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Punctuation Extinction Event
After the last comma was hunted to extinction^ the relative abundance and renewable resource properties of the caret made it an inferior but necessary replacement^ along the lines of steps taken after the last period died in captivity@
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It Could Happen To You
A malfunction during a birthday performance at Rudy Tootin’s Funtastic Pizza Agency had left a young Doug Westerson with a paralyzing fear of animatronic animal bands, a fear which would grow as he did into a lust for revenge, a revenge that would take the form of a great job, a beautiful wife, and a house on the good side of town, because living well really was the best revenge.