One Sentence Stories
Page 7
Ten years after the apocalypse, the last hope to reignite the dying flame of civilization lay in Kenneth’s human beatboxing skills.
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Mr. Mole Gets a Visitor
Maureen had a backyard rose garden, and underneath that was her first cat, and beneath that cat was a mole’s hole, and in that mole hole there was a teeny, tiny cap and glasses, next to a teeny tiny cup of tea spilled onto the thumb-sized loom-woven rug where Mr. Mole lay across the body of his jilted ex-lover, who had already succumbed to the itsy-bitsy strychnine-laced sugar cube.
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Prescription for Loneliness
“A girl you say… well, young Roberts, in my opinion, you should get her something she needs, but something that she wouldn’t expect – I got just the thing, right here… there we go, that’s a tube of Vagimil, which just might show your desire for intimacy and concern for her health,” suggested Old Mr. Paddington, whose pharmaceutical knowledge far outweighed his romantic experience with women.
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1982
Me and Charles pew-pewed with Star Wars action figures daily and sure did play a lot of River Raid on Atari that summer, both of us inseparable pals right up until the time we saw E.T. and it scared him back to his home planet.
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Giant’s Corner
It was laundry day for the giants, which meant the townsfolk of Giant’s Corner would be wise to stay out of the lake on that hot summer Saturday, yet another day for Junior Giant to lick that bedwetting problem.
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Detective Club
Tom, Ronnie, Squeaky, and I had founded the Detective Club in the tree house we had built the previous summer; twenty years later, I still find myself obsessed with Tom and Squeaky’s notes tucked inside a battered blue trapper keeper, wondering just who the one-legged man was and how the blonde widow in the mink benefitted from framing us for her butler’s murder.
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Catstronaut
It was pre-sunrise that Monday morning when we woke up to see our cat Dribbles off to the space center for his trip aboard the Vulcan Mk-II rocket; his bowl is still there, where he ate his last meal before he became one of Earth’s greatest and most tragic heroes, and when I find my gaze fixate on it, the scars open up, the same scars from that day when I had to help put him into that cat spacesuit.
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You Must Learn and Duck
Dropping mad street knowledge on all the suckers, it was apparently Daryl who had carted off our old encyclopedias and was currently throwing them at passersby from his fifth story window.
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Race for the Cause
March 6, 4:33 PM – Half an hour after I injected myself with six quarts of platypus venom while exposing myself to a healthy dose of X-rays; still no superpowers, moving on to moose bile and neon gas combo.
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Exotic Pets Come With Shampoo for a Reason
“Animal smuggling isn’t necessarily as risky as drug smuggling, but if you thought getting the Bengal tiger in the balloon was hard…”
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I Wish Hell Existed So I Had a Place to Crash When I Die
Drake Vanguard and his long-time nemesis, Otto Von Killberger, made brief eye contact in the topical ointment and creams aisle of Hell’s biggest supermarket, fulfilling a long-standing promise between the two in the most awkward way.
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The Resentment Lasts a Lifetime
“It’s a rather unspectacular one, the result of lazy and uncreative parents who just shrugged and went with the default, and that’s the story of how I got the name ‘Player 1’.”
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Performance
You feel obligated to flirt with the audience, because when you’re up on that stage, all those eyes transfixed like moths to a streetlight, it takes only a single performance before you begin to realize that they don’t have to look in your direction, no, it’s that you are the star, the adored, the desired – you are Salty the Sea Lion!
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Time Zone Travel
Still regretting the words spoken in the heat of the moment, Diana sped across the Arizona border, checked the local time and let out a sigh of relief as she threw her phone into the dam’s waters below, making it impossible for her to make that fated call a half-hour from now; with time to kill, she sat in on a lecture on temporal physics, and asked the speaker, “Wait… what?”
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Wax Lips
McGolligee specialized in found art, gruesomely obvious when the police raided his wax museum.
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Conspiracy Bowl
There was no question to Don that the government had faked the moon landing, just as he suspected that his wife had faked breakfast for the last eight years.
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Sugar-Coated History
Rome hadn’t been built in a day, unlike Candy Corn City which had – one of them I ruled with an indomitable will, the other would soon fall into line.
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The Wire
Detective Ronsetti heard all kinds of indictable information on the wiretap, but this was evidence he could use to make a bust and a superior green bean casserole.
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I Bet It’s Love
Josie and I had fun just wagering on which parts of the paint on the wall would dry quicker and on who would lick their gambling addiction first.
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Beach Babe
Kelly faded away so gradually that we didn’t even notice she was made of sand.
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Autobiography
Yet another promising relationship dissolved abruptly, he sighed and looked down at her signature written there, and he thought maybe it was foolish of him to get tattoos of all their names – call it laughable naïveté or the undying romantic hope that the pursuit of one’s life love was over, regardless, he was determined to make the next name the last, because he was running out of room for them on his penis.
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Dead Last
One gaze at the horde of undead below convinced Sam that he could not let himself become like them, so, wiping the sweat from half his face, he looked back down at the pistol in his lap and did the only thing left to do – cured zombieitis!
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Good Fortune Sharing
“Right now,” exclaimed Jim to Donald, Mort Martindale, Tom from his astronomy class, the bagboy, and European girlfriend Daniella, “right now, I am the luckiest man in this bed!”
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Iraq Costs a lot of Money
“The government has a phrase for it – tax evasion – but you, Mittens, might know it as meow.”
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Malaria and Me
Looking back, I wouldn’t trade the jungle expedition that gave me malaria for anything, except for a cure for malaria.
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Filled Trip
Sue was a Sweetie Pie – from that day on Hilltop Elementary would require permission slips for trips to the pastry factory.
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No Stalgia
It was hard for Jacob to feel nostalgic, being a baby and all.
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Why I was Kicked Off the Debate Team
“Nuh-uh!”
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I Heard a Child’s Laughter Again
As a child I loved playing around the old, abandoned well, and as a child’s ghost, I love haunting the Gundersons.
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I Want to Be Absent
I woke hoping for a fever or nausea, anything to call in sick to work, listening to all those prayers.
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We Could Be Heroes
The day saved, the hero puffed out his chest, stared down at his name emblazoned there and announced, “I’m Short-Term Memory Man?”
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Just Desserts
Snake-Eyed Geoff and Easy Elly had been taken down by police snipers, leaving only me and Preacher Don to outmaneuver each other for the last piece of cake.
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Suspects 1-9
“Dammit, Sergeant, all the clues are here, we just have to make sense of it somehow!” hollered Detective Brubonkski, as he mashed his fist against the desk and cast another dumbfounded gaze at the book of Sudoku.
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Hockey is Rubbish
Standing between Horace and his objective was the biggest, fastest, most intimidating goalie he had ever laid eyes on, which always made garbage day a bigger chore than it should have been.
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The Wrong Guy
“Mr. Johnson, the charges against you have been dropped – apparently new evidence has found conclusively that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and we want to apologize for holding you responsible all these years.”
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First You Get the Money…
Officially, I was only marrying Celia for her money, but unofficially I was marrying her for her drug money, which I could use to buy a lot of drugs off her.
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Tough
Cage Blitzer was a tough son of a bitch who shit razor blades and fire, but the toughest guy I know changes his diapers.
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Grieco System
In 1988, Richard Grieco was Susie’s world, but as time went on and his melting polar ice caps caused catastrophic weather phenomenon, she was forced to launch herself into the void of space, looking for a new star system for her people to colonize.
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The Shape of Things to Come
“You know, I envy you kids – back in the day, you got married and had sex with the same woman for the rest of your life… now all you see is young folk dating the shapeshifters we discovered ten years ago in that underground continent…”
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7 to 1
It’s terrible when you all of the sudden realize just how fast ten years can go, and that it didn’t seem so long ago you dropped off your dog at the kennel.
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The Battle is All But Won
The enemy still had their food supplies and weapons cache, but we had thoroughly captured their moon bounce stockpile and wheeeeeeeeeee!
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Bananas
Dr. Pearson wanted to name the new lab chimp something bland like Cody, but I wanted to name him Captain Bananas, after my uncle.
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Op Ed
I look forward to a future when gasoline was replaced with more environmentally friendly alternatives, mostly because I’ve had it with the robbery at the pump and also I am on fire.
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Wonderland
The cake labeled “eat me” would make Alice grow, and the bottle of liquid that said “drink me” would make her shrink, and the nondescript little green pill would make her feel nothing but love for everything while she danced all night, finding herself in many photographs she didn’t remember taking with people who she couldn’t for the life of her remember meeting.
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Freshly Squeezed
You couldn’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why Sheila and I were being chased by vampires.
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Dream Incisors Hurt Your Morning
Terry had woke face-first in a pillow covered in his own sweat from a dream where the Earth was conquered by giant wombats, which would have been horrible since he had just barely gotten over the giant beaver subjugation.
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Patty Resume
“So, it says here that you were an ‘assistant to the hot dog cart vendor’ – just be frank with me, Mr. Sandleburg, can you handle tongs or are you just another padded resume that’s going to step up to the meat-o-matic and come out with second-degree burns on his hands?”
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Emergency Protocol
The creature was loose in the facility, so fuck it, I’m eating Rick’s meatball sub.
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Children Deserve to Know the Truth
“No, no, of course kids your age don’t have to worry about dying, Honeybear – well, except for when they’re killed by time traveling assassins before they become the next Hitler, but, generally, no, you have nothing to worry about.”
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With Great Power Comes Great Hospital Bills
I guess we just assumed that since Superb-Man could fly he could also fight crime and not that it meant that he had hollow bones that splintered six days from Sunday after a good punch from his nemesis, Bone Density Man.
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Romantific
“The heart wants what it wants,” I explained to Michelle, “but mostly it wants blood – I mean, that’s what it’s for.”
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Moist Bread
Sheila had brought a sandwich in her pocket, which drew a lot of repulsed looks from the rest of the kangaroo lunchroom.
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The Truth about Technicolor
Making use of the free ticket to the Film Noir festival that had shown up in his mailbox last week, Dannie looked forward to a long afternoon of black-and-white bliss; the zebras had him just where they wanted him.
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Made Man
“Don’t you get it, Vito?” growled Capo Michael “Big Gravy” DeSoto to his broken record of a jealous errand boy, “my new guy was born a made man - he’s freakin’ Frankenstein!”
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Castle: Kid
Roddy was always bragging about how his family had a castle, so me and the other cool kids were always looking for a way to make him eat his pride – and then of course, all he could brag about was how he ate a castle.
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Your Precious Liquids
“I have to admit something – sometimes, I just can’t hold it and I pee in bottles, then hurl them outside,” admitted an embarrassed Alvin, who had obviously never read the memo about how recycling in the space station worked.
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One Trick Pony
Butterscotch was a one trick pony, and that trick was zero-g jetfighter loops.
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Sea Monster
At the Buster Seashell Aquarium of the North Pacific, the friendly Buster staff was exuberant about aquatic life and answered every question with Buster zeal, with the exception of “how many penguins do you think I could beat up?”
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Bean-Shaped Heart
“No, we’re not your real parents… but maybe if you found them they’d donate one of their kidneys.”
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The Right Move
I thanked old Mrs. Cruzfeather for the lovely cup of tea and then, while she was fetching me a biscuit, I spastically threw the stuff into her potted fig –- people get poisoned that way all the time, I saw it in a movie once.
Making the Cut
Back in my schooldays, every kid I knew wanted to be a ninja, but the harsh truth was most of us died in the training.
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And Where is Your Fifteen Minutes?
“It was my damn swelled head that ultimately destroyed my fame,” stated Abernathy Flakstan, the former ten time winner of the “Smallest Head in Kennitonk” whose biopic rights were allegedly caught in a bidding war between Seventh Street Russ and the hairless guy who drank the blue liquid at Crabby’s Barber Shop.
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