Mike saw that the cute barista who had smiled at him, and filled up his to-go coffee cup, had also drawn a little heart next to where she had written his name. This small gesture led to what became an almost daily ritual of stopping by her counter on the way to his office and purchasing a small heart on a to-go cup filled with coffee.
After a few days of these early morning visits, Mike noticed that the stranger in front of him in line picked up a cup signed “Dave ❤️” – an observation which led to a marked decrease in his morning caffeine intake thereafter.
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It is amazing how small gestures can sometimes redirect behavior in large ways. It is also amazing how much it can sting to realize that a small gesture is, in fact, small.
While running his fingers down the middle of his back, looking for the exact origin point of his nagging ache, and intending to dig his thumb into the muscle there, Walter’s fingers feel a small lump of tissue just to the left side of his spine.
He freezes, and suddenly a rush of recent memories flood into his mind, including an odd morning two days prior when his left leg had been numb upon waking.
He then considers whether he should ask his wife to look at the spot or if he should visit the doctor first, alone, to have it looked at, just in case it turns out to be nothing.
I once had a pilar cyst (not a big deal, as I later found out) on my back, that I discovered in this manner. In my case, I asked about it and was told it had always been there. I’d just somehow never noticed it because it’s hard to get a really good accounting of what’s happening in the middle of my back, you know?
It’s weird to think that lumps of tissue, growing where they shouldn’t, should be so scary. And yet…
It’s also interesting how open you can become (or not become) regarding your own body and its oddities while in a long term relationship. Depending on the circumstances, that openness might shift strongly in one direction, or the other, even between the same two people. Eventually, even in the best of cases, your body stops working properly and you cannot really hide that fact. The best person to help is the one you are with the most. Yet it’s also true that the person you are with most often can be the most impacted by those changes. Your “lump of tissue” is to a great extent theirs, too. Your bad news is their bad news.
I guess the alternative is for people to hide their injuries and then once sufficiently sick, to wander off somewhere alone to pass away. That’s a rather bleak thought.
“This is a beautiful old car and you’ve taken great care of it, so do you mind me asking why you’re selling it?”
“To be honest, I don’t want to,” the old man began “but my kids are telling me it’s time, I don’t want to fight with them about it anymore, and God help me if something ever happens to prove them right.”
I had a lot of feelings about his answer and the look in his eyes when he gave it, and I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but instead I just said that I was thankful to be the lucky guy he is selling it to, before handing him a check, wishing him well, and driving away.
If we are very lucky, most of us will eventually end up on both sides of this type of exchange. Of course, it does not feel like luck, for most people, to be on the latter end.
Writing this story was a bit like “adventures in compound sentences” to get it in under the limit, but I think it worked even if it also feels like I cheated.
Through the window, the image of a large green woman holding aloft a torch comes into view in the distance. Her presence cements into reality, for Boryslav and his family, a relocation that none of them could have foreseen just a few months ago.
While he thinks on what it means to be a refugee, he looks more intently and notices a sinister smile on the great lady’s face.
I always enjoy – in good storytelling – when the characters think they have reached a place of safety only to learn that they have been lured into a trap. The Statue of Liberty is so often used as a positive symbol that it felt like good material to use for subversion of expectations.
Obviously I am not the only one who has had this particular idea.
Freddie Kaminski blows ten birthday candles out at the local Chuck E. Cheese, in front of a crowd of six that includes his older sister, Julie, and both of his parents. Despite no school absences from any classmates the day before, his parents spent the morning fielding numerous barely apologetic phone calls from other parents proclaiming the sudden onset of an illness, or some other unexpected circumstance, and thus an inability to attend.
Freddie thinks to himself, as he observes the continued surprise, disappointment, and worry of his family, that he had told them he did not want a party this year.
Is this how villains are made? Or is this how parents are made aware of the fact that a villain has already been made?
This story is mostly just a projection of parenting anxiety.
Social adjustment is probably more important than anything academic you pick up when you’re young (though not being able to do academic basics can be an obstacle to social adjustment.) It is my experience, based on several interview and hiring experiences, that homeschooled kids are often far more well-adjusted than their peers. There is something to be said for inculcating emotional security until it permeates a person’s self-identity.
The neighbors of the upscale Carlisle Creek suburban housing addition gather outside, in their yards and along sidewalks and streets, to witness the home-shaking display taking place in the distance above them. The sky is alight with explosions that color the heavens like too many fireworks.
It had been a surprise to humanity that the hostile extra-terrestrial visitors considered the recent passage of the Voyager 2 space probe through the outer solar system a breach of their sovereign space.
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I have always thought it was a bit brazen to send space probes into outer space, especially with a bit of encouragement to come find us. One person or agency’s sense of exploration could quickly lead to an extra-terrestrial annihilation of all humanity if we just so happen to meet the wrong ETs. Our own past here on earth tells us as much. Is a vigorously enforced “sovereign space” unrealistic? Our own history her eon earth suggests that it is not.
Of course, if ETs showed up en masse, I suspect many of us would stand outside and watch.
As her marriage and career went up in flames, Haillee Calhoun sought out wisdom and advice from a book that has guided her throughout her life. She hoped, this time, that its answers would not remain elusive.
Through her tears, she started once more at the beginning of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
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In hindsight, this satirical story was a little bit mean-spirited on my part. It’s a riff on the “Read Another Book” meme, which was born out of the over-use and over-reliance upon the Harry Potter series as a means of comparison for everything. The story was designed to illustrate the limits of J.K. Rowling’s series.
Read Another Book is an expression used to criticize the overreliance on comparisons to Harry Potter in mainstream politics, particularly by Resistance Twitter users. It can also be used similarly as a catchphrase intended to criticize people who use the Harry Potter series to compare real-world events to that of the books, frequently appearing as a hashtag in such posts across a number of social media platforms online, often by members of the Anti-Harry Potter crowd.
Origin
The use of this catchphrase appears online as early as 2016, though the exact origins are unknown. On November 12th, 2016, one of the earliest examples of such use appears in a tweet from Twitter[1] user imbadatlife (seen below). The tweet, which uses “READ ANOTHER BOOK” alongside several examples of comparisons between Harry Potter and real-world political events, received over 16,300 likes and 7,400 retweets.
The tweet mentioned has some angry language, so I didn’t include it in the embed, but you can view it at the link above. In a similar vein, at one point, elite universities had to start putting out statements discouraging applicants from citing Hatty Potter in entrance essays, due to how frequently the story was being used by applicants. I enjoyed the series (both the book sand the movies) but I am a little uncomfortable about our very best and brightest universally citing the story in entrance essays.
We have an entire generation of people who might be identifiable as the Harry Potter generation. My story above, mean and/or funny as it is, is my attempt to imagine one such person returning to the books during a bad patch in her life.
A disbelieving John Bennett stumbled out into the river and its rushing current made his knees buckle, though he managed not to fall.
“Dear God, please stop that fish,” he moaned helplessly. Unfortunately for John and his wedding ring, the Lord did not answer his prayer and the catfish swam away.
This story was kind of born out of a twenty year old prompt. A friend of mine once tried to get a group of us to play a game wherein he would introduce a prompt and someone would have to write a story around the prompt. One of the prompts in the game was “Dead God, please stop that fish” (or something very near to that,) and for some reason I have never been able to let that prompt go.
This three sentence story was my attempt to craft a very short story around it. I also had an idea about someone watching helplessly as an order of salmon was served to the wrong person (with the error creating large consequences.)
I live in a part of the United States where people go noodling. In my imagination, a guy who was noodling bare-handed, and despite his wife’s stern admonition against, came to regret the decision.
Dusty Writes 