Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
He encountered a friend and told him, “I like your shirt. That’s very nice.”
“Thank you,” the friend replied.
“Would you sell it to me?”
“What?”
Brainstorm! He’d start a reality game show — “The Shirt Off Your Back” — where minor celebrities would go around offering people money, gifts, or favors for the clothes they were wearing. It’d be sort of a poor person’s Indecent Proposal.
It was dumb enough that it might just work.
“Capitalism is a feral beast but I love her when she works for me.”
— Easy Rawlins
From Blood Grove by Walter Mosley
He enjoyed people watching. Regulars were given backstories as their habits and details were observed and conversations they had with others were overhead.
One twentyish woman always wore a jean jacket lined with wool. An ordinary jacket except she wore it every day. This was during summer, during the day, during times when the temperature tiptoed up through ninety to one hundred degrees F. Yes, she was inside, where air conditioning sometimes made it feel like we huddled in shacks as we went ice fishing. But she never removed it, always wore it.
Imagination began fabricating reasons for her jacket. It could be fashion commitment. Perhaps a medical condition? Maybe the jacket provided her with extraordinary powers or protected her. There was also the possibility that the jacket gave her form. Removing the jacket would reveal that she had no body beneath it, exposing her as a neck with two hands and a lower body.
It was hard to say why she wore the jacket, but many possibilities existed.
He enjoyed a long, intimate drink of coffee. The brew — temperature, flavor, highlights, smell — was perfect, encouraging him to drink longer, and then, to close his eyes and indulge in another long drink.
It was a gorgeous cup of coffee, and almost made up for the years of harsh, hot coffee he’d drunk in military facilities around the world at life dark thirty in the morning.
After he and his wife were married a few years, she passed on the casual judgement that he had a flat butt. He’d never considered his butt before, imagining without thinking about it that he probably had a pretty nice butt, but the comment raised his butt awareness. He began studying other’s butts and soon realized that a large spectrum of butt characteristics exist – flat, round, broad, muscular, chubby, pert, drooping, and so on. So many ways to classify and categorize butts by shape, contour, and type are out there that he eventually developed a large index butt shapes.
He had, somehow, become an asspert, all because of his own flat butt.
Old floof song, usually sung at night, often to the tune of a “I’m A Floof”.
Five o’clock in the morning,
‘bout more than a hour ‘fore dawn.
I’m staring in my food dish.
My kibble’s half gone.
Starvation is standing beside me.
It’s not a good place to be.
All I want is some kibble.
Why do they torture me?
Whoa, I got the kibbles,
I got the old kibbles blues.
If you had to eat ol’ kibbles,
You’d have the old kibbles blues, too.
Three young girls arrived. He’s not an expert in these matters, but their lithe size and small stature made him guess that they were probably ten to twelve years old. All were white and wore shorts, and four-to-five-inch-high heels with ankle straps. One of the pairs of heels had clear plastic. The other two were stiletto.
These, he was certain, were the youngest people he’d ever seen wearing high heels. He’d certainly never seen them on children this young before. It seemed like they portended something, but he didn’t know what.
One problem with using Purple Air to check his town’s air quality is that each time he checked, he ended up singing “Purple Rain” by Prince, but substituting ‘air’ for ‘rain’.
The moment was here: time to write. There was so much to do with storylines, plot points, and character development, his thoughts were like a clowder of kittens chasing one another and wrestling while also playing with a litter of puppies. Organization was required. Discipline. Focus. Direction. Yes, yes, yes. And, yes.
But first, more coffee.
He wondered if it was ‘just him’. He didn’t really become annoyed, but it was a minor irritation when another person insisted that he make a call on the household’s behalf and then hovered nearby, eavesdropping, inserting themselves into the conversation by throwing out comments even though they have no idea what’s being said on the other end, throwing the conversation’s rhythm off. If they wanted to talk, why’d they give him the phone and asked him to call?
Yes, it was probably just him who found this rude and intrusive. It often was ‘just him’.
Michael Seidel, writer 