My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

Huge Baby

He’d been a huge baby.  Came out of the womb twelve pounds and kicking.  At a dinner party when she thought he was asleep, he’d heard his mother tell a male friend the birth felt like, “an angry monkey climbing out of your asshole.”  He never forgot that phrase for the rest of his life.  She’d been drunk, he knew, but it stuck.

He dreamed of it on his headstone.  He thought of it whenever he saw banner-carrying planes fly along the beach with phrases like: 2-FOR-1 WET T SHIRT ALL YOU CAN EAT CRABS.  He wrote it on bathroom walls when he was drunk and sad.  He thought for years he’d make it a t shirt, even designed an accompanying graphic, but couldn’t imagine any place he’d actually wear it.

He didn’t even like the phrase very much, or the image.  He hated both, in fact, but it was his.  Worse than just hearing it, he actually saw her say it, saw the shit-faced expression of incredulousness as she uttered the words.  She’d seemed in the moment genuinely stunned to still be alive after the experience.

Afterwards, he didn’t turn goth or shoot up his school or kill his parents or join the military or kidnap kids in a windowless van or turn his anger towards sports and conquer the tennis world or begin a tortuous drunken life ending in a black out collision with a highway construction crew or start fucking his history teacher into a six month affair that leads to him and the teacher orchestrating a bloody twenty five minute botched-melee-murder on the husband in the garage with a ballpeen hammer and blood stains covering 35% of the garage’s surface areas.

What he did do was begin to secretly hate his mother forever and she never, at any moment for the rest of her life, ever understood why.