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.

Look, I don’t know what you’re getting so mad about. I mean, I know no break up is a good break up, and you have every right to be upset, but there’s no need to be causing such a scene.

Unexpected? Really? We’ve been at each other’s throats for the last couple months now, and the only way we’ve been communicating is through yelling. We haven’t even seen each other for the last couple weeks before now. You can’t really say this is coming out of the blue, can you?

I’m not saying that it’s your fault, of course. I’m not blaming you or trying to be mean, I’m just saying let’s be realistic here. Believe me, I’m sorry, and I’m trying to do everything here to make this as easy as possible. Anyway, I feel like I cut you off there. You were saying?

Wow, seriously? This is the rudest break up you’ve ever been through? For real? Again, you have the right to feel however you want, but color me surprised. I thought I was being really nice about this. I made sure to see you in person. I’m not doing this over the phone or email. I made sure we’re somewhere private in case there was any breakdowns or anything. I even brought some of your favorite foods and things as a kind of…I don’t know…goodwill gesture, you know?

What’s that? I guess I could see how this could be construed as a date or a make up effort, sure. So I’m sorry for that, but it’s not. That’s not what I intended at all.

Sure, it’s Tuesday. Why do you ask? Is it a special day today or something? It’s Valentine’s Day? You’re shitting me. Well, damn. Okay, this changes everything.

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.

It is the fourteenth of August in the year 2024. The time is 3:47 pm. This will be our first human trial of the mental transfer. I will be having my mind transferred into that of an ant for one minute. During the entirety of that time, I will be doing what I am doing now, which is thinking completely in words, reporting what I am experiencing so these thoughts can be transcribed onscreen to our research team.

I am currently wired in, watching the countdown clock and awaiting transferal. Transferal begins in 6…5…4…3…2…1…

I am seeing a lot of light. So much light it’s blinding. There’s too much sound! I can’t close my eyes! It’s too much! Okay, it’s calming now. Things are calming down. I think I was having a sensory overload as my brain adjusted to this new form. Side thought: could this be what birth is like?

Things are coming more into focus now. I may be seeing and hearing, everything is completely different. I don’t know what to do, or how to handle this exactly. I am going to attempt to walk forward.

I don’t think I’m moving, you will have to tell me if I am moving. I do not think so. Muscle control is hard. Still seeing and hearing things in a strange way. I am having trouble thinking. It feels like I am losing my ability to think.

Please end this early. Please put me back. I am scared. I do not like this.

I am collect something now? I am bring something now? I see. I hear. I know what to do.

I am get it. Eat. I am get. I am get. I am. I. I. I. I. I. Us?

END TRANSMISSION

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.

Pristine wore drab green high heel galoshes to work.  Thick squarish heels like makeshift table legs.  High fashion heels with mud on them–the exact sentence fragment she’d used to describe herself on her FIT application.

She slung hushpuppies and jalapeno poppers at Mustang Sally’s near The Garden three days a week.  She loved basketball, played in college but her neck and legs weren’t thick and while she munched plenty of rug in her playing days, it was because she wanted to, not because she was a lesbian.

Nowadays she goes to the occasional Knicks game with customers.  She always claims the away team as her hometown and screams invective at the Knicks every chance she gets.  When the surrounding crowd lays into her, she stands up and turns back and forth at the waist like a politician, addressing the crowd with both middle fingers raised.  The customers never asked her out again and usually started eating at Mustang Barry’s two doors down.

Some guys claimed not to care, but when she did the exact same thing the next game, they’d lose patience.  No one ever made it past two games.  “I thought you were from Sacramento?”  “Yeah, but my DAD’s from Chicago.  MARBURY’S A PEDERAST!  KNICKERBOCKING CUNT FUCKERS!”

She drank Bloody Marys her entire shift, popped olives like painkillers.  She was the kind of woman who ate giant steaks so she could take giant shits but somehow still seemed feminine at the same time.

She’d been going to FIT for seven years and loved having witty fags for friends.  She was happiest spending hours in Mood, stroking reams of fabric she couldn’t afford, before going to the sale bin and buying odd samples shaped like floor plans.

She couldn’t hand sew with a gun to her head.  Her machine work was amateur at best.  But she knew colors.  She took a class a semester, a pace that put her degree off another 3 years.  In the meantime there was Sally’s and its memorized, paced path among the booths.

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.

DH roped a single over the shortstop’s head, and immediately felt something clench in his hamstring on his way to first.  The manager brought in a nineteen year old from Omaha, thin as a mantis, to pinch run.

DH dropped his enormous ass on the dugout bench so hard even the deputy pitching coach felt it, way down at the end, but the crash fixed the static on the bullpen phone.

Three and a half minutes after DH raised his batting average to .338 he’d devoured an entire family pack of sunflower seeds, a half pound of homemade jerky he kept in the luxurious shaving kit that held his multiple batting gloves, and two cream pies meant for the pitcher’s face if he managed to win.  The pitcher was a rookie, and they’d planned to cream pie him when he got interviewed.  The other pie was backup.  DH ate both.

No one spoke to him in the dugout.  He knew he was fat and old.  He looked awful in a baseball uniform.  He suspected that’s where the expression ten pound sausage in a five pound bag originally came from—fat guys like him putting on embarrassingly tight clothes with no shame and jiggling around in public in the name of sports.  At least the famous boozers of the twenties didn’t have to play on television, he thought.

He began weeping in the dugout.  At first quietly, then his shoulders began to shake, and eventually he was bawling, snot down the front of a jersey already stained with jerky grease and cream pie.

He’d been right—everyone hated him.  The team released him that night and he flew home to Florida and sulked in his mansion.  When he came back two days later to clear out his locker, someone’d pissed in it, possibly multiple times.  His leather jacket was ruined and his kids’ drawings floated in the puddle at the bottom.  But he thought there might still be a jar of gherkins way back in the top and he stood on his tip toes to see.

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.

If I’m not mistaken, I believe this painting is The Vagina That Didn’t Talk Back, as painted by Hans Frootloos, one of my favorite artists from the Carney Netherland Years of the late 30s.

The setting resembles the pastel back of a dutch elementary school where kids in clogs play hand ball and the girls lick striped lollipops the size of truck tires.  Horses trot by carrying cheese-wheeled chariots.  Except this schoolyard is full of lions.

The mustachioed man is Ruud VanGooey, the greatest dutch lion tamer the world has ever seen.  He invented the whip, jodhpurs and mustache wax, and was considered a great thinker of his time, often dining with Einstein at their favorite knish cafe in the red light district.  Contrary to rumor, he did not invent the pompadour.

The whip is on the upswing, aimed at the temple of the charging lion about to rip Ruud’s face off.  One lion has pranced off in fear, and could he not, in truth, be considered the vagina?  The lion in the front corner either freshly awoken from a nap or presenting its anus for buggering.  The fourth lion watches the prancer descend, seconds away from crushing multiple vertebrae.

And then there’s The Vagina, the lioness, poised in a battle stance like a track star. Ruud’s pointing directly at her and she stares him down.  She’s growling, inches away from leaping to rip his throat out, but she’s clearly not here to argue and not a single word will ever escape her mouth.

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.

Due Diligence

Every time I go on a business trip, it’s always the same thing. I go in, shake everyone’s hand, say the bullshit I came to say, then try to duck out. That last part never works, though. The suits that I present to, who I could never relate to, always want to take me out to eat. I don’t know what it is about business types and their meals, but if you don’t break bread with them it’s an insult of some kind. Even if you’ve eaten with them before, you gotta eat with them again.

So this last time I was in Los Angeles, same old story. I do the presentation, and want to retreat to my hotel to watch porn on my laptop, but nooooo. It’s dinnertime. What’s weird about this one, though, is that not only do the three guys I was in the meeting room all day with come to the fancy restaurant (and they’re always fancy, by the way), so do six other people.

At first I was a little excited about this turn of events because a couple of the surprise guest were hot little numbers in tiny black dresses, but of course they got seated at the other end. I got wedged between a fat guy with slicked back hair that only wanted to talk about golf (fucking spare me), and a girl with long black hair that was apparently mute because other than ordering, she didn’t say a word.

So now’s the time where I perform. I call it my due diligence, where for two hours I turn on the charm and act interested in everything everyone has to say. Golf? I love it but don’t get out often enough, tell me about your last twelve games. Lawn care? I live in an apartment, but aspire to do tedious work all weekend someday just like you. Children? I hate them with a passion that could power the state of Ohio, but do go on and on about yours.

I even do my best to chat up the mute to my right. I ask her about her long hair, her family, the weather – but none of it works. At best she answers with a couple words then turns away. Fuck it, what do I care. I’m almost through this hell anyway. Dessert and coffee, great! Slurp it all down. Let’s get out of here.

Finally we’re outside the place, shaking hands and creeping our way towards cabs. At the end, it’s just me and the mute.

“Great meeting you,” I say to her as the cab that will get her the hell away from me pulls up.

“You don’t mean that,” she answers back flatly. “And everything you’ve said at the dinner tonight was false as well, except when you were talking about your favorite movie.”

I’m about to make some kind of back pedaling rebuttal, but then she continues. “Don’t worry about it, everyone at these things acts just like you. I’m not here to snitch you out or anything, I just come to take in all the masked misery that happens at these things. Free dinner and a show, you know? Anyway, you should quit your job and follow your dream of opening a bicycle shop. You’ll be less successful, but much happier.”

“How did you know about the bicycle shop?”

“I was in a car accident a while back that left me unable to walk for a year, and it gave me psychic powers. See ya!”

She got in her cab and drove away, leaving me stunned on the curb. How the hell was I supposed to know there was actually someone interesting sitting next to me?

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.

High Energy Painting

I met a few friends at the bar after work, and some of them were going to head over to an art show. I’m no high culture fiend or anything, but I like going to see exhibits at the museum and stuff, so I thought, why not?

We ended up in some loft in some area of town that looked run down yet still has well dressed young white kids running around all over. When we get up to the guy’s apartment or studio or whatever it is, it’s filled with a pretentious looking crowd standing around with red, plastic cups. They’re all ignoring the guy standing on a splattered tarp on a raised part of the floor in the corner. He’s wildly attacking a canvas with a brush to speed metal.

Again, I’m no art studies major, but I know something I like when I see it. I pull up a chair next to the platform, just as he’s putting in a new album.

“Hey, what exactly are you doing right now?” I ask him.

“This is my art style. I paint as fast as I can to fast music. I call my style High Energy. So this album lasts about 40 minutes, and the whole time, I’m going to paint as quickly as I can.”

“Cool.” I replied as I settled back to get ready to watch the show.

Blank canvas lined up and music queued up, he started thrashing his brush against the white surface the second the opening guitar lick kicked in. I sat and watched him intently, grabbing and mixing paint, throwing brushes to the wayside when they were worn out, sweating profusely only 15 minutes into the album. Every so often, one of my friends would wander by and watch with me, saying something like, “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?”

Just as rapidly as the CD had started, it just as rapidly ceased, and so did his painting. He walked away, never looking back, and headed to the bathroom. There his painting sat – a wild jumble of lines and random shapes, with no discernable pattern. Part of the canvas he never touched, so the whole thing looked unfinished.

A girl wearing a black and white striped scarf walked by and commented, “Wow, I’d always heard he was good, but wow.”

As soon as that was said, I stood up, left the party and walked home with the image of that painting in my mind most of the time. As I pictured the piece, the thought that popped into my head the most was, ‘art is stupid.’

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.

In the Neighborhood of Rick Luxury

They’re at it again, God damn it. Throwing each other around that shitty ring in their backyard. There should be zoning laws or something against this, but the cops have told me that there’s nothing they can do about some asshole doing flips and fake fights on their property. If I had known that there was going to be a professional wrestler moving next door to me when I first bought this house 20 years ago, I never would have come here.

Calling him a professional is a stretch, isn’t it? He calls himself Rick “Wrestling Personified” Luxury. With a crappy name like that, it’s no wonder he’s not on TV. From what I’ve heard, he only wrestles in gyms and bars around the area, trying to make it big. Good luck with that, buddy.

I don’t know anything about being a good pro wrestler, but I know a thing or two about being a good neighbor. Setting up a ring in your back yard, and spending the weekend with your buddies throwing each other around isn’t the best way to ingratiate yourself. The constant slamming noise from the ring is one thing, but the people that it attracts is what bugs me most. All these young, tattooed up young thugs with their little costumes…what kind of example is that to set.

I’ve made it a point to keep my eye on them from my window. I’m waiting on them to make one screw up – something like roughing up an underage kid or doing drugs back there. So far, the worst I’ve seen is them having some beers afterwards, but they probably know I’m watching so they do all the worst stuff inside the house.

Been watching their little shows for a few months now, and I’ll admit that I can see improvement. Not that I’d know what the hell makes someone good in this fakey sport, mind you. They’re doing full matches now, treating the whole thing like what you’d see at a real show, I guess.

Hate to admit it, but I’m starting to get into their bullshit. I even crack my window a little so I can hear their little speeches. That way I know who the good guys and the bad guys are, and can hear the flea-brained fairy tales they cook up about each other.

You know what I hate most about Rick Luxury, though? I’m jealous of him.

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.

Lady Star Wars…

NYC grants you the opportunity to witness spectacles on a daily basis, the best kind are the ones involving movies.  I’ve been to the opening of Batman, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, every guy action flick pretty much, but nothing compared to Sex and the City.  It comes along just once every decade that that a girly movie causes grown women to dress in costume and endure long lines with heels on.

My girlfriends, four of us of course, ordered our tickets online a weekend before and managed to snag one of the last screenings that evening.  You should never under estimate movies crowds; we showed up an hour half hour early and ended up wondering if we were even going to get to seat near each other.

The teenage usher says,  “Ladies, I am about to let you in.  Please try to maintain order.”  Of course he opens the elastic divider and we all make a run for it.  One women even lost her high heeled shoe and you could see the inner turmoil, should I leave it or try to get it seat?

After some quick thinking we score seats together in the second row and look up  at all the crazy hats and dresses to see drunken cosmopolitan cat fights, meanwhile the ushers are taking video footage and laughing.

All in all, the movie was just better because of the pre show antics.  Never underestimate the power of enthusiasm, lesson learned.

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.

Athletics and Life

You are pushed to limits everyday for years and then someone shows you a desk.  I was no NFL or NBA player, but like them  I pursued a passion, a sport that someday had to end.  It surreal to care so much about a sport and do it all the while knowing that your body will no longer go any harder faster or stronger, your body will get injured or you will peak, you hope you peak comes first.  In recent study they found bronze medalists to lead far more fulfilling, happier lives than silver medalists.  The reason:  silver medalists focused on losing the gold and bronze medalists were happy just to be standing on the podium.

 It got me thinking, is every area of my life going to play out like my athletic career? Take relationships for example, every relationship has its peak, usually it is the first year, then the rest of relationship you try to build endurance from the foundation that you established in year one.  Then you get bored and your training lags, so add something new into the mix, a kid.  Then ultimately you retire from your relationship and you and your partner becomes coaches.  You think back to the glory days of when you were fit, adventurous and carry out your remaining days together, but most of the time a new player gets added to you team, a trade perhaps which tries to get you to feel like you are back on the A squad.