Phil the Post-it Note

There was a post it note named Phil. Phil had a terrible memory. All he would ever be able to remember was one thing, and he had no control over what it was he would remembered. Once Phil remembered something, he could never remember anything new again. It would be a moment as if the hand of god - or the person who owned the notepad - suddenly wrote something upon his mind. One day, Phil would be lying on a table, trying not to stick to strongly to a surface - you know, to keep his options open - when suddenly the pen would come.

From then on, Phil would never be able to remember anything new. If something new did enter into his mind, Phil knew from listening to the elder post it notes in the pad Many a day, things would be come confused, like lines of writing overlapping. Soon there would be too much, and the crumpling would occur. None of the other post it notes knew what it was like to crumple, just that one day you would either be whisked away to guard what they were inscribed to know or that they would be crumpled.

As a result, all post it notes lived in fear of being crumpled because one condition didn't sound like it would be too different a life- mostly just sticking to surfaces and rustling in breezes - while the other sounded vastly different.

Like all other post-it notes, Phil was afraid of change. His body spent such time at rest, only occasionally fluttering at the edge - crunched as he in the post-it note queue - and the concept of rapid and continued motion frightened Phil. He didn't know how he would regain control of his being once the crumpling began, and he - and the other post it notes - knew how ineffectual his one defence, the paper cut, could be. No one who lashed out at the mysterious force that crumpled ever came back a live.

To be continued...

Down from the corner of Mulberry and Penobscot

The brontosaurus trotted down Mulberry street. With one step, its head swung right and its tail left. With the next step, its head swung left and its tail right. And so forth. Head and tail a like clubbed cars, telephone poles, lampposts, trees (like crepe myrtles), mailboxes, pedestrians, small dogs, and the ghosts of travelling salesmen trampled to death by the brontosauruses of the days of yore.

Of course, brontosauruses, famed for the miniscule size of their brain and the presence of a second brain in the rump to control the tail are not known for giving too much thought to larger matters of the world. This is illustrated by the fact that the head always goes one way the tail other. Many biologists might tell you that the opposing sway of the head and tail are a matter of balance. Those biologists are wrong and just plain stupid.

But not as stupid as brontosauruses, and likely not so happy either. After all there are the sayings, "happy as a brontosaurus" and "cheer up like a brontosaurus," and "there's no such thing as a sad brontosaurus." People always think brontosauruses must be too big to feel anything, and if they do it probably has to do with the constant need to eat. This particular brontosaurus, the one on Mulberry street, is in fact travelling down Mulberry Street towards Penobscot Street, and this particular day happens to be trash day. The brontosaurus stops every driveway to eat a special basket of wilted lettuce and other assorted vegetable remains that each neighbor dutifully leaves out next to the regular trash.

The neighbors would tell you that they leave the baskets of greens out because they love to take care of all of nature's creatures, the neighborhood brontosauruses most of all. They would never admit, especially not on national TV, that they hate the brontosauruses because the brontosauruses, THIS brontosaurus in the case of Mulberry street, roam the streets because the people kept feeding them. In such regards, the brontosauruses were not any different than backyard squirrels or the racoon who won't stay out of the garage. The main difference was that a spoiled squirrel or racoon would not go on a starved rampage through the suburbs, destroying cars, walls, houses, and pavement with the thunderous march of its footprints and catastrophic hurling of its body weight.

Several neighborhood ordinances attempted to eliminate the brontosaurus problem. The first ordinance required that nobody feed the brontosauruses in the hopes that they would seek sustanence elsewhere. This ordinance resulted in eleven dead and twenty two million dollars in property damage. The second ordinance called for a signed petition to be read allowed to the brontosauruses explaining that even on good days their presence caused thousands of dollars worth of damage, and would they kindly take their destruction elsewhere. Every resident signed the petition. The brontosauruses ate the petitions straight from the hands of the messangers. The cost to the city was the price of approximately one ream of paper and about two hundred man hours of signature aquiring labor. The third ordinance called for the creation of a central dumping ground for all vegatable refuse in the hopes that drawing all the brontosauruses to a consistent and strategically chosen feeding area would minimize both feeding damage and general brontosaurus free roaming. This experiment caused the city to discover that despite the scattered and apparently independent roaming of many brontosauruses, possibly encouraged by a lack of natural predators, brontosauruses were truly by nature pack animals. The alpha brontosaurus siezed control of the feeding pile, and the lower brontosauruses rampaged through the suburbs hoping to gain the alphas favor by making the main pile bigger. Damage resulted on the same level as that caused by the first ordinance.

The fourth ordinance called for the town and county police force to recruit a band of armed civilian volunteers in order to attempt to bring down or drive out the brontosaurus herd. This ordinance proved to be the most financially efficient as it saved the area the salaries of the numerous officers who lost their lives and opened up the job positions of the recently deceased citizenry to less fortunate individuals who were ambitious enough to apply. However, the ordinance was imediately repealed after the infamous B-Day massacre. Certainly, no one in the city council expected brontosauruses to turn so viscious when shot with armor piercing rounds.

The fifth ordinance, the first one to fail the vote, suggested that the entire town be relocated several miles to the east to a suitable sight in the hopes that the territoriality of the herd was the cause of their roaming. In a 4-3 vote, the prevailing argument suggested that the brontosauruses may have intially arrived in the area in search of a central herd territory, but that the consistent and readily available supplies of food ensured that they would be unable to survive on their own and would arrive in the newly resettled town in a starved and desperate state.

The final ordinance necessitated that the residents left a bucket of vegetable greens out once a week.

Chett and Sarah sat on a swinging bench on their porch on Mulberry Street. They held hands and watched the brontosaurus gracefully dip its head into the bucket on their driveway. It lifted its head, leaves of lettuce falling away from the sides of its mouth.

"So much like a cow," Chett says. "The way its mouth moves."

"What do you suppose they eat the rest of the week?" Sarah says.

No one really knew. No one wanted to know. All Chett and Sarah knew was that if they did their part, if they lived their lives in accordance to the law, the worst they could expect was a few hundred dollars of damage to their car, a few hundred dollars of damage to their lawn, and a variable amount of damage to the street and sidewalk per week. Unless of course, the brontosauruses tail knocked open the fire hydrant like it did two months before. Other than that though, that and the constant breaking of windows due to the thunderous shaking produced by the animals foot steps, all Chett and Sarah had to due was leave a bucket on their end of the driveway and make sweet love late in the evenings to baritone singers who laid their vox over bass guitar and a hand drum set to brass melodies.

"I really love you," Chett says, taking Sarah's hand in his.

"I really love you to," Sarah says. "Do you think this is a good neighborhooed to raise children?"

Mrs. Norman across the street and two blocks up pushes her stroller out of her front door, as if right on cue. The brontosaurus lifts its head from the bucket and looks over to Mrs. Norman. It swings its head towards and into the stroller. Leaving a Mrs. Norman's baby howling and newly naked, the brontosaurus swallows the babies clothing and goes back to its buckets.

"Of course my love," Chett says. "We're gonna have a healthy litter. Have you checked on the eggs this morning?"

Sarah opens the hatch in her stomach. She pats Chett on the cheek with playful condesencion. "Every five minutes."

Like little brontosaurus eggs, Chett thinks as he looks at the eggs in Sarah's storage compartment. He leans forward, hovering his face over Sarah's belly. He knows what an act of will it takes for Sarah to supress her instincts and not kill him for getting so close to her eggs. He breathes his hot breath gently on the eggs. It's almost like touching them, he thinks. I wish I could touch them, but then she really would kill me and I can't say that I'd blame her.

When he leans back from the clutch, Sarah closes her stomach and relaxes. She slides her hand back under Chetts, and together they watch the brontosaurus rear onto its hind legs to the top of a tree. Chett sighs, and wonders what his children will look like as they hatch from their eggs, climb onto his lap, and begin to eat him to build their strength. Those first days will be crucial, Chett thinks, I'll need to start fattening myself up.

pertaining to the recent lack of activity.

Although it might appear that writing on this page, as on my other blogs, has stalled out. However, such is not the case. As of late, I have been sidetracked with a blog writing project that has absorbed all of my fictional energies (blog fictional energies anyway). To read this project, go to the list of links on the right side. Click on "write, then think" and read the post entitled "F for fetus" and all its attached comments. You will find a lengthy and hopefully funny story that is the joint collaboration between myself and the author of "write, then think". However, if you wish to post any comments of your own, please post them to this blog as we are keeping the comment space on "write, then think" exclusively dedicated to the continuation of the story. Happy reading!

Detective Story

When the lightening crashes, the cheap venetian blinds over the window let in bars of light across my desk like a TV with a broken something. The black funnel shaded lamp wobbles on its chain for no particular reason other than the neat effect it has on the lighting. I pop the top of my zippo with a snap and flick the flint to buzz a flame with that little hiss of air sucking into ignition. The white of the ember ember of the cigarette reflects off the glass, illuminating the little running bubbles.

Then there is a knock on the door. Even from here, I can see the shadow of an eye trying to look in through the peephole. You have a peephole long enough, you notice these sorts of things.

"It's open," I call through a throat thick with bourbon and whiskey, the glass empty but fuming with traces of alcohol on a file envelope labeled "Case - Gordon."

The door opens, and a dame walks in with her brown hair tossed over one shoulder and wearing a black trench coat with a hem that cuts off half way down the thigh. Her lips are full and pouty, a dark shade of gray. Her skin is an ashen shade of white with deep shadows on her eyes. Her cigarette trails white smoke as she plants her hand on her hip and leans against the door frame like she was meant to be there, a statue and a silhouette all at once. The kind of statue you’d like to wake up next to as long as she wasn’t made of marble or had an inflation tube on the back of her neck.

"Can I help you, mam?"

She sticks her head forward and places her other hand on her hip, pouting her lips out.

"You're the only one who can help me."

I puff my cigarette and run my finger around the rim of my dark gray fedora. I reach for the empty glass on the table but stop myself. The bottle of rum is on the filing cabinet by the door. The whiskey and bourbon on the table on the far side of the room. I know that if I am going to get to the bottom of this, I must deal with things one thing at a time, especially if I’m going to get to the bottom of this in a way that leads to me getting her into bed.

I run my eyes up and down her body like a cheap gumshoe, waiting for her to continue.

"And?"

"You're the only one who can help me."

I reach for the glass again, close my fingers around it and lift before I am thwarted again by its emptiness. Unsure of what to do with the glass and feeling a bit awkward by the attractive woman's off-kilter repetition, I slip the glass into my trouser pocket in a surreptitious manner. I can tell already that this is going to be a difficult encounter and I am already doubting whether or not I’ll be able to get her into bed.

“Okay. We’ve established that much.”

She straightens. Smoothes her coat down her sumptuous, pale thighs.

“My husband is missing. You’re the only one who can help me.”

I nod, soberly and realize that I am rapidly approaching sobriety because of the distance between myself and the alcohol and the presence of this dame. Bracing myself for the possibility that this woman has come to my office for more than soliciting sex, I decide that the best course of action is to sit, so I sit on the silver chair and pull myself into the black desk.

“And how can I help you with that?”

She scrunches up her little button nose and a crease appears between her penciled eyebrows.

“Well, you can find him for starters. You’re the only one who can help me.”

“Can we continue this without any further repetitions of ‘you’re the only one who can help me’?”

“If that’s the way you’d like it.”

Then she slides the little padded chair from beside the file cabinet, and the light hanging over my desk wobbles mysteriously on its chain, again producing that curious effect of moving shadows. She crosses her thigh over her knee, preventing me from trying to glance up the bottom of the trench coat. I can’t even tell if she’s wearing anything under that coat.

“So...you’re husband is missing and you want me to find him?”

“Well what did you expect? It’s not like I’m trying to solicit sex.”

I shrug. Disappointing. I figure at least rules of social protocol can relax.

“Well, before we start talking, could you be a dear and hop to the file cabinet and grab me that bottle of rum?”

Confusion on her face as she complies. A touch of irritation. If I wasn’t going to get sex before, I certainly won’t now. She bangs the bottle bottom against the table as she sets it down.

“Can we get down to business now?”

“Well, first tell me why you think I can help.”

“You don’t want to know his name? Where I last saw him? How else will you know if it’s a case you can handle?”

“Case?”

She takes the bottle, pops the plug and swigs. A trickle of rum runs down her thin. The murky gray liquid totters in the bottle.

“Are you just playing hard ball or what? Or is this some trick?”

“What are you talking about? Why are you here? You’re not even wet. It’s pouring outside.”

“Trench coats keep you dry,” she says. “Speaking of which, why aren’t you wearing one?”

I look down on myself. I’m wearing gray jeans and a black and white checkered shirt. The checkers seem to cast shadows in the wobble of the overhead light.

“Should I be? I’m indoors.”

The woman opens one of the pockets of her trench coat and pulls out a folded bunch of papers. She flips through them.

“This conversation isn’t going at all according to my script.”

“You brought a script?”

“Well you don’t enter a detectives office without some preconceived notions of what is going to be said, now do you?”

“Detective?”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What makes you think I’m a detective?”

"Well, there's a file folder on the desk, for starters."

I look down at the gray folder.

"That's a red herring."

She shrugs.

“We are in black and white, aren’t we?”

She had me there. Maybe I was a detective. But if so, were was my gun? I didn’t feel particularly hard-boiled unless you counted by now rather confused hard on.

“I guess I can be a detective for you.”

She looks around frantically. Then straight into my eyes. The kind of gaze that makes you want to tear your shirt open and howl at the moon like some lost, wild beast.

“Give me your glass” she says.

“My glass?”

“In your pocket.”

I shrug, pull out the glass and slide it across the table. She takes the bottle of rum, pours two fingers into the glass and sloshes it in my face. I was right. Long night ahead. And not in the good way.

“Not if you’re going to make it sound so dirty.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t be all ‘I guess I can be a detective for you.’”

I wipe my chin with my palm, then suck the rum out of the collar of my shirt. I haven’t even started being a detective and I already suspect that I’m not going to be a very good one.

“Well what should I say then?”

She opens her script.

I wave my hand.

“Look, I’m sorry you’re husband is missing, but I just don’t think this scene is working for me.”

She pouts a second.

“You feel it too, huh?”

I nod. We both stand up and shake hands.

“It was really nice meeting you,” I say. “Sorry I can’t be more help. You might want to try next door. That guy is real gritty.”

“I’ll do that,” She says. “Sorry I threw a drink in your face.”

“Cheap stuff anyway.”

She walks to the door, looks over her shoulder and blows me a kiss. I catch it and shove it down the front of my pants. Then she is gone forever, like a wind in the desert with the name of Sarah.

I step back over to the window. Yep. It’s a dark and stormy night.

For those who still check

I swear more posts will come soon. I've been too swamped in writing poetry to think fiction, though my brain has been rebelling as of late and the seeds of weird stories are starting to sprout. Be patient until after April 3rd and then I will resume here.

The Loneliest Surface to Air Missile in the World: An Encore Presenation

***author's note: I hand wrote a fairly amusing film-noir style detective comedy piece, but I have been too lazy to type it up. So instead, I present you with an encore presentation of the following story. It originally appeared on Fishheadalchemy, but it was really what inspired me to rethink the concept of this page and start writing the stories you have found here for the last couple of months. Enjoy:


Let me tell you about Sam. Sam was a missile, the loneliest surface to air missile in all the world. Sam sat forever at the bottom of the silo. He waited day in and day out for his turn to launch. Tears ran down his fins from his nose casing as he watching buddy after buddy zip out from the earth on a bed of flames to a firy destruction in the skies above.

So glorious, Sam thought, to launch from the earth on a bed of fire and collide with another object to detonate in the sky in an even bigger and more destructive fireball than the one that launched me.

Sam thinks about launching every day, about the blue sky, about the trees growing smaller before he blew up. Sam cries everynight as one by one his friends fly away to their beautiful, firey deaths.

"What's the point of being a missile if not to be launched? Can there be a God if there is nothing for me to blow up?"

These are the questions Sam asks day in day out. The other missiles that hadn't been launched long grew tired of hearing Sam's whining and made themselves go dud. As night set on the silo shortly before the end of the summer and the last rays from the sun backed out of the hole like a dying flame, Sam wondered if he could just launch himself.

Could he fire without purpose to detonate in the sky? Would his explosion be just as glorious?

Sam didn't have the answer. He just waited and waited until one day one of his red guiding fins fell away from the side of his propulsion housing. One of his internal sensors shut down and another indicated that his fuel had been contaminated. The months past, and then the years, and so did war after war, and Sam's housing began to corrode and his nose lost its shine.

One day, some technicians opened a door at the base of Sam's silo dressed in white coats smudged with grease and carrying clipboards.

"Looks like this one's got to be junked too," the first technician said.

"Yeah, too bad they didn't launch this one when the war was still hot," the second technician said. "I bet this was one damn fine missile.

"You got that right," the first technician said. "He would have blow'd up good. They don't make them like this no more."

"They don't fight wars like this anymore," the second technician said, shaking his head.

Neither technician knew it, but tears rolling down Sam's side through the rust and the corrosion. Neither of them knew it, but they'd broken Sam's internal guidance chip with grief, and he had become a dud despite his determination to stay volatile. When Sam was disassembled and deposited in a weapons disposal facility, he was too sad to notice. He just didn't know which was more meaningless, to be laid to waste or to detonate in the sky atop a pillar of smoke and flame without a target.

The End

The Cod God

Because Cod are difficult to distinguish between, being alike in shape and color and most intellectual respects, this cod will be referred to as Cod A. I realize that this places intrinsic limitations on character development and perhaps on the reader's ability to empathize with Cod A, but shouldn't escape your notice that Cod A is in fact a cod, therefore a fish, and sometimes I wonder or not whether we should really attempt emotional resonance with a fish. We might hit some sort of fin frequency and suddenly find ourselves mutating in our beds sprouting dorsal appendages while flopping on the box spring in a vain attempt to draw water through our newly formed gills.

So there was Cod A swimming in the stream that ran from the hill to the pond while thinking "bottom feed, bottom feed" or something like that in fish thought. Now, the stream from the hill, which will hearafter be referred to as hill 1 for the purpose of geographical distinction with hill 2 which is on the otherside of the fence, that runs to pond alpha, such designated because it likes to be such designated, was a nice stream as streams go, lush at the bottom with the water greens that sprouted between the rocks. Insects with broad leg spans liked to glide over the surface of the eddies. Mosquitos hatched their eggs among the reeds along the north shore right at the elbow bend. Crawdads darted from alcove to alcove along the bottom, swift despite the inflexibility of their armor.

And of course, there were plenty of Cod swimming up and down the current, cod named Cod C, Cod L, Cod X, and Cod P. Cod A was a young cod, not long ago hatched in pond alpha. From birth, Cod A found it was adept at the national past time of Cod across the world which was swimming up and down streams. The local team swam from Pond Alpha to Hill 1. Then they swam back. Since Cod have a poor sense of time and little to no rational thought or memory, there was no method of measurement between cods, just the knowledge that one cod was a good cod while another cod was a bad cod.

And of course, while they swam, all cod kept an eye out for the Cod God. The Cod God is not to be confused with the God Cod that rules over the Cod afterlife with an iron fin. Instead, the Cod God was a legend among Cod, appearing in the form of the most brilliant gleaming light. The Cod God transported cod to the Cod God. Most recently, it was Cod D who ascended to glory and righteousness from the pond. Cod L had an inkling that it might be next, but Cod X believed that honor to be its and it alone.

Not that the Cod actually communicated any of this to each other, or even really thought about it to themselves since, as already stated, Cod possess little to no capacity for thought. Most likely they think "water feels nice," and "BRIGHT THING!!!" And, of course, sometimes they vomit.

So Cod A swam from Hill 1 to Pond Alpha and was planning on swimming back to hill 1, when it realized that something was different about the water. Something was warmer. Brighter. A greater amount of silt than usual was kicked up by little creatures stirring at the bottom, and Cod A was overwhelmed with the impulse to bottom feed while thinking something resembling "water feeds nice."

Off among the rushes, Cod X swam in figure eights around its perspective egg laying site.

Cods C, L, and P were all on their way to Hill 1.

And Cod A snorfled among the green plants at the bottom of pond alpha, vaguely aware that something about the water was different. More electric, like the effervescence of opportunity healing the mysterious rift of the chaos of nature. Of course, we already know what Cod A couldn't comprehend which is that we have lowered the Cod God into the water and lie in wait on the slats of a rowboat to transport a cod by means of the Cod God to bask in the glory of the God Cod on the slats of our boat, the very slats upon which we are lying.

Of course, we, not being cods, really know nothing of the Cod God or the God Cod. We are here for dinner. For sport. You might be here for the moment you beat the Cod senseless with your oar to stop its insescent flapping. I don't know about you. We really don't know each other well being fishing buddies from work, catching a few minutes of chat over cigarettes on breakdown. Even then we talk mostly about Cod.

But you might say that we are the unknowing vessels for the Cod God, transmitting meaning into the water in the form of the purposeful touch of human presence. Thinking about frying up a nice juicy Cod.

And of course, though we know that cod are below us swimming in pond Alpha, we don't realize that Cod A is snorfling for bottom dregs among the greens, that the flap of cod A's tail against the water that sends microsurge currents through the depths. We don't know the frenzy those microsurges cause in the microscopic pond alpha dwellers.

"I can't wait to fry a fish," you say.

"Them fish will be good," I say.

Neither of us says anything about the undercurrents of our actions, let alone the microcurrents of Cod A's tail. We don't say anything about the disillusionment we will cause in Cod L and Cod X if we catch Cod A, nothing about the vacuum we will leave in the food chain balance vacuum the absence of such an important consumer will leave.

But of course, we don't catch Cod A. We go home empty handed and hungry, our lures wet and dripping and baitless. None of us, the fish included realize that Cod A will forever be unaware of a slight, barely cogniscent nagging that it missed the great chance of its youth to ascend to meet the God Cod on the hooks and barbs of the shiny and metallic Cod God.