Lost

            Aye, ‘twas a hell of a stint, I tell ya!  Thar I were, shakin’ and starvin’ in the brig.  I had no ale nor brooms to speak of as manner of consolation, it was a bad fix-up, what they done to me.  Sure, I done what they said I did, what with the shooting a cannon at Seamus, and whatnot, but I’d loaded the cannon full of parrots from the captain’s quarters, so as not to harm ‘im none.  That wasn’t fittin’ fer what they’d done to me, as punishment.  It just weren’t right.

            Be that as it were, I took to lickin’ the bars for sustenance.  Whilst I was lickin’, the ship shook violent-like!  I thought we were being attacked by other pirates, as what happened from time to time, but no holes came through the ship as it shook.  No, somethin’ else was goin’ on, entirely.  In a valiant fury, I tried to bite my way out of my fetters, but ‘twas to no avail.  I yelled fer assistance, but Porter just screamed back that I weren’t git’n’ no damn ale, and that I were a sea-forsaken idjit ass for askin’ at this particular time.  That’s when the children of the kraken came floodin’ in from Poseidon-knew-where on the ship.  The squids took Porter, the hapless bastard, by surprise and ate him in no time flat.  Hearin’ his squelchin’ and screamin’, I recommenced my efforts of biting my way free.  As it was before, I had no luck until the little bastards slid down the stairway and ate my cage like it was some fancy cheese.  Most o’ ‘em slid away after that, I think they were full, but a few attacked me. I fended ‘em off as best I could, but my prowess had dwindled a tad, as I’d had no ale in days.  Everyone knows a man fights better with the good stuff in ‘im.  I kept ‘em off most of me, but one lucky sumbitch threw itself at my foot, and latched on good.  I screamed with bloody vengeance in mind, and ran over to the cannons (which they kept right by the prisoners, for some reason).  I threw myself in the cannon with some powder, and blew myself and the foot-munchin’ pinprick devil into the ocean.  The thing attackin’ my foot died in the process, but it took my foot and half my calf with it.

            And that, son, is how come I wear this peg leg now.

It Has Come To This

            “So, it has come to this, eh?” Pock remarked, as he backed himself against the edge of the cliff. “I can’t help but feel like I’m trapped in a sequence from the Lion King. Do you feel that way, Han? Can you smell the déjà vu, the law suit coming our way?” He reached the edge of the cliff, and couldn’t help but sneer at his nephew, Han. What a pitiful child he had been. Now he thought he was all grown up, and could play with the big boys. How sweet.

            “What the hell are you babbling about? You killed my father when I was a kid, blamed me, and now all these years later, you want to talk to me about some stupid kids’ movie? Do you know how much crap I took from other kids until I learned that the Hitler Youth cap you gave me isn’t socially acceptable here, or anywhere else that ISN’T your house?! When people only know you as ‘Nazi Boy’, you don’t feel very welcome in the foster home, damn it!” Years of ridicule swept back through Han’s mind, making his hatred of his uncle that much more intense. The only two friends he had from his foster life, Tim-Bob and Paul, had been his only solace during that time.  “I still can’t believe you agreed to go on this safari with me. What did you think was going to happen? That we would kiss and make up?”

            “That did cross my mind, I’m not going to lie about that.  How could I pass this opportunity up, though? It’s Africa, and you’re my nephew! Sure, we’ve had some difficult times between us in the past, but I thought surely we could work past that if we killed some hippopotamuses.”

            “It’s hippopotami, you jackass!” With that, Han raised his hunting pistol and fired away at his uncle in a blind fury until he heard the gun’s empty click for a few seconds.  As his uncle fell from the top of the cliff, Han couldn’t resist shouting down at him “You could have lasted a bit longer, but that grammar mistake was the last straw, asshole!!” Suddenly, clouds zoomed in from all sides, and a spontaneous thunderstorm erupted around Han. “Oh, great. Now it’s raining. The hippopotami are going to be back out soon.” He ran back to the rented Land Rover and drove away from the crime scene as inconspicuously as possible while in a Land Rover. “Why do they only come in white?” Han asked himself as he tried to be sneaky, which wasn’t easy while driving a large, white, English brick on wheels.

            As he drove away, he saw three odd looking natives walking towards the cliff with expectant looks in their eyes. There were two men, and a woman. The woman and one of the men looked intelligent and purposeful, but the other man was in a violent giggling fit, and Han wasn’t sure how he could walk and laugh that hard at the same time. The others hit him every once in a while, seemingly in an attempt to shut him up, but he only laughed harder, until his giggling grew to a howling fit of laughter, and he couldn’t walk anymore.

            “Now that I think about it,” Han said to no one in particular, “this does seem oddly familiar.”

Omlete

            Ostrich egg omelet over easy, exactly what you don’t expect to find in the middle of an autopsy.  Davis had sawed the skull open, expecting to pull out a brain, but found something entirely different. It explained the smell, though.  Usually, dead people didn’t smell like food. The fact that this one did had caught him off guard almost as much as finding an omelet instead of a brain. Chemical analysis had told him that it was from an ostrich egg. He never would have guessed that, otherwise.

            “I think we found the cause of death, Watson.” Davis announced over his shoulder as he examined the omelet in his hands. Would it be ethical to eat it? He hadn’t had the chance to eat at all today. If he ate it, all evidence of this find would be gone, though…

            “Why do you keep calling me ‘Watson”?! And you found it? What killed our newest guest?” Winston said, excitedly bouncing over to Davis.

            “Death by spontaneous omelet-cerebrum translation. And shut up. You’re Watson for as long as you work for me.” Davis suppressed a chuckle. He decided not to eat the omelet, but now the question became how to preserve it for later.

            “Spontaneous what? No. That doesn’t make any sense.” Winston/Watson half-mumbled. He scratched his head as he looked for the brain that had to have been there. All he found was the fried ending of the spinal cord, perplexing him further.

            “It makes perfect sense, Watson. Look at it. There is no brain. There is an omelet. An omelet that is made of ostrich egg, no less. This lack of brain and surplus of omelet HAD to be the cause of death.  People don’t live with omelets in their skulls, you know, Watson.” With a flourish, Davis brought the omelet up to Winston’s face, letting him take a good look at it, then subtly danced over to the evidence freezer, having decided that freezing the omelet would be the best course of action.

            Winston scratched his head, again. Davis’ argument made sense, people couldn’t live with omelets in their heads, but still. Omelets couldn’t just get into people’s heads. It still didn’t make any sense.

            “I see you over there, trying to make sense of what you’re seeing. Don’t. One of life’s greatest lessons is that it doesn’t make sense. I quit trying to explain things any more than their obvious nature years ago, and look at me! I run a morgue now! Sweet gig, if you ask me.” Said Davis, closing the freezer door, and the conversation.

Politics

            The governor started his day off just as he usually did. He managed to get through traffic without shouting at anyone or making any other such bad PR move, made it to work on time, complemented his secretary’s new ear rings (she had new ones every week), wondered if he was paying his secretary too much or if her priorities were just screwy, sat at his desk, and turned on the local news.

            Something happened in his mind during an Oxyclean commercial, though. It occurred to the governor that no one in this building was doing anyone any good.  He spent most of his time in his plush, executive leather chair that bosses are supposed to have, and filled out paper work.  The paperwork rarely actually served any purpose other than to satisfy the need for middle men and obvious approval of things in a beaurocracy, but it continued to pile up on his desk, and reeked of obligation.  His secretary served as a wall of interference for any caller or visitor the mayor happened to have, rendering both of their jobs rather irrelevant (what is the point of the guard that oversees the button that does nothing?). Everyone else in this office was supposedly hired for the public good, yet would up doing exactly what the governor and his secretary did: nothing of consequence.

            Everyone here received a paycheck, though.  Citizens paid them to do something, though the governor couldn’t think of exactly what it was they would want him to do.  He knew how to campaign, but everyone knew that the campaign statements don’t bleed into actual job responsibilities. If anyone had taken a class on the mechanics of government when they were in school, they should know as much.  Did they expect more? Where they disappointed, and should he care if they were? He had been elected three consecutive times, after all. That should count for something. 

            This was all getting quite ridiculous, though, even in the eyes of the benefactor.  How long could such facades hold any substance?  He went around, strutting to keep up appearances and lying to people.  They all swallowed the lies so readily, though.  Suppose he decided to quit and get out of the business, what then? Someone else would fill his seat, doing exactly the same thing and maybe not feeling a bit of remorse.

            “Good Lord, I hate politics.” The governor said with a sigh as he put his head in his hands.

Can't Sleep

    “Hey, Frank. Can I ask you something?”  Cletus asked as he hopped over the fence. He was getting fed up with this fence-jumping nonsense, finally. It had started out as fun and games, but now Cletus had to get something off of his chest.
    “Shoot, Cletus. What ‘choo want?” Frank called, right behind him. It was Frank’s turn to jump the fence, but he wasn’t very good at multitasking. He had to say that before he jumped, since talking and jumping could be hazardous. If he thought long and hard about it, he wondered why he (or any other sheep, for that matter) would talk at all. Thankfully for Frank, he only ever thought long or hard. He never did both at the same time; it made the world seem wrong, somehow.
     “Why are we jumping this fence? Seriously, we could go around it. There’s a gate just over there, we go through it to get shaved.” Cletus shivered at the thought of being shaved. It just made the world seem wrong, somehow. “We don’t even need to be on this side of the fence. Every day, we line up, and jump back and forth, back and forth, over this same fence. Why? Are you getting something out of this? Are we training for something that is going to happen soon? Are we worried about some disaster that would only happen in one part of the field?”
    Frank’s brain hurt a little bit from hearing that many questions at once. “Ow” was all he could manage for a reply. He started wondering why he was talking again, and was subsequently killed by a massive migraine.
    “Frank? ‘Ow’ isn’t much of an answer to any of those… Frank?” Cletus looked back and saw a pile of sheep. Apparently, the sheep behind Frank didn’t know that Frank was going to die from a migraine headache at that exact point in time, and was caught completely unprepared for the situation. It tried dealing with the problem by walking in a straight line, now following Cletus, though from about a sheep’s length distance. It ran into a second problem, though, when the sheep after Frank tripped and fell over Frank, causing a chain reaction of tripping and falling, winding up in the largest pile of live sheep in the history of the world, with one dead sheep at the bottom. The pain from their collective headaches would have killed a small whale, but they somehow managed to cope. Cletus felt that this could have been avoided somehow, but wasn’t sure how, and wasn’t too concerned with hindsight anyway. That was one of the perks of being a sheep.
    “What just happened? I’m not on the ground anymore. I was on the ground before this. I remember that. What just happened? Did anyone see that?” One of the sheep said from inside the pile. It was hard to tell which one; they all sounded and looked almost identical. Maybe it was Jordan, maybe it was Jordan IV. It was hard to tell.
    “Why are we jumping that fence? Does anyone know? Do we need to be over here, and if we do, why are we going to jump over that same fence again in a few minutes? Wait, we won’t be jumping this time, unless all of you get out of that pile.” Cletus hoped that he’d have a better chance of getting an answer this time, since he was asking many sheep all at the same time. Surely one of them would know.
    “Dude, why are you asking questions?” Ah, this is Dude, Cletus realized. Dude was the only sheep that announced himself when he spoke. Dude was handy like that.
    “I’m just curious. Are we training for something? What is the benefit of jumping this fence again and again?” Cletus asked. He sincerely hoped Dude had an answer. Even if it was wrong, it would be something.
    “Dude! Relax. You need not concern yourself with why you are jumping this fence, only how you are jumping this fence. Asking ‘why’ only complicates the issue, man. There’s nothing hard about jumping this fence. Look at me, you know? I suddenly find myself trapped in a humongous pile of sheep, and do you see me asking why? No. Dude, I’m just in a pile with all my friends, there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of this eventually, piles never last, man. Balance, amigo. Everything seeks balance. For now, there is pile, and looking at you, we see there is also not pile. Pile and Not Pile, that’s balance.” And Dude fell silent.