O phone
You aren’t much of a muse.
You correct my spelling
To something I neither expect
Nor want.
You are too helpful
With your auto capitalization
And your flat, buttonless keyboard.
Yet I continue to use you
As my primary writing tool
Because it is so convenient
To lay on my back in bed
And hold you up
When I write.
That is
Until I drop you
On my face.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He wasn’t sure. He could smell the garlic from here, and it wasn’t pretty.
“I have an idea,” he said, leaning away. “How about we whip up some mint milkshakes?” It was a good idea, but she wasn’t biting.
“I’m fuuuuuull,” she pouted. The garlic rolled by him as she whined the word, an invisible tsunami that hit him with nearly physical force. It was all he could do to keep himself upright.
“I can’t,” he murmured. “I just can’t.”
“What?”
“I SAID I CAN’T,” he cried out desperately. “I’m sorry! You’re just too garlicky!”
Her warm, cozy expression shattered. “What?”
“I’m so sorry! I can’t be in this room with you any more!”
He ran like the hounds of hell were after him, burst out the door, stumbled down the stairs, and zoomed away in his car.
She leaned back in the couch, nonplussed. She never got a reaction like that from a man. Garlic odor? What an odd way for his fears to manifest.
She grabbed her phone and sent a group text to her coven.
Sorry gals. He was a sensitive, sensed something wrong and ran. I’ll get us a fresh one tomorrow night, I promise.
Definitely on a silly streak lately. Not one thing I wrote last night made much sense.
The weather affects us all.
Soon the harvest moon will turn
And I will turn with it.
Life is complicated.
I change from dog to girl
And back
But my food choices do not change inside me
And something deep within is alarming.
When I was changed
I ate something a human shouldn’t eat.
My body is a mystery
My dog body doubly so.
Today I’m putting hot sauce on all the turds in the yard.
My human self must train my dog self.
I sit in the yard
Collar around my neck
Waiting for transformation
And thanking God for privacy fences.
This is another old one, from years, eons into the past, back when I was young and beautiful and full of shit. I actually don’t remember when I wrote it… that’s how old it must be.
“I don’t think so,” she said with marked finality.
The grocery boy paused in his bagging before he realized that she had an earpiece in and was speaking on the phone.
“No, no, I–yes, that’s mine, just put that — NO, I can’t let you do that…”
The grocery boy slipped a black cat into one of the plastic grocery bags and tied it off while she was distracted.
“Because it wouldn’t look good… because it’s stupid.”
The grocery boy slipped a dachshund into the other plastic bag and tied it off. This was a little harder, as the dachshund was wily.
“No, just put it– yes, put it center, like I asked. …center, like I told you. This conversation is over.”
She clicked off her earpiece, grabbed all the bags without acknowledging him, and headed for the door.
Then her groceries exploded into action.
Lean Meal Frozens skittered across the floor. Peaches sailed through the air in a flurry of barks and yaps. An otherworldly scream sounded from within the second grocery bag, and a bag of frozen french fries went straight up into the air, pirouetted, and plummeted straight down onto the startled woman’s head.
The cat and the dachshund clawed their way free from the bags she dropped, and streaked out of the room after each other in a blur of primal fury.
Lemons stopped rolling. Graham crackers skittered to a halt. The woman collapsed, dead with fright.
The manager poked his head out of the staff room and quickly appraised the scene.
“Goddamnit!” he said. “Who keeps putting animals in the groceries?”
Nobody said a word.
The bagboy smiled to himself and surreptitiously slipped a ferret into a distracted woman’s purse.
Once upon a time there was an elephant named Ricky. Ricky had asthma and couldn’t go through the tall grass without sneezing and his throat seizing up. His mom got him an atomizer with a special elephant mask, and it helped, but he got bored missing out at the atomizer while the other elephants romped in the air pollution and irritants.
He decided to move to the city, where he could be an indoor elephant and breath only air that was conditioned, filtered, and purified. He called ahead and got himself an office job via phone interview.
When he got there for his first day, he was dismayed to find that the elevator wasn’t designed to capacitate his size.
Okay, he thought, I just have to take the stairs.
But when he opened the stairwell door, it was too narrow. He couldn’t even fit through it, and just looking up that skinny stairwell gave him claustrophobia.
Ricky decided to go outside the building and see if there were any alternatives. He saw a window washer’s lift. It was the best option he’d had yet.
Climbing in, Ricky felt a wave of vertigo, but he pushed it away with sheer willpower. He wanted this job. He found the remote and pushed the button. Up he went.
As he ascended, the engine started to make a strangled noise. Ricky looked at the sign and saw the weight capacity was thousands of pounds below his own weight. This made him dizzier than before, but he was nearly there, so he kept on.
When he got to the eighteenth floor, he found, to his horror, that the window was smooth glass, unpunctuated by latch or hook. The vertigo was setting in strong. He couldn’t take it. He swayed into the glass and shattered the pane, tumbling into the room with a frightened trumpet.
“GAH! An elephant just broke in!” Someone yelled.
People screamed and scattered in all directions.
Ricky opened his mouth to explain that this was an accident, he was here for an interview but the building lacked sufficient accommodations, but his stress levels were too high from the vertigo and the social ostracism. He had an anxiety attack and an asthma attack, all at once, and all he could do was make wretched zombie noises. This only served to heighten the atmosphere for the humans.
A man in puffed sleeves had a harpoon hanging over his cubicle. The office man who wanted to be a sailor, at last his time had come. He pulled the harpoon from its fastenings, aimed, and launched it at the elephant.
The impact drove it into Ricky’s shoulder, where it didn’t do much damage, but stung quite a bit.
“Take that ye land whale!” the would-be sailor shouted proudly.
Ricky had had enough. The interview was not worth this. He took the stairs down. The less said about that the better; it was a whole new kind of nightmare, especially the corners.
Work sucks, Ricky thought. I’m moving back into mom’s savanna. At least there, I only have ONE thing wrong with me.
So he did, and lived happily ever after for the perspective.
Sarah D. Silvey 