"15 Short Stories"

Yet another waste of web storage space by Matt Hohnstein.

 

I.          Instead, the Octopus Takes the Bus!

            Whenever it was really snowy, I had to take the dingy yellow bus to school and doing so always reminded me of how much I absolutely hated it when people would doodle things in the fogged-up bus windows.  Every time a “!PLEH” appeared, I’d smirk at the temporary vandal’s error of not reversing the letters as well as the spelling.

            I would wonder what kinds of lives these people lived.  What kind of people would draw on a foggy bus window?  Were these school system denizens actually wannabe graffiti artists or simply kids with nothing better to do than write profanity or “!PLEH” in a window.

            Usually, the bus would reach school and I’d forget all about these people for a very long time.

 

II.        The Morning after the Gelatin Incident!

            In middle school, there was this kid that would use his tongue to eat gelatin out of the plastic cup that the school cafeteria served it in.  Any time an obnoxious “slurp!” was heard, we all knew that it was this kid.

            I’m not sure if I ever caught his name, really.

 

III.       Gasp!  A Gorilla!

            I went to the zoo on a school field trip in elementary school and there was a man that was walking around in a brown suit that had a thick beard.  I was in line waiting to look at the lions when this man approached my school group and a nearby kid freaked out, shouting “a gorilla escaped!” over and over again at the top of his lungs.  Some of us looked at the kid and laughed.

 

IV.       Doorway!

            A long time ago when I was considerably smaller, I would scale doorways and pretend that I was Spider-Man.  My mom always worried that I would fall and break open my skull.

 

V.        The Boomerang Hit Me in the Face!

I was at my friend Jimmy’s house when he was given a yellow plastic boomerang to play with by his Father.  Having seen boomerangs in cartoons, I believed that Jimmy’s boomerang would perform the same way.  It didn’t.

Jimmy took the boomerang and flung it across the room.  Unfortunately for Jimmy, it collided with an urn containing the cremated remains of his Grandmother.

 

VI.       Get Me A Freakin’ Xerox Already!

            Many years ago, my younger cousin Ralph had the bright idea to photocopy a ten dollar bill on a piece of green paper at the library.  He ended up making fifty copies of the bill.

            That evening, we went back to his house to cut the rudimentary forgeries out, but in his absent-mindedness and lack of knowledge about photocopying, Ralph had altered the paper alignment and printed the reverse of the bill on the opposite corner of the page.  To correct his error, he cut out both parts and pasted them together.  I had no part in doing this.

 

VII.     Bigfoot Takes a Holiday!

            Quite often, I ponder if Bigfoot is real; and, if he is, if he ever gets to take a vacation from being stalked by woodsmen with no social lives.

 

VIII.    Pause this; I need to go Jump in a Lake!

            Whenever I think about lakes, I remember the time that I saw a dead body in a lake.  Just kidding.  It was two dead bodies.

 

IX.       The Newt Ate My Cheese!

            One time at work, a woman came in with her son.  He was about seven years old and had brought his pet newt with him in a little tank with a handle on top so I approached him and asked what the name of the newt was.  He looked at me and didn’t answer, so I asked him again what the name of his newt was.  Again, the boy said nothing.  Finally, I asked his Mother what the newt’s name was and she did not say anything.

            My co-workers stood around me and gave me odd looks.  I did not understand why I was getting this kind of treatment until I realized that I had been speaking in Swedish the entire time.

 

 

X.        Test the Test’s Testing Test!

            In elementary school, I failed a test when I labeled a picture of a rectangle as a “box.”  When asked why I had written “box” by the teacher, I stated that if the angles were wrecked, then it would more likely be a trapezoid or perhaps a scribble.

            I also remember thinking that trapezoids were cruel and unfair confinements for zoids, whatever they happened to be.

 

XI.       The Printer is Jammed!

            Because the printer was jammed, I was unable to turn in half of my status report to my boss, Herb Lesko.  Fortunately, this half contained numerous ethnic jokes that my co-worker Randy had put in without my prior knowledge.  After being fired, Randy found happiness as a pill-sorter at a mental institution.

 

XII.     The Magic Fish!

            I had been fishing with my daughter all day and we had caught no fish at all, so she thought that it would be better if we were to get into the water and fish like bears.  This would have worked if we hadn’t been in a twenty-two foot-deep lake.

            That evening, we ate burgers.

 

XIII.    Riboflavin!

            At one period in time, I had considered legally changing my name to “Riboflavin” just because it sounded really interesting.

 

XIV.        Interrogation Bonanza!

Quite frequently, I am haunted by a childhood memory when I was interrogated at an all-you-can-eat restaurant by an obese man that wanted the last piece of fried chicken, which happened to be on my plate.  Ever since, I have not been able to eat fried chicken without thinking about what happened when the man’s pants button burst which subsequently caused them to drop to the ground.  Everyone else found this to be hilarious.

 

XV.      A Pastel!

A fight ensued between my wife and me when she wanted to paint the bathroom a pastel shade of pink.  I stated that there were no such things as pastels and that there were only red, orange, green, blue, purple, pink, yellow, black, white, and gray.  She called me an idiot for not remembering to include flesh tones and that black, white, and gray were not actually colors at all.

My second wife was colorblind, so this was never a further problem to me with her.  We divorced a year later when she thought that I was too quirky.