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Granted
After reconstructing events through eons of geological hearsay, Dr. Sheldon and his team were thoroughly positive that Pangaea’s eventual breakup was due to money issues.
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Tiny Fists like Superballs
G. Randall Tippington had always wanted to be a bully, and it looked like fate and his poor sense of direction had parked him right outside his old elementary school.
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Embassy Sweets
“Fuckin’ clean up your fuckin’ environment China fucker,” didn’t make Fitzpatrick the worst diplomat ever – that was reserved for either Ambassador Goetz or Ambassador Ikehara, who were currently engaged in a knife fight.
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Monsters of Rock
As soon as the first notes of the ballad floated through the concert hall and so many in the audience caught in the moment flicked their lighters to life, a panicked frenzy set upon the masses as they collectively remembered that the band’s new lead singer was Frankenstein.
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Dumps Her
“I made a list of your positive qualities; pleasing to look at, receptive to any amount of crap I heap on you, smells like hot, wet garbage – huh… oh, this is the one I made for the dumpster across the street.”
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There is No Excuse
The selfish bastard never calls anymore, thought Melanie as she passed the outer rim of the solar system.
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Emoticon VI: The Reckoning
With a final, desperate mash of the delete key with his broken hand, Kyle destroyed the last of the loathsome emoticons:or… did he?
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Gingerbread, Men
Our gingerbread house made it feel like we were living in a Christmas carol, right up until Uncle Al used the gingerbread toilet.
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Who Could Win a Rad Bike
It wasn’t important anymore that our scavenger hunt team had won the Huffy; what was important was that everyone stuck to the story that our team name was the King Cobras and not the Pound Puppies.
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Runner-Up: Horsecapades
“It’s not that we don’t want to encourage all kids ‘K’ through sixth to participate, Mrs. Greenwood, it’s just that racism isn’t a talent.”
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Memory Sponge
Holding the dirty, once-yellow sponge over the trash, Oscar remembered the good times they had shared – doing the dishes after Thanksgiving dinner with Mom, wiping the spilt wine from his first date with Moira, cleaning up after the Antonio “The Scorpion” Avilar hit – yeah, it was going in the display case with the others.
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Know Your Spacetalk
He promised her he would take her “dancing on the rings of Saturn,” a charged phrase that actually meant “thrown out the airlock” in space pirate slang.
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I Don’t Even Know Anymore
“Irony – is that the word?” Jacques asked as he was fitted for a wooden eye, since his original one had been ripped out by beavers.
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Best Boyfriend Ever
“I want to be the best boyfriend ever, Kelly baby… psych – I’m selling your eggs to get kickass new rims!”
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Drawing From the Idea Well
Inventor Steven Charles Napier knew that when he solved the problem of getting fresh water to the billions without access, the world would know him by sight – unlike the Home Depot clerk asking for ID before he put several thousand feet of garden hose on his credit card.
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Double Meaning
In the year 2204, every word in the English language had developed a sexual connotation – it was smut like this that the Grand Dicklayer was trying to have permanently wiped from the Peernetration Jack-In.
Go
Honoring my birthday resolution, I tried to be more encouraging, causing the most horrible car crash this stop sign has ever seen.
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You Suck at Movies
Jill had to admit, Graham was getting better at watching movies with her… then he fell out of his seat, rolled down the aisle screaming and somehow had set his left arm on fire – so close!
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Helmeted Space Traveling Guy Comes Back From Tomorrow Place
“To describe it, it was kind of weird, little crazy - you had to be there, I guess,” that was how most of my stories ended after I returned from the wormhole that rocketed me into the future.
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Torture != Trust
The only weakness my captors knew about was my hay fever, but instead they chose dong needles.
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This Just In: You Should Die!
Macho didn’t even hear the door to the trailer open, but he did hear the bullet whiz by the tuft of hair sticking out of his right ear right before the legends of bass fishing plate exploded – Emileen was back in his life and the bitch still couldn’t shoot straight.
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Fossil Record
Sadly, man was progressing far faster than the evolution of his predators, but you couldn’t help but respect the determination of the phonograph-headed lion.
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Cocoa: The Next Generation
If they’d only make beverages more intelligent in the future I’d buy more of them, but this hot chocolate never shuts up about how nice a cup of it would be even though it’s the middle of Summer 2030.
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Oblique Political Metaphor Story
To Paul, it made good sense as a consumer – if something stops working thirty days after acquiring it you take it back and get a replacement, though the orphanage strongly and gaspingly disagreed.
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2-Denied
At the Beer and Pancake House, you really couldn’t go wrong with anything on the menu except Edna, the sassy, buxom waitress on the cover making the flapjack joke – she’s a cartoon, a cartoon with ridiculously high standards.
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Inflation
With the price of words skyrocketing, he ______ the _______ all ______ and then some.
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A Spoon Story Has No Point
Justine worked down at the local Dairy Queen, and I would come in once a week to rattle off stories that went nowhere while she expertly double-cherry dipped a vanilla cone for me, until one day when Justine was replaced by this older guy in a hair net who wasn’t as good at dipping cones and who overcharged me for a Dilly Pop, which I don’t know if they make anymore.
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The Secret from Space
To us on Earth, the alien transmission had yielded blueprints to a bizarre monument that we interpreted as a yet undeciphered galactic riddle, though in truth, the beings that had conceived it still could not believe we had actually banded together to construct an enormous sculpture of their genitalia.
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Sexecutioner
As we lined up against that wall, we knew that one of the men in front of us had bullets in his gun, but what we didn’t know was that he was also wearing a thong.
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Hooray, I Have a Drug Problem!
Hooray, I have a substance abuse problem – every girlfriend’s burnt couch, every single coworker wrestled, every loved one missing tires – forgiveness is a rehab visit away, because today I’m coming clean… about my drug problem, woo!
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More Good
The piñatas really lent the place a festive atmosphere, thought Finnegan the coroner.
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Time
In another time and place, a man did not hug another man, but that was then and this is prison.
I Hate Myself and I Want Him to Die
My clone and I had had lunch, and I had to admit it was a real test of patience to put up with myself, especially with all the “who was the real clone” philosophical bullshit and the “he’s stealing
my mail/I’m fucking his girlfriend” thing.
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Someone for Everybody
It’s a commonly held belief that there’s someone for everybody – dude, what a slut!
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Mel
She spit when she talked, swore like a talk show guest during the three-fourths of her waking hours on the phone, and threatened anyone she perceived as having slighted her; she was lean and ropy, with greasy flaxen hair and a chest like two snowy, overfed children nestled in the velvety hands of a god of sleep – in other words, she was classy.
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R_PE
“Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself?” the phrase was new to Denny and he was suddenly concerned about his future as a hangman.
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Landing a Lucrative Handjob
Marcy was particularly proud of how quickly she could produce desired results with her handjobs – it was extremely difficult to mimic the real thing, but she thought that in the time paid for, she came as close as a prostheses maker could.
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Ledge
Looking down at the city stretched out below his wind-harried face, Tim thought about the descent facing him as his feet slid from the ledge and his pigeon wings unfolded by instinct.
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I Need Sunshine
I can feel your body close to mine… cheapass children choosing the budget burial.
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True Tales of Truth
Craig was lecturing us about how we shouldn’t spread tall tales about his might when suddenly he picked up our county and hurled it out of the path of a falling meteor.
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Better to Have Loved
Unrequited love was the worst kind of love, especially when she was such a sexy armoire.
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Animals Can’t Understand You and Don’t Want To
Being the cat equivalent of a genius, Lemon grew to understand the English language, finding it simplistic with its limited vocabulary of “good”, “kitty”, “no”, and “son of a goddamn fuckwhore get off my leather couch.”
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Syrup Laws
“Why in my day, we had syrup laws to keep a man honest – the only place that’d serve pancakes after ten was at a bordello, because only the kind of man who would frequent a whore would eat such a thing, but you kids, you eat at your twenty-four hour pancake houses while the world turns to a big filthy pat of the Devil’s butter…”
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Classic Shoulder Morality
The oompah band on my right shoulder made a good point, but the doo-wop group on my left shoulder also made a convincing argument for evil.
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Birthday Surprise
There were fifty birthday cards on the table, but not one of them contained the words he needed – the code for the birthday bomb.
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Love and Death in the Sandpaper Aisle
“You don’t even know where you are anymore – well, I’ll tell you, you’re in the wood finish aisle of the Rainy Valley Lowe’s, and you’re also within arm’s distance of the only man who’s going to love you for who you really are, so, c’mon…put the nailgun back in the cart…”
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Clocks Don’t Have Backhands
A room full of clocks wasn’t as nerve wracking as Todd had thought it would be, though he still couldn’t help but feel a little pressured about the dead hooker.
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Euphemism Bonanza
Chip was going to “give her chimneys a good sweeping” and after “working up a sweat” he was going to “collect his payment in fair trade” and then he was going to go home and have sex with his husband.
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Anniversary
“So... five months… hmm – oh, I got something, what’s your favorite grain?”
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Super Science Will Kill Us with Kindness
Perry had been hit by a Tesla-like inspiration to solve the problem of escape velocity by turning off the gravity of the Earth itself at the time of launch; unfortunately, Perry had not been similarly inspired to include a restraint next to the gravity lever.
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The
James was a great great guy, but I was beginning to think I needed a new editor as I helped him sound out “the”.
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This Country Life
Breeze carrying fresh bread baking, wild raspberries in a bowl of homemade cream, wet oil paints portraying the glinting gold fields in the mid-afternoon sun – this was living, proof to the undead that their meal was close.
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BO Kart
“I’m never stopping – I’m going to race around in a go-kart night and day for the rest of the whole darned summer!” said Georgie, the smelliest kid we knew.
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Three Cents a Word, Liquor Store Club Card
Carrie wrote so much better sober than drunk, and it was also a dark and stormy night where somewhere pugilists danced a savage cha-cha.
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AKA Poverty Lion
Underwear, a backscratcher, a toothbrush, a hoagie - truly, you offer up a bargain on excitement, Ray’s Hardly Used Goods Emporium!
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Comedy Was In His Blood
He literally died laughing; the hardest part for Dennis was trying to convince the others of that, since his conviction was as poor as his detective skills.
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These are the Days for Frog Scoring
According to the newspaper, an alarming percentage of the frog population was turning female due to estrogen levels in the environment – looked like Hopper was sure to get lucky tonight!
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Gill, Girls, Grills
“‘Healthy appetite,’ yes I suppose that could be considered a positive trait, but honestly, Gill, what type of girl were you expecting to meet when you clicked on a profile entitled, ‘Let’s Eat BBQ!’?”
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Childhood Wonder
When I was a kid everything seemed so much more magical, but things have changed since the evil wizard Vogon sucked up the world’s mana to create his sky fortress of ultimate misery.
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Thirteen
“Command, this is Barker, last man alive on Bravo team - I just tracked down and killed the twelfth and final one of those mutant gingerbread sons of bitches and I’m ready for… please repeat… how many are in a baker’s doze- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
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The Ghosts that Hound Us
It was crushing for him to sit there so many years later and cycle through the memories of the halcyon days… the glee of the children huddled around him, the frenzied movement of hands in the back of smoky bars, the countless imitators of his style, and who could forget the bedspreads – what happened to you, Pac-Man?
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Lunatiger
Invasive species are undoubtedly a threat to local ecosystems, but damn if the tiger hasn’t taken to the Moon.
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Peach Boy
Momotaro, the story of the legendary Japanese boy hero born from a peach, broke box office records and terrified the hell out of peach audiences.