wr_post18:subj_fict

SCRAPPY SQUIRREL AND THE FUCKED UP WEASEL KING

so, check it, there was this squirrel right. he was like the runt of his litter or some shit. so like he was small, right, so the story goes that he was also really plucky. yaknow. scrappy. a fighter. its archetypal. so cool, right. so scrappy lived with his brothers and sisters in this tree. and when the winter was coming one year they were all like 'yo. lets get some food together for the long winter so we dont starve.' and then there was like a story about a grasshopper and an ant. yeah, i know, like squirrels know those stories too, right. so they all started harvesting. but scrappy was like 'fuck that shit.' i'm gonna go piss on people walking past the tree. cuz he was a badass, yaknow. so winter came and he mooched. and that was cool sorta. cuz like in a family, you often get that crazy uncle or whatever who just sits around and yells at the tv. and you're like 'why we gotta put up with that shit' and your moms cuffs you in the head and's all like 'language. he's my brother and he's your elder. you show some respect.' and you's like 'damn moms.'
so like he ate all their food. and everyone did alright. but then it was like the coldest day of the whole winter. they didnt know it, right, but like looking back on the event and all, that's like how it was. word is bond. and so like this weasel comes by the tree and knocks on the door. i know right, a door? and comes in cuz the other squirrels are pussies, but scrappy's like 'yo, that dude's trouble. look at his eyes, yo.' but no one listened. and later that night, like the weasel fucking ate the other squirrels. and he came by scrappy's room and was like 'yo, i just ate your family and you're next.' and scrappy's like 'shit dog. why's it gotta be this way. why's there so much hate in the rap game. cant we just sip some thug passion and collaborate on some fat tracks?' and the weasel had like a change of heart, cuz he was like an alcoholic or some shit and liked drinking and dropping rhymes. and they went into the booth, but then when the beat started in and scrappy was like 'yo, what the hook gon' be?' and the weasel was like 'i don't need no motherfucking hook on this beat. all i need is a...' and then scrappy capped him through the glass with his tek. and stood over the weasel and was like 'yo, this one's for my moms' and put two in the weasels head and dropped the gun and walked off and the camera was like close-up on his eyes. and he had this stare like you looked at it and you was all 'shit dog' only slow, like 'shiiiiiit dooooog.' and then it pulled out to an aerial view of scrappy walking slow-mo through a plaza smoking a cig and he puts on his glasses and then it goes to black and there's like fucking guitar riffs or 'kashmir' or something. and its like 'directed by barry sonnenstein, produced by marty lefkowitz....' and then you walk out of the theater and light up a cig and put on some glasses and the camera pulls out as you walk to your car. and then scrappy wakes up in a cold sweat and goes to the door of the tree and the weasel is standing there and he's like 'nooooooooo' and it zooms in down his throat and goes to black and the credits roll again, but this time the names are different. and you sit there and you're like, that was lame. and then the theater explodes and you're flying out of the wreckage onto the hood of a camaro and you look inside and its will smith and martin lawrence. and they're like 'bad boys for life, yo' and you're all 'that movie sucked my left nut.' and then you wake up and your left nut is missing. and you're lance armstrong and you fuck sheryl crow, maybe or something.

wr_post13:subj_fict

OH, HENRY!

Henry Benson.
Hank to his friends...if he'd had any.


So already, we've established Hank as an outsider. He probably could've had friends if he weren't so particular about the friends he (would've) kept. He worked in finances and made enough money to retain a substantially well-endowed girl. He'd never tried the gay thing, he was just waiting for the one, as they say. Generally reserved was he in two words. Sure, he went out on weekends and got drunk and social, but he'd never felt the need to take anyone back to his rat's nest. He wasn't a pack rat, per se, just disorganized. He kept ill-kept records on potential terrorists, do-badders in his neighborhood and people who had pissed him off in one way or another. They occupied the rooms Hank didn't and waited for their date in court.

Late in the afternoon, one August day, he slit both wrists and died on the phone with his grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer's. She told the rest of the family that he had decided to move to Swaziland. No one looked into it and his firm replaced him.

wr_post10:subj_fict

STORY TIME

steve weinstien and walter johnson lived next door to one another forever. they both lived in their childhood homes. their parents died and they each took over their father's businesses. steve married walter's sister and walter married steve's. and the wheel in the sky kept on turning. then one day as they returned from work steve and walter met at the short hedge that divided their yards, as they often did, and drank a beer as they pondered life's mysteries, as they often did.

"do you believe in an omni-present, creator figure?" steve asked.

now walter and steve had known one another all their lives, yet the issue of religion had never been broached. just one of those things you leave alone. some people are very touchy about it. there was a slight pause as walter thought the question over. then he reached under his jacket, whipped out a gun and shot steve in the head.

it was an open and shut case. there were several witnesses. walter called the cops himself to confess. later in jail he repented for his actions, began tutoring inner city kids through a rehabilitation program, prayed fervently and lived out his life in an upright, admirable sort of way. after three months of appeal failed, he faced the chair. he was electrocuted before nine members of the county governance board and received a small funeral.

"name?" saint peter asked, as walter checked in at the pearly gates.

he got through without much hassle and looked up steve in the heaven directory.

"sorry about that whole business of shooting you," walter said. "i just wanted to do some research before i gave you my answer. after weighing many things, i've decided that i do beleive in a creator and furthermore, a benevolent, forgiving creator. i'm sorry it came at such a heavy price to each of our families. i just wasnt sure how else to be certain."

steve took in the whole explanation in silence, then smiled and offered his hand to walter in a good-natured handshake. walter was moved by steve's unfathomable kindness. he had expected it to take several days, months or years, though he was not sure of a concept of time in heaven, for steve to forgive him. as he pondered all this, steve reached under his robe, pulled out a gun and shot walter in both knees. as steve stood over walter, a look of satisfaction came over his face.

"thanks god," he said. "that guy was a real shithead."

"no prob, steve," replied god. "us jews gotta stick together."

wr_post09:subj_fict

HOW TO TELL A JOKE WHEN YOU FORGET HOW TO TELL JOKES

So here's the point. You are asked to tell the interviewers a joke. You suddenly forget all the jokes you know. So you’re no longer REALLY trying to be funny, but you have to say something. And if its fucked up enough and delivered with a completely straight face people will laugh...albeit nervously. So with those conditions set, I sought to come up with something completely fucked. Hence standard opening:
Two guys walk into a bar...
They work in office buildings next to one another and they realized that they get off at about the same time each day. It’s become standard to see one another there to unwind. So one day they walk in and there's a new bartender. This is a bit of a surprise, especially since they've been coming in for about a year and always had the same guy there to greet them. So one guy walks up to the bar and, by way of seeing whether the "new guy" knows his shit asks, "do you know how to make a sex on the beach?" the new bartender reaches under the counter and grabs a bat, menacing the two guys he leaps the counter and chases them out of the bar. Now they were a bit put off by the unwanted exercise, but they'd been coming to that same bar so long they couldn’t quite get out of the habit. Plus the next nearest bar was several blocks down and parking was always hard to find. So again they go in, this time careful not to say anything provocative. They order two beers. Still the guy flips. Doesn’t say anything, just grabs the bat, leaps the counter and chases them out. Well this is just intolerable. They can’t conceive of going home to their wives without a little time to unwind. They are both happily married, but the buffer is the only time they get to just let it all hang out. So they decide they'll have to wing it on the parking and just go to the bar down the street. So they get their coats on, meet in the garage and climb into the car. They park behind the bar at what looks like a loading dock, head inside and have a beer. This is all they wanted. Just some time to talk about sports, chicks and life. They walk out towards the car only to find it in flames. They are pissed. They run back into the bar to ask what the fuck is up with the "towing" in this neighborhood. the bar is empty. they go back out and see the new bartender standing in their path with a bat. he takes them by surprise. smashes in one guys kneecaps and breaks the bat over his head. he hurls the splintered ends at the man who's running away catching him through each shoulder and knocking him to the ground. he drags them both up against the bar and really works them over. then as he's walking away he looks back over his shoulder. "in my fucking bar, we dont serve no damn pussy drinks." the men chuckle under their breath. "it sure is hard to find a quality bar these days" the newly-paraplegic man says. the other man just slouches down and coughs up blood.

eh? eh? hilarious!
a bit complex, yes, but thats the point. straight face. they wont know what to think. and you probably will be branded as a sadistic fuck unfit to be in any organization. wait what were we trying to accomplish?

wr_post02:subj_fict

SMALL WORLD, AIN'T IT?

Tony worked in an office processing forms. He picked them up from Jake and then sorted them by urgency, subject matter and product code to be sent on to Mike and Sheila respectively. One day instead of reading the forms and sorting them, he jumped out the window of his 22nd floor office. Later that day, Sheila got word of the note on his desk. Looking back she could see the signs. She didn't know why, but she felt somehow responsible. So she quit, changed her name, got a new job and pretended her old life had never existed. Mike never actually spoke to Tony. He had a germ phobia and would only receive the forms through inter-office mail and only handle them once they'd met his exacting standards for cleanliness. Tony's death had no effect on Mike, who assumed it was all the work of germs. Jake hired a replacement the next week. Her name was Cindy, a young girl out of college who he hired mainly for looks. He began an affair with her and one day during a rendezvous in the conference room he called her "Tony." Things were awkward from that point on and Jake fired Cindy rather than deal with seeing her in the halls. He cut out Tony's position in the office infrastructure and assumed the responsibilities of Sheila, who's replacement had refused to work with Mike on the grounds that he often sent her emails critiquing her hygeine. With less people on the payroll, numbers began to move out of the red. The company was purchased by a conglomerate and the work was outsourced to the Dallas office. Mike moved back in with his mother and took up coin collecting (an odd hobby considering the number of unwashed hands such old coins must have come in contact with). Jake stayed home with the kids and watched his wife's crafts shop blossom into a successful chain. He envied her. When his company had begun to succeed, they gave him the axe. He had thought about killing her. Make it look like suicide and take over the crafts game. The only thing stopping him was a strong distaste for crafts. He began putting out ads for a nanny in the hopes that he'd find a cute little thing to remind him of Cindy. He coached his daughter's softball team and flirted shamelessly with the young mothers. One night he was beaten senseless by a father who happened to be in earshot. His wife divorced him and took the kids. He moved to Illinois and got a job at the Kinko's. His shift manager looked like an old co-worker, but that's too contrived. Sheila was actually in Ohio working as a waitress. Mike tried to keep in touch with people, but he didn't have their new addresses. His life came to a fitting close when he contracted West Nile at the age of 34. His dying words were, "Germs! The only way around them is to nuke the whole damn world!" Jake's wife, Olivia, read about it in the obituaries, but the name had no significance to her. She married a guy named Terry, the regional manager of her Midwest offices. Terry secretly hated kids and tried several times to asphyxiate them in the garage. Sheila, who now went by Trisha, moved in with another waitress and they moved to Toronto to start a bed and breakfast. While making copies one day, Jake met a casting director and landed his first acting part as "Bus Driver #2" in a low-budget porn. Terry took Olivia on a vacation for their one-year anniversary to Trisha's B&B and their first night there, they rented the porn that Jake was in. It was a bit part and Olivia didn't even recognize him, but the sequence of events leading up to that moment was altogether too strange and the world abrubtly ended.

Minute Rice in the Era of Instant Obsolesence

Gary and Tina had three ugly kids, a run-down bungalow on the industrial edge of the suburbs, two rusty sedans and no ambition. They'd been married for nearly three decades and the only thing keeping either of them going was each's desire to see the other die first. Gary Fleenor had been the Runner-Up State Spelling Bee Champ in High School, but he'd assumed the title after a scandal rocked the world of competitive letter recitation, connecting the winner, one Margaret Bloom, to both the Yakuza and Archibald Pez, of novelty-candy-dispenser fame. The title had earned Gary the admiration of then-incarcerated Tina Radmonowitz. She was performing community service, collecting trash on the highway median, when she happened across the article that had broken the "Spelldown Snafu" story. It would be eight months before they met in person, but what began was a fiery correspondence built on lies and exaggeration, would gradually blossom into a bitter, stagnant marraige. Derek Fleenor, the first mistake, was good with his hands, or so went the testimony of the five eyewitnesses to his first aggrivated assault. He'd made it through six states before the stolen Chevy he was driving into oncoming traffic siezed up and went into a skid. When he awoke in the prison hospital, he was no longer a biped. It was the subject of much ridicule in the infrequent letters to "ol' one leg." Betty, the only Fleenor who had ever shown promise outside of the world of organized crime, died of Leukemia during a protracted legal battle for the rights to her first novel, "Please God! Kill Me Now." Eventually, the royalties were awarded to Gary and Tina who spent them on huckster balding cures and crack cocaine, respectively. The baby, Vernon, four-and-a-half, had no real concept of the hell he was being raised in. He also knew very little of his older siblings. To him the world consisted of blaring sirens which, when he was lucky, were from the "Real Police Drama" programs his mother watched and the slow, sour smell of unwashed clothing, which made up the bulk of the house's furniture. Eventually he probably grew up to do something undesirable for shit pay, but nobody cares about stories like that, so let's just say he became an astronaut. Vernon Fleenor, the first man on Mars!