Squiddums' Stories

On the shelf

2008-08-18T06:37:11Z

Inside the box of stale breakfast cereal, at the very bottom (deeper even than the benthic crumbles of a complete breakfast), under the left cardboard flap lived a little bug.

The little bug was used to the earthquakes that would shake his home at approximately 8 am every morning, and they happened with such regularity that he would make sure to put his laundry in on time to save on all the electricity that would have gone into agitating the load.

Sometimes the moths from the oatmeal bag nextdoor would stop in. Flighty creatures, there was no routine to them, and it upset the little bug to have them dropping in with no reasonable warning. The little bug would have just pretended he wasn’t at home if it wasn’t for the brown moth.

She had wings dusted with silver and black, smelled of oats, and she always had something appreciative to say of whatever snack he had hastily put in front of them.

The black moth, on the other hand… well, one could only be polite for so long before something had to be done.

Mrs. Gorse's Dogs

2008-03-18T05:18:54Z

The sound of gravel grinding against tires leaked in through the window, and Mrs. Gorse peered out into the dark.

Two sets of headlights switched off.

A car door clunked open, and the spray of gravel that followed announced a dog on the premises. The dog skittered around excitedly as more doors opened.

Mrs. Gorse tottered to the kitchen to open a tin of soup.

Tic-tic went the stove burner, trying to light; crunch went the rosebushes in the yard as someone started to uproot them.

Mrs. Gorse emptied the tin into the pan and went to let out her dogs. Rosebush murder was unforgivable.

She opened the basement door, and her dogs trotted out. Really, they did look like dogs, if you didn’t try to count their legs too closely. She let them out the back door and went back to her soup.

The soup boiled and the trespassers’ dog howled and the cars kicked up waves of gravel as they peeled out of the drive.

Her dogs got to sit on the armchairs for the rest of the night and read the magazines for a job well done.

Birds nightly

2008-03-17T03:58:32Z

Dom was forty-one, and he’d only ever dreamed of birds.

He’d be sitting on a cliff and feeling the wind whip around him, and he’d know that all he had to do was open his wings and let the updraft throw him into the sky…

He’d be stalking on long legs along the shore at dawn, searching for bright little crabs with the urgency only felt in dreams…

He’d be a grey-cowled crow, dodging traffic to land on an antler and gaze into a dead eye…

Feathers and claws and chirps and beaks, every night of his life, and so when he saw a pigeon he would always throw some of what he was eating. When the ground frosted over, he’d hang a ball of suet-and-seed from the eaves of his house, and he never kept a cat.

So when he closed his eyes on November third and dreamed of a grey whale the size of a planet, he knew something was changing.

Twelve

2008-03-17T03:04:02Z

Twelve is strong; it’s months, and the number of hours before you start over again at the beginning, the years when a kid is still a kid and hasn’t tipped over that birthday into teenager-hood and begun that final climb to adulthood.

Stump was twelve years old, and he liked the nightset, the twelve hours from seven to seven. Enough time to see the people go to bed, and see the people get up and into their cars and drive along the snowy roads in the thick grey fog, their headlights bright.

The cold didn’t bother him. He had fur. He liked the night; nobody would get a good look at him, in the dark.

There was a girl at the house with the rock garden, and she’d put food out on the patio. Stump would climb over the back fence and sit in the snow and eat, and sometimes she’d watch through the glass door.

She never opened it, but she never threw anything, either.

Stump sometimes had to chase away raccoons and opossums and one time a skunk. He got in a fight with a coyote once, too.

It was okay. He won.

Vigil

2008-03-15T05:35:44Z

They were in the valley when they saw the fire – a pinprick on the slope, light welling out.

It was promising.

They crept through the trees, uphill, over stones and up loose mounds of dirt. They closed in on the fire, watched it through the dark forest.

The fire burned beside a pile of stones, and a boy stood alone at the foot of the pile, head tipped forward on his chest, sound asleep.

They moved out of the trees, towards the pile and the boy. He snorted awake.

“Give us your gold,” said the first.
“And your shoes,” said the second.
“And your coat,” said the third.

He took off his coat and shoes and threw the clothing at them. He didn’t run.

“Your gold,” said the first.

“I wouldn’t have gold on vigil,” said the boy.

“They pile rocks on their dead,” said the third.

The first looked at the stones. “They put gold on their dead?”

“You can’t have it,” said the boy.

“Don’t lie,” said the first, and it WAS a lie.

Under the stones was gold on the body.

They stamped out the fire before they left.

Knives

2008-03-13T06:46:51Z

Five tries, and the knife was sharp.

Sarah drew it along the edge of her thumb, drawing blood, too sharp to sting.

It was her twelfth.

She wiped it on her sleeve, wrapped it in flannel, put it in the drawer beside the rest of them. She was creating an arsenal, really, and it unnerved her.

A boning knife, a hunting knife, a serrated knife. A double-bladed knife nearly long enough to be a short sword. A flat-ended knife, the cousin of a machete. All of them made from railroad spikes, heated and beaten and ground down.

She sucked the pad of her thumb, tried to feel the accomplishment and fulfillment of a job well done, but already she could feel the new knife forming in her head – a curved blade, a forked tip, like a wicked cheese-knife.

There would be no rest until this new little knife was realized; Sarah took a spike from the pile and started the bellows.

Knitting and lectures

2008-03-13T06:21:23Z

After the lecture, he put it out of his mind. It was not something that needed to be thought about – lecturing, expounding on ideas, was to him as knitting was to his mother. She had no use for patterns anymore; thinking it was as good as knitting it, and there it would be on her lap.

That is to say, an unconscious action. A nervous tic. It was terribly awkward on dates.

Another path

2008-03-13T06:16:31Z

College dropout. My classmates are jealous.

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Urban Beautification

2008-03-13T06:08:17Z

Jeffrey felt that Reykjavik grew tired and melancholy in the fall. He bought a number of colorful umbrellas from a flea market, and left them on municipal statues, public art, and traffic dividers.

“They do look happier to be dry,” a woman said as she passed the rainbow-umbrella-topped concrete pylons.

Jeffrey supposed that glasses-nose-and-moustache disguises could be appealing, too.

A quarter-inch off the floor

2008-03-13T05:59:01Z

Once, my children, we roamed the earth, scrounging what we could find between grains of sand, in burrows, in the gutters.

This was before the flood.

The flood drove us to seek shelter, and shelter we sought, and shelter we did find. We hid and when we had dried from the flood and our hunger began to pain us, we ventured forth.

What wonders we did see! This was a time of full bellies and sweet dreams, the week of the Overflowing Recycling Bin and the Wadded Up Pastry Paper.

It was in this time that we scouted the route that would become the Tour Around The Wrapped Hard Candy that you have enjoyed many times. Is it not a pity that we are not larger, or more mechanically inclined? That we must rely upon the carelessness of others for our sweetest rewards?

Sweet rewards they are! Nothing compares to the Uncapped Honey Jar Which Had Rolled Under The Stove. Generations feasted upon it…

Until the Citra-solv rained death upon us. There are good times and bad… the good will come again, little ant.

Curiousity

2008-03-13T05:34:15Z

Some people let fear take over their life. Some people are too stupid to be afraid of anything, or maybe they think they picked up the 1up somewhere along the way, and when they step out into traffic they’ll disappear under the wheels only to reappear four feet off the ground, flashing and semi-opaque, ready to try again.

I’m scared of lots of things. I’m scared of plaster of paris, and superglue, and bread dough. Bread dough is more disgusting than scary, though. It sticks to you, pulls on the little hairs on your arm when you don’t wash it all off.

I’m scared of the walk-in oven at work, of how it hasn’t got a handle on the inside. I can’t decide if the no-handle thing is scary because it’s a safety hazard, or because it’s not a safety hazard.

Really, if it’s not a safety hazard, that’s scarier – if you get stuck in the oven, you’re done for.

So I’m fascinated by it. When I get to the bakery at 3 am, I’m scared of myself, the compulsion to slip in and close the door…

Some mornings...

2008-03-13T05:22:13Z

It had never been such a struggle to get out of bed. The blankets felt like lead, the most comforting, warm lead that ever weighed heavy on anybody.

It’s not worth it, Gerd decided. She rolled over, hit at the alarm clock with as much desperation and motor control as a fish flung up on a dock. The alarm’s tinny beeping stopped, but the harm had been done.

Now awake, Gerd had to pee.

She headed for the bathroom, groggy and stumbling, but fortunately alert enough to stop before tumbling off the edge of the chasm in her hallway. Her toes curled over the edge, and she overbalanced backwards, sat down hard on the carpet.

The bathroom was nowhere in sight. The hallway ended, dropped off into the darkness.

Gerd began to think that maybe wetting the bed wasn’t such a shameful thing, really. Pee on the sheets, wad them up, wash them in the morning – but the clean sheets were in the cabinet beside the bathroom, at the end of the hallway that didn’t seem to exist anymore.

What the man heard

2008-03-13T05:00:58Z

The man, watching through the twigs of the sprawling shrubbery he hid behind, adjusted his headset, twisted a dial on his listening device.

He had been following the pair since that morning. It wasn’t every day that he ran across subjects with such potential.

Tucking the listening device under his arm, he dug a notebook from his heavy coat, pulling a chewed-up pen from its spiral spine. The pen made a nice, cozy noise as he wrote: “stop.. letting mind run wild… only tree…”

Then he clamped the pen between his teeth, retrieved the listening device, and aimed it at Izak and Sheryl as they stumbled through the forest… away from the cemetery.