Filed under: fiction
I hadn’t known anyone could keep talking while taking a breath. The woman across the way from me on the bus could do it, though.
She filled the aisle seat as full as could be. With the bus being at capacity, that meant she had a trapped audience in the window seat. He was a young man — younger than my 35 years then — and was dressed neatly enough. I sat by the window across from them; your grandma dozed on and off next to me. We were headed home after going to a funeral on her side of the family.
After the first two minutes the young man across the way didn’t so much as grunt to encourage the woman to keep talking or to make her think he was listening. He closed his eyes for a while, either trying to feign or attain sleep. She didn’t mind at all and he gave up on that and stared out the window.
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Filed under: fiction
“The question before the floor, during this special assembly, is whether to declare former President George W. Bush the worst president our great nation has ever suffered. Joe-Pete, you wanted to go first.”
Joe-Pete walked to the podium next to the leader’s throne.
“Thank you, Your Grand Imperial Exaltedness. As president, George W. Bush was fully complicit in these matters:
“1) lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so as to start a war that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the execution of Saddam Hussein;
“2) torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq;
“3) holding suspected al-Qaida soldiers in Guantanamo Bay and torturing them and not permitting them access to legal representation and keeping them there for years without charging them with any crimes; and
“4) wrecking the national economy to the especial detriment of the Jewish money cabal and generally bringing the rest of the nation down to our level here in Scratchass County.
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Filed under: fiction
Mayor Harvey Pendleton banged his gavel a dozen more times. “Order! Order! I said, ‘Order!’”
The sanctuary, the largest available room in town other than the saloon, came to something like a hush.
“Now I know everyone’s upset, and I know most of you have never been to a town meetin’ in your lives, but there are rules about how this works. First and foremost is you speak when you’re spoken to and not otherwise. If you want to talk, you raise your hand and wait until I call on you, just like back in school. That’s the only way this can work.”
He cleared his throat and lowered his voice just a little. “Now,” he said, and he paused, thinking of what to say next. “Now. I know that everyone’s still atwitter about what happened last Tuesday. It was a dark day when the Fu Shi Gang came to our town and burned the hotel and shot all those folks. Why, I’d known some of them for years myself.” He cleared his throat again. “It’s hard. Hard losin’ ‘em to that rotten rabble of Chinese.”
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Posted on November 12th, 2009 by bryon
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