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The Cereal Wish | Part 5
I wake up lying flat out in the entry hall closet we never use because we are too lazy to open the door. I’m lying on boxes of Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios I had wished into being. There are even some extras to make a pillow for my head. Melted chocolate is streaming out of the boxes like cookie blood. I can hear Maggie snuffling at the doorway.
Social Contract for Dummies
Trevor Noah released a video the other day describing how looting illuminates the brokenness of the social contract: If George Floyd can be murdered, publicly and deliberately, police—and if this is not an aberration but part of a pattern—then there is no rule of law.
Just in case it was too subtle, let’s revisit recent events moment by moment, using building blocks to understand Noah’s explanation. Call it The Social Contract for Dummies.
The Cereal Wish | Part 5
I wake up lying flat out in the entry hall closet we never use because we are too lazy to open the door. I’m lying on boxes of Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios I had wished into being. There are even some extras to make a pillow for my head. Melted chocolate is streaming out of the boxes like cookie blood. I can hear Maggie snuffling at the doorway.
The Cereal Wish
Fast & Short is a flash fiction collaboration between eight Literate Ape writers. Each was tasked with authoring one piece of flash fiction that would be combined to create a single short story. The writers’ flash fiction needed to serve two purposes: 1) Stand alone as a unique piece of flash fiction and 2) Serve as a vehicle for building a larger story and driving that story forward. Here is that developing story.
Costco and the Apocalypse
We are all connected . . .
Fifteen Years Later
I finally met my mildly reviled neighbor . . .
Obama Scolds the Woke
it looks like our beloved past-president has come out of retirement / hiding / wealth-making / whatever he’s doing with his fancy foundation, at a time when the nation is abandoning allies, abandoning core principles, abandoning the Constitution . . . to criticize THE WOKE for being judgmental.
What the hell do you say to that? OK, Boomer?
Nothing
Louise walked out into the waking morning with an ache in her throat and neck she identified as the desire to cry.
Taiga
There’s a reason why the flames lick higher and higher…
God Makes an Omelet
Morning has broken.
First me, then you, then the country
strewn left and right, spoiled
Additions to Sam Johnson's Dictionary
fetal supremacist (n.): A person who simultaneously advocates to curb abortions and abolish food stamps. i.e. The fetal supremacist wanted to revoke citizenship for children born in border states.
Cal Embraces the Death Penalty
“You know what I want to get her, I mean, if I don't break up with her?
I want to get her one of those stun guns you can get at Walmart—”
A Rescue Call Despite the Odds
What’s the matter, why don’t you know who you are? Wake up, America,
it’s me shaking you by the shoulders like Jim shakes any given guest star
out on the Final Frontier:
Him, Too
Almost everyone has a Me, Too story. This one isn’t mine.
TRUMP DUMP: An Easy Reader
Prologue
I’m Donald Trump and I am big.
Headlong
When resistance is futile, but you have to resist….
Fat and Somewhat Happy
This the poor can’t afford to know. But you know
and you’re getting poorer by the minute, so you’ll have to forget.
I Wrote a Letter
I was married and happy and not looking. But I went out on assignment to help him cultivate his fields, and something wild coursed through me. Something not cultivated, at all. I ended up writing him a letter:
I want to fuck your farm.
I want to curl my toes in the brown clay,
mash the wet soil under my arches,
squeeze the juice out of the squirming underground
and watch it bubble up out of the mud,
and over my heel,
and out from under the balls of my feet: musky.
insistent. warm like arterial blood.