A couple of years ago I posted a short-short story called Red Ball, which became rather popular and got comments like “breathtaking” and “This is great. Really creepy!” and “YES! Creepy… for sure.” and “Creepy is the word! Especially the 4th corner.” You can read the original story here.
Now I have gone and made a short video of it. I narrate it. You can see it by clicking on this sentence.
That’s it. Thanks for coming by. V+
I went to this Brussels restaurant. I indulged therein. Leaving, I pocketed their matchbox. This 2:01 minute video tells the wondrous story. Of adventure and true, vivid gourmet deluxe.
It is one in an ongoing series that perhaps has no end.
Now, to view this most excellent, enlightening video, CLICK HERE.
Thanks for reading & seeing. – Vincent
The man shuffled into my office to tell his troubles. He sat down where I had to look at him.
Taxes were ruining him, his wife didn’t understand things, his bills were piling up, he didn’t like the weather, his car was on the bum, his children avoided him, a pet hamster had died.
“Even my cat committed suicide,” he said. “He went in the road during the night to fight a truck. The truck won. Found him next morning, his head all flat, his brains shooting out his ear holes like grey toothpaste. It nearly broke my heart. We buried it and the hamster together in a spot in the backyard. My kids prayed, and then looked at me as if it were my fault. I didn’t know what to tell them. God, why …why my cat?”
He sat there, waiting for an answer.
“Did I ever tell you about the dog I had when I was a kid?”
I didn’t want to hear this.
“He was a big cuddly mutt named Elmer.”
Now I really didn’t want to hear this.
“Fred,” I interrupted. “You’re in no state to talk about a dog from your childhood. Especially if his name was Elmer. It’ll only depress you further.”
“Old Elmer,” my friend mumbled, as though he hadn’t heard my warning. But something must have gotten through, because he changed the subject. “They say it’s going to rain.”
“They’re often as wrong as they’re right,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. “Can’t trust anyone these days.”
I tried to change the subject. “How’s—?”
“Don’t ask,” he interrupted. “Don’t make me think about it. Let’s just sit here in silence in some animal warmth.”
We were sitting together like that for about five minutes, me getting impatient to get back to my work, Fred comforted by the warmth, when the boss walked in and said,
“Say, have you seen the report on … oh, Fred, hello. How are you?”
“My cat’s dead,” Fred said. He got up and walked to the door. “Elmer’s long-gone, too.” And he left.
My boss said, “Who’s Elmer?”
“You really want to know about it?”
He did. He was the boss. It was his job to know about such things. So I told him.
After hearing everything, he was silent for a long while.
“I had a dog named Buster who died when I was a kid.”
Sharing some more animal warmth was about to happen in my office again, and it wasn’t even nine thirty-five in the morning on a Monday.
“I love you, Mam. Oh how I looooove you. So much and double so much.” The daughter opened her mouth for more.
Mam said back, giving her more, “And I love you. You are so perfect.”
Daughter ate it up and said right back, “Mam, you can do anything. Just anything.”
They wanted to hug, but couldn’t because the daughter did not have arms. Or legs. Or any appendage. She was simply one big mouth with lips, tongue, teeth, moisture and love. Love for her Mam.
“I looooove you, mam.”
And needs.
“I waaaaaaant, mam.”
“What do you want, my dearest of dears?”
The big mouth smacked its lips.
“I want something you can get for me.”
“That’s why I’m here.” The Mam beamed. She could not help herself, she had to say it again. “You are perfect. Just perfect.”
“And when I do something wrong, mam? When I’m older and am bad, what will you do?”
“I will scold you, correct you, teach you, forgive you, and everything will go back to what it was before you were bad.”
“You’re the best mam ever!”
Mam went out and bought three books, a pair of gloves, five pairs of shoes, eyeglasses in a fancy frame, chocolate bars, four types of cakes so she could have a bite of each, and a new toothbrush and toothpaste.
“Oh, Mam, stuff! Stuff! Lots of stuff! You thought of me! But mam. Mam! Shoes? Eyeglasses? Gloves? What are they for?”
“For when you grow older and develop.”
“Oh mam! Mam, you think of everything! Everything!” The mouth loved using exclamation marks. She couldn’t help it if everything was wonderful. Wonderful! “Feed me, Mam. Feed me everything. I am made for it. One big happy need! You fulfill me!”
Mam went to the kitchen, stayed there a while, came back with three mounds of food, which she spoon and fork fed to her open-mouthed daughter.
“Mmmmm, Mam. You’re the best!”
“No, you’re the best.”
“No, you’re the best.”
And so forth until Mam went to get dessert.
And mam asked, defining future needs she looked forward to providing, “And what does my perfect baby darling forever want from me?”
“Hug me, give to me, forgive me, buy for me, feed me, squeeze me, fulfill me, shape me, take me, make me.”
“Oh my daughter!”
“Oh my mammy!”
“We were made for each other.”
“Oh, yes, mammy! Oh! Yes!”
And the daughter began hungrily nibbling her mother and the mam said, “My darling. My perfect, loving little girl. Ouch.”
She flew off her feet and landed on her butt when he pushed her out of his way so he could get to where he was going. She stood up slowly, brushed herself off, and gazed at his back as he diminished in the distance, hurrying away. She took a step toward him.
She landed with a hard thump and four red marks on her forehead where he had pushed her with the fingers of his left hand. This time he stood there, looking down. Her looking up. She stood, slowly, carefully, her eyes never leaving his. Took a step toward him. He put his fingertips right back on the same places on her forehead and pushed. Harder.
She was getting used to landing on her backside and seeing life from this angle. Or if not life, at least him. The guy who kept pushing her down when she approached him. She thought she should maybe sit there for a while and think over getting up again for him, but the feelings were too strong, too wild. She was up and moving toward him again watching his hands, both of them, getting ready to push her again.
For a few weeks now she had taken to wearing cushions on her backside. Her bottom had become so black and blue with this pushing down business that it was starting to hurt and could not be ignored even with this overwhelming instinct, need, passion, this desire. So when she fell, this time on gravel in his driveway, it hurt some, but not as much, because of the cushion. In fact, she bounced a bit, which was different.
Next time when she landed on her rear end in the parking lot of the liquor store, she put her hands down for landing stability and sharp-edged pebbles dug into her hands. She cried out. She looked up to see if this mattered to the man. But he had already turned away.
Again she fell, like a fluffy animal tossed on the floor.
Once more she fell and this time she fell into the ocean and a wave came and the salt went into her wounds and stung and the man stepped back, ever determined. She got up again, ever determined. They stood facing each other, her hands ready to grab him, his hands ready to repel her.
As she fell, she grabbed a bit of his leather coat and wouldn’t let go and as she fell, he lost his balance. He came after her. She landed hard on her bottom, on her back, in the dirt beside the bushes. He landed hard, on her, his front, on her front. It was progress. Perhaps a breakthrough. They lay like this in a public space until he pushed up and away from her.
Next time he pushed her away and she fell, she felt, or she thought she felt, his heart wasn’t really in it so much. Not like before. So she fell, more than ever, in love.
The next time, he didn’t walk away after he had pushed her down. He turned away, but he was not walking away. At last. Finally. She knew in her heart of hearts that now she was not the only one falling.
Wrote a short-short story a while back called Puppy’s Dead.
Seems to be one of the more popular stories–at least people keep coming back for it.
So I’ve made a little video of it. Did the voice over myself.
CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.
Hope you enjoy. Thanks for coming by. –Vincent
It never failed to happen—it always happened—he always went into a museum ready to be stimulated, amused, moved, awed by art—but inevitably, before he’d gotten twenty-six paintings or three rooms into an art museum, he’d start feeling sparky.
There was no fuller, better, harsher word for it. Slowly, subtly, before a picture any picture—didn’t matter which—his hands would begin sliding up and down the back of the woman he was with.
Before another dozen paintings were out of the way, he’d want to head her to some impossible secluded corner in the museum to grope.
It had happened before. And before. And before that. For years, every time. Once he’d dished up an explanation for it: “I think it’s because in museums there’s this sense of extinction. It’s all done, dead, hanging on the walls, inert, trying to be masterpieces. And I react to this by getting a certain base, jumpy, grabby horiness. I’m fighting the overwhelming sense of still life and eerie permanence by being invaded, overwhelmed by the possibilities of a woman’s flesh, alive, new, there.”
“Don’t,” she whispered, looking around, squirming out of his clutches.
He tried to take his mind off the matter by going to stand and look at another painting. He appreciated. The colors, the composition, the brush strokes … and then he’d glance sideways, and there’d be another woman. He’d stand back, as though appreciating the painting by giving it a fuller view, from a fine connoisseur’s distance. He’d study the woman instead. He’d study any woman. Face, eyes, hands, thighs, ankles and everything in between.
The museum was filled with wandering women. The pictures, the chef-d’oeuvres, the exhibit that had cost so much to get into—it all became incidental background compared to the alive and moving women.
Outside, escaped, the drums of sex would dim.
“What gets into you?” she asked.
He took in a chestful of outside air. “I don’t know,” he said, quieting. He breathed.
They began descending the cement steps.
Two women passed, ascending. His eyes followed. Followed.
Within, deep within, a muffled drum beat on.
I kill slugs. At night, in the beginning, I placed little bowls of beer embedded in the earth to tempt them to come, like wary animals arriving to sip in the savannah during the depths of darkness. But like unreconstructed AA members, they could not resist as they came to sip, and then sip some more, then more still, until they waded right in, and literally drown in their beer. Next morning, the little pools of beer held a number of floating and semi-sunk oblong corpses.
Snails, too, a couple of them were in there. Not a one of them could hold their liquor.
Still every morning I see my salad gets munched, holes appearing in the leaves. So another plan is formed, more sinister, more immediate. I waited until midnight approached to go hunting. I got my flashlight out but found it held dead batteries, damn, went around the house unloading batteries from remotes and cameras and suchlike discovering I had a house full of half-dead or utterly dead batteries. The flashlight kept its single eye closed. So I got a candle, lit it, not enough power, then a second candle, lit them both, and went into the night.
When I held the candles up to view the immediate territory, weird bendy shadows were cast over the land. But they were there. A transient city of snails and slugs, poking along slimeily, seeking their midnight snacks. I had filled a can deep with water and put it down near my feet. With carefully gloved hand I picked them from the ground, plucked them from the plants, one by one, and plopped them into my bucket to drown, and kept culling, and they kept acoming.
After a bit of capturing and tossing them into my mini-well, I had a look to see how many I had taken care of. Six or eight or an army of them were crawling up back to the rim, wanting life, or more free food. I pulled back three inches, as though under a surprise mini-attack. Naively, had I thought they’d just drown if there was enough water. I lowered a single finger into this world and pushed each one back down and each one was no match for my finger and fell with a tiny splash and a bob but still, still they still came up, crawling back with a zombie’s determination. This midnight raid was turning into something like night the living fucking dead.
So I put a second thought into the matter and and dumped in a dash of chlorine, swished it around in the water, then again poked those slime-balls back in. Again they went plop into the water but this time they curled and met their maker. Each released a little bit of distressed foam.
Pick ‘n’ plop was the main movement and sound thereafter out there in the garden when reasonable men were asleep. I tried pouring some salt on a couple of them and saw their innards sort of catch fire as some different but more raging sort of foam came bubbling up from under their bodies, their inner fluids flushing out.
I killed many during the next three midnights, decimating the local population. Then the following four nights there were no attacks on my small vegetable patch. The lettuce leafs thrived. No nibbles. One never foolishly declares victory in such matters, but the lettuce began to believe in themselves again. Courgette plants spread their leafy wings. Rhubarb went rhubbarbing.
But for those three nights running, with candles and evil intent, I sought and killed slugs and snails which dared assail with mucus mouths my struggling salads. Those nights were like my own little intense slasher-horror film out there in the dead of night. The foam and the bubbling. The single sound of a snail plopping into chlorinated water, that midnight plop a full one-note sound, masking the terminal.
…Here’s this popular short-short story, comes in three different forms:
WORDS
My short-short fiction piece, “Big Toe Walkabout” has proven to be popular story.
AUDIO
So after the story appeared, I made it into a Podcast/Audio clip.
VIDEO
Yet, maybe some out there would like to watch this big toe illustration while listening, so now I have made it as a one shot video story.
Yep, stories come in all sorts of packaging around here.
Enjoy, and endure. Thanks for reading, seeing, listening. And leave a comment below! Or in the YouTube comment box–I’ll get it.
People have been trying to steal the flower box outside my house.
There used to be a flower box set outside my window ledge facing the street where pedestrians pass. It was long and it was full of pretty things. Indeed, the point was to pretty up the neighborhood. But some passing people would pluck out the flowers, roots and all for, one imagines, their own home use, leaving gaping holes. I replanted the missing flowers with just basic leafy greenery reducing the plucking thievery, making it, one would think, no longer such an attractive steal. But someone was not happy with this solution. One deep night someone or a couple of someones pulled the flower box off the ledge and it free fell to the sidewalk where it fractured, splitting in half. It was discovered the next morning, dirt spread across the pavement, people stepping over it like some new obstruction that’s none of their business. So one cleans up and disposes but does not give up, damn it. One puts out a pentagon cement box full of tight smiling flowers right on the sidewalk, right next to the front door, insisting on bringing a little damn cheer to this damn neighborhood. Still, still, unknown people pluck at it, as though trying out pick-pocketing skills on the inert and attractive. So, sinking to their level, getting crafty, I planted some wall-aimed though hidden sticks usually used for skewering meat, deep in the ground, sharp points behind the leaves, so when an evil hand reaches in to thieve a plant by its roots, they get their greedy little fingers and/or palms jabbed. As a result, becoming frustrated and lightly wounded, they now kick at the cement box by my front door, jarring it out of its snug place. Every morning I put it back in its place, defiant, determined. They leave coke cans in it. Sometimes cigarette butts. Plastic wrappers. Last week someone laid a steel portion of a shower pole across it. Some foolish one actually tried to take the whole heavy flower container last week. But it had been tied to a steal horseshoe shaped shoe scraper embedded near the front door, left from the days when this city street was part of the outlying fields (I don’t live on rue de l’Agriculture for nothing). But when these determined plant robbers lifted it, the two wires encircling the box held it secure, so they could only get it off a ground a tiny bit. They must have jerked at it, hoping brute ignorance would help, and it wouldn’t give because I’m smarter and so it slipped from their grip (or they just gave up) and it fell to the sidewalk, yet, a sturdy construction, it did not crack and smash. It was left right in the middle of the sidewalk as the unsuccessful thieves drifted back into their empty-handed night.
Yesterday, someone tied across my front door some plastic police tape that had “Police” stamped repeatedly in black on yellow, the kind of official narrow strip found at crime scenes or accidents, to seal off the area from a curious public. It was tied at a slant right across the bars protecting the window of the front door, with some excess tape stuffed firmly in the keyhole, blocking my ability to lock or unlock my door to the world outside.
The flowers now look nervously up and down the street to see who or what might be coming next. A sensation of paranoia has begun seeping in from the flowers outside to the life within. The next assault is awaited….
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