Category Archives: Light

August 7, 2012

If You Could Live Anywhere

“If you could live anywhere, where would you live?” Allison asked.

Jordan thought for a moment. “I’d live on the Hubble Telescope.”

“You can’t live there. There’s no air or place to sleep.”

“It’s a hypothetical question, right?” Jordan said. “So any answer is allowed.”

“Fine, why would you want to live there?” Allison asked.

“Who wouldn’t want to live there? You could turn away from the Earth with all its ugly problems and gaze out forever onto the vast expanse of the universe. Instead of worrying about war and poverty and finding the right person to marry, I could look out forever on God’s grand creation and fill my soul with beauty.”

“Wouldn’t you be lonely?”

“You could visit sometimes, if you want. So, where would you live?”

Allison shrugged. “I don’t know now. I was going to say the tree house.”

(So…if you could live anywhere, where would you live?)

29 Comments | tags: fiction, imagination, mid-week flash | posted in Light

August 3, 2012

The Secret Lives of Strangers

By David Stewart

“Do you think that strangers are strange? There’s no way to really know. One of the things I love about strangers is that you can’t really know anything about them. Get to know them, you say? Then they’re not strangers, are they?” Francis said all this while gesticulating somewhat ferociously at the woman sitting next to him on the bus.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” the woman said. She got up and stood by the door.

“That’s my point, exactly,” Francis called after her. “I could be anyone: a movie star, or even an axe murderer.” From the looks he was getting, the passengers on the bus considered the latter to be vastly more likely.

But Francis was no axe murder; he just liked to watch people and he felt that he had a gift for telling things about people, just by looking at them.

A man got on the bus. He wore a faded leather jacket and a baseball cap that said “USS Missouri”.

Francis sized him up. A former sailor? No, it was too obvious. This man was a pirate. He used to be a consultant for the Somali pirates and retired here to live with his harem of semi-legal Chinese immigrant wives. He takes the bus because he always carries a pistol and his road rage is constantly teetering on the edge of erupting, Vesuvius-style.

The man put a hand into the pocket of his jacket and gave Francis a meaningful look. Francis looked away quickly.

A woman got on at the next stop. She was a gorgeous brunette and wore short shorts and pink midriff top.

A former model, Francis thought immediately. She made millions on the runway, but retired after becoming disillusioned with the lifestyle. She rides the bus because she’s looking for a normal guy to settle down with: someone slightly overweight and wearing a clever T-shirt.

The woman walked by Francis without even reading his clever T-shirt. Well, it doesn’t always work, he thought.

An elderly woman climbed laboriously onto the bus. She didn’t interest Francis much, but he was fascinated by the small poodle she held in her arms.

That dog has rabies, Francis thought. It’s taken some medicine for it, so it’s okay now, but any sudden movement and it will Hulk out and start attacking everyone. Even a sneeze will set it off. Francis shifted to the middle of the seat to try to keep the woman and her dangerous poodle from sitting next to him.

The next person to get on was a girl in her twenties. She wore glasses and carried a thick stack of books with titles like Molecular Geometry. She sat down next to Francis.

What if she’s a terrorist? Francis thought with a chill. What if those books are loaded with explosives and she’s just gotten out a terrorist cell meeting and now she’s on a mission? She probably worships Egyptian deities and has dedicated her life to avenging them for being forgotten by humans. The woman opened the top book and began reading about obtuse angles in sodium hydroxide.

Francis looked out the window to find some more strangers to daydream about. The bus was four stops from his house when suddenly the girl next to him jumped up and pulled an Uzi out of a hollowed-out Metaphysical Economics book.

“Everybody down!” she screamed. “We’re taking this bus to Mexico. Stay down, or by Anubis, I will shoot you like a jackal.”

“Oh no, we’re not,” the man in the brown, leather jacket roared. “I have to get home to my wives.”

He jumped up and pulled a gun out of his pocket, but in the process, jostled the elderly woman with the poodle. The poodle let out a howl and jumped to the floor. It started frothing at the mouth and running around, peeing on everything and trying to bite people’s ankles.

Francis tried to make himself smaller as he looked out the window. I have a terrible, terrible gift, he thought.

12 Comments | tags: bus, fiction, funny, quirky | posted in Light

July 30, 2012

Meanderbus

By David Stewart

I live in the town of Jeonju, South Korea. It’s a medium-sized city of 650,000 people in the southwest of the country. It has always been famous for being a traditional, historic Korean city.

Then they elected a new mayor: Mayor Kwak Min-Gi. He was young for a mayor and had an artistic temperament. He wanted to make Jeonju into a easy-going, free-spirited, stop-and-smell-the-roses sort of city. Not a very Korean ideal and a bit of a hard sell.

One innovation was the “karaoke stoplights”. Now, instead of being on timers, each intersection has a song assigned to it. Directional mikes are set up and the side that sings the loudest gets to go next. If you get stuck with a bunch of sullen drivers, you can sit there for twenty minutes or more. People were a little resistant at first, but it slowly caught on.

Now, to get across town to my friend’s house I have to sing three Korean ballads, two K-pop songs and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” Don’t think you can just let everyone else pull their weight either. Men in business suits will be leaning out of their windows, singing at the top of their lungs and yelling to everyone else, “Sing, dang you! I’m late for work!”

Another innovation was the “artistic vehicle” movement. Cars in Korea are almost complete black, white, or gray. Mayor Kwak offered huge discounts in vehicle taxes to anyone who decorated their own car. Koreans are natural artists and everyone likes to save money, so it didn’t take long to catch on. Now, you can look out on a traffic jam of green, yellow and neon pink cars; cars with Hello Kitty on the hood; cars with childish scribbles on the doors; and vans plastered with the entire casts of Korean dramas. The upside is that it is now very hard to lose your car in a parking lot.

My favorite innovation, however, was the “meanderbuses”. These were buses that did not have a set route. They just went wherever the driver felt like. These took a little longer to become popular and even now, they’re not used a lot. After all, it’s hard to take one to work when you don’t even know where it’s going. Which is precisely the reason I love them.

You have to keep your eyes peeled. There are only five meanderbuses for the whole city. You can follow them on Twitter if you want to know where they are currently, or just use the old-fashioned method, which is a group of spotters who keep each other informed.

Every time I ride one, I find a new place. Once the bus went out into the mountains on little one-lane roads for about an hour and drove past five toothpick factories in a row. Another time I found the Jeonju Museum of Culinary Snake Meat Substitutes. Who knew?

Last Thursday I was waiting at the bus stop to go to work when a meanderbus showed up. Of course I took it and called in sick. It was good that I did too. Mayor Kwak was on that bus, showing off the program to a group of reporters and government officials. They asked me how I liked it and I told them it was great. We cruised around Jeonju for a couple hours and then had lunch at a galbi restaurant that was housed in a former bomb shelter complex, built under Mount Hwasan. I didn’t even know it was there before.

Thanks, meanderbus!

19 Comments | tags: bus, fiction, quirky | posted in Light

July 24, 2012

Rice Pilaf Surprise

By David Stewart

I went into my favorite restaurant and saw that there was a new item on the menu: Rice Pilaf Surprise. I’m not really a fan of rice pilaf normally, but the “surprise” part intrigued me. So I ordered it.

I was halfway through when I discovered a twenty-dollar bill buried in the rice. I’ll admit, it was a surprise. Not that I was complaining—the pilaf cost $3.50. I didn’t eat the rest though. After all, money is dirty. What I did do was order another one.

In the next one, I found a five-dollar bill and a bunch of quarters. In the next, there was nothing but two Lincoln Logs and a Lego pirate figure, but in the next one was a gold necklace that had to be worth something.

“You’ve got quite an appetite today,” the waitress remarked, as I ordered my fifth Rice Pilaf Surprise. She pointedly ignored the pile of plates filled with untouched food.

“I sure do,” I said. “Three more Rice Pilaf Surprises, please.”

All in all, that night I got $37.15, a gold necklace, the Lincoln Logs and Lego pirate, three pieces of wire and an old cell phone. All I had to do was buy ten Rice Pilaf Surprises.

Since then I go back every day, usually ordering 10 to 12 at a time. For the last week, it’s been mostly dead rats, shreds of newspaper and some old car parts. Still, I’m not worried.

I feel a hot streak coming on.

10 Comments | tags: fiction, food, funny, mid-week flash, quirky | posted in Light

July 18, 2012

Inside a Social Raindrop

By David Stewart

(This story is dedicated to my wife Leah, whose birthday is today.)

Aqua-biologists have determined that the smallest sentient particle of water is the droplet. Droplets are much smaller than we think and are very resilient through all states of matter. They are also very friendly.

I can just see them up there on a cloudy day, bonding together into bigger and bigger drops.

“Just a bit more,” they yell. “Just a few more for critical mass.”

“Hey, didn’t I see you in the Danube?” one droplet asks another.

“Yeah, back in the day. I’ve been hanging around in the upper atmosphere for a while now though. You?”

“Africa. I spend some time in an elephant.”

“Hey, I was snow,” another says and all the other droplets ooh and aah. Being part of a snowflake is incredibly fun.

“Are you guys going down?” a few droplets cry as they whirl by in an air current. Water droplets have such corny senses of humor.

“We sure are. Grab on,” the others shout, laughing.

More droplets pile on. “Three, two, one, and here we go!” they all shout as they all feel that delicious brink-of-the-rollercoaster sensation just as the raindrop begins to plummet.

“Whee!” they all scream. It’s only natural. The ones at the bottom are flattened out by their speed and the ones on top just barely hang on. They descend through a grey misty world and then suddenly come out of the clouds.

“Almost there!” one of them shouts as the ground rushes up to meet them.

“See you in the Amazon River!”

“See everybody in the Amazon River!” They all laugh, even though it’s the oldest joke in the book for water droplets.

“And here we goooo!” they all yell together.

Splat. The man looks down at his coat sleeve where the raindrop hit and then up at the sky.

Dang. He forgot his umbrella.

12 Comments | tags: fiction, funny, mid-week flash, quirky, rain | posted in Light

July 10, 2012

Crane Game Wife

By David Stewart

(Introducing the Mid-Week Flash, a short, often rather odd piece of fiction every Wednesday.)

I found my wife in a crane game. You know, those ones you find on the street and in bars that are impossible to win. This one was in the back of a run-down arcade. I was bored and when I saw a bunch of small, pretty women inside the case, I thought: Why not? Better than a plushie Spongebob doll.

I put a quarter in and started to move the crane around with the joystick, but they all started running away from it. It was then that I realized they weren’t robots or dolls. They made me sit down and tell them about myself, what I was looking for in a girl, and why I liked them in particular (which was hard, since they were asking about all of them and I didn’t know any of them). Finally, after a couple hours, I put in another quarter and one of them jumped on the crane and I got her out.

She was only ten inches tall but she said if I put her in water, she would grow. Of course, stupid me, I left her in too long and now she’s like, seven feet tall.

I still love her though.

21 Comments | tags: crane game, fiction, funny, marriage, mid-week flash | posted in Light

June 28, 2012

Three Writers on a Bus

By David Stewart

A group of friends, Mike, Tom, and Kelsey were traveling to a writers’ meeting when there was an accident. Here are their accounts of the incident.

Mike’s Account

It was raining—not a happy little drizzle, but a carwash set to Super Premium, hold the hot wax. We were traveling down a lonely highway halfway between Nowhere and Who Cares City and had been for over two hours now.

I was doing a crossword puzzle and failing miserably at it. Who the hell knew a 7-letter word for domicile goatee anyway? The broad across the aisle had been giving me the sweet-eye for an hour now and I kept giving it right back. She had legs like the Amazon River: long, with lots of curves.

I glanced out the window and saw a car was coming up on us, like it wanted to make our acquaintance in a hurry. The passenger side window went down a crack and the barrel of a snub-nosed Luger told me they didn’t want to chat. The bus driver—O’Malley, by his nametag—saw it too and threw the wheel to the left, trying to give the other vehicle the old cold-steel shoulder. The car swerved but O’Malley kept right with him. The front fenders scraped with a shriek of steel like the devil’s nails going down Hell’s blackboard.

There was a boom as the Luger fired, hitting our front wheel. O’Malley did his damndest to pull it back under control, but the bus tipped and started to roll. The Amazon across the aisle fell into my lap. I put an arm around her waist and held on as passengers and baggage got thrown hither and yon. I knew I was probably going to die, but what a way to go.

Tom’s Account

The Imperion-class space frigate, Reyhoun, rocketed down the warp-path towards the Orion nebula. Captain Dax Harflux piloted the 800-ton frigate with cool confidence that came with eight years of experience in the Galactic Commonwealth. This was his last trip of the cycle, transporting dignitaries and Fagullian wine to the nebula colonies.

A beeping sounded from his instrument panel. Holy meteors! A Narullion pirate craft had been detected 40km behind them and coming up fast. He had to evade it, but how? He was locked into following the warp-path until he hit the nebula jump-gate. He accelerated, sending sparks of anti-matter shooting from his proton-powered nacelles.

The Narullion pirate was approaching rapidly on his port side, firing crackling beams of scarlet energy. Captain Dax strengthened the shields but they had already lost half their power. Another beam hit and the ship lurched to one side. The pirates had gotten the gravity generators and inertial dampeners! The whole ship started to roll and with a burst of white light, they flew off the warp-path. With his last burst of energy, Captain Dax hit the emergency distress button. He might die with his ship, but the pirates could never get their filthy hands on the dignitaries or his cargo of Fagullian wine!

Kelsey’s Account

I sat listlessly by the window and watched the rain glisten down the glass. Today was the one-year anniversary of my beloved being killed in action but my heart still yearned for his gentle touch and the feel of his strong arms around me. Life had been drained of color since I had watched him leave for basic training in a bus much like this one.

There was a flash of yellow next to the bus and I saw a convertible pull up next to the bus and stay there. I was seated directly behind the bus driver and I saw him slow to let the slick sports car pass, but still it stayed with us.

Then to my astonishment, the convertible’s roof began to retract and a man stood up in the passenger’s seat. He was wearing a battered Army uniform but his head was bare and the rain soaked his soft brown locks in seconds. I let out a gasp as I saw that it looked like my beloved.

He smiled and I knew it was him. That smile, even seen through a rainy bus window going 50 miles an hour, still filled me with chills. I did not know how, but it was he, back from the dead. I flung open the bus window and leaned out, heedless of the rain and extreme danger.

“My dearest love!” he cried, “I have come back for you. Not even death can keep me from your side!”

“But how?” I shouted back in wonder and joy. “They told me you had been killed at Dieppe. I received a telegram.”

“A clerical error!” he shouted joyfully again.

I let out a sigh. Clerical error. From then on, those two simple words would be the happiest words in the English language for me.

He pulled a box out of his pocket and opened it, proffering the contents. “Would you do the honor of marrying me?” he shouted.

I fear that I fainted at that point and, it seems, collapsed onto the bus driver. With my last sensation, I felt the bus swerve and then I was thrown into weightlessness, like an angel settling gently to Earth.

I woke up in the hospital, with my beloved sitting next to me, a diamond ring on my finger. Oh, but I was the happiest woman in the world!

Bergerville Herald, June 20, 2012

A Greyhound bus traveling westward on highway 16 side-swiped a car, hit the curb and rolled once. The cause of the crash is said to be mechanical. Nine people were treated for minor injuries at the Bergerville Central Hospital.

10 Comments | tags: accident, bus, fiction, funny, noir, parody, romance, science fiction, writers | posted in Light

June 25, 2012

When Opposites Attract…Like Matter and Anti-Matter

By David Stewart

Back when I lived in Vermont, I knew a married couple called the Harringtons. They loved each other, as far as I could tell, but when it came to their genetic thermostats, they were like black and white.

Mr. Harrington always ran cold; his hands were as chill and clammy as a dead fish and he wore sweaters up into late spring. Mrs. Harrington, on the other hand, could melt icicles just by pointing at them. She was constantly flushed and sweating. I once saw her walking in a blizzard in short sleeves and she was still red in the face.

It turns out that Mrs. Harrington liked to sleep with the covers on, even though she was always hot. Something about the air on her skin made her feel violated, she said. As you can imagine, summer was hellish for her, and as the temperature rose, she kept the air conditioning on more and more. Little did Mr. Harrington know that his wife had hooked up an extra tank of super-powered Freon to the unit. She had bought it from a Russian spam email and it was apparently not intended for home use.

The first night she used it, the temperature in the bedroom fell to below freezing and icicles starting forming on the drapes. Mrs. Harrington slept like a baby, only waking up from the crash of Mr. Harrington falling on the floor in hypothermic convulsions. To this day, he remains the only case of July hypothermia in Vermont history.

Of course, it didn’t help that Mr. Harrington couldn’t sleep with the covers on. He felt like he was being suffocated and woke up hourly, screaming about being buried alive. As you can imagine, winter was a living hell for him, if hell indeed froze over. He would crank the heat as high as it would go until the Harringtons’ gas bill rivaled the GDP of a very, very small country. The gas company had one whole department dedicated to the Harrington account.

With an Exxon Valdez-worth of natural gas pouring into their house every day, Mr. Harrington could finally get comfortable and sleep through the night, but Mrs. Harrington, on the other hand, was experiencing a much more classical picture of Hell. After she was rushed to the hospital in January and treated for heat stroke, the Harringtons knew that something had to change.

They didn’t want to divorce and the idea of separate bedrooms seemed lonely and the quitter’s way out. One day, Mrs. Harrington found a revolutionary type of bed on E-bay. It allowed each side of the bed to regulate its temperature separately by dividing it with a high-pressure air curtain. Mrs. Harrington clicked Buy it Now without even looking at the price.

The bed was sealed and pressurized inside a big glass box. It worked like a charm: Mr. Harrington could turn the heat up all he wanted and Mrs. Harrington could cool her side down until she could see her breath. The first night they used it, they found that it worked too well. As the temperature difference between the two sides of the bed approached eighty degrees, mini storm fronts broke out along the dividing line. A tiny hurricane swept the length of the bed around 4am, pelting them with a thimble full of rain. Still, neither one wanted to stop using it.

“Giving up on this bed would be taking the quitter’s way out,” Mr. Harrington said.

“Plus, it’s non-refundable,” Mrs. Harrington added.

So, now the couple dresses in their rain-slicker pajamas every night and Mrs. Harrington puts on her sleep mask with the small umbrella attached. Mr. Harrington swears that the tiny lightning bolts don’t even wake him up anymore and that the thunderclaps are as soothing as a kitten’s snore.

It wasn’t easy to adjust, but it was a compromise, and isn’t that what marriage is all about?

6 Comments | tags: apartment, couple, fiction, funny, marriage, problems | posted in Light

June 21, 2012

Caves for Rent – Inquire Within

By David Stewart

“Ugh, I feel like a zombie,” my wife said, crashing facedown onto the bed.

“Nonsense,” I said, surreptitiously checking her skin for a greyish pallor. She had been saying that sort of thing for about a week now and although I never truly believed her, I kept a baseball bat by my side of the bed.

“I’m just so tired. I never get enough sleep. I just wish there was a cave I could crawl into and sleep for a month.”

I’ve never been really big on metaphors, so I googled “caves for rent”. There were a surprisingly large numbers of results: some absurd, some merely expensive. To narrow it down, I typed, “just a cave to sleep in for a month”. One result came up.

ARE YOU TIRED OF TOO MUCH LIGHT? WANT TO HIDE FROM DEBT COLLECTORS?

TRYING TO NURTURE YOUR INNER TROGLODYTE?

SLEEPY BEAR CAVE RESORTS HAS IT ALL!!!!!

I wasn’t sure what a troglodyte was, but the ad sounded enthusiastic and anyone who used five exclamations points in a row had to be sincere. I called the number.

A week later, I packed my wife’s bag while she was in the bathroom and told her we were taking a ride. She wouldn’t get in the car until I gave her some explanation, so I said we were going for ice cream. Then I felt like a jerk, so I really did stop and got some. We were almost finished our cones when we pulled up to the cave I had rented. It was just a dark hole coming out of the side of a hill with a steel door inset into the entrance.“What’s this?” she asked. “Are you going to kill me and throw my body in a cave?”

“Surprise!” I said and then had to explain I wasn’t referring to killing her.

“So . . . you’re going to lock me in a dark hole?” she asked hesitantly.

“Well . . . yeah, but not in those exact words. I rented you a cave. You said you wanted to sleep in a cave for a month. I booked it for a month, but they threw in an extra week free. Food’s provided and there’s—I checked the brochure I had pushed up my sleeve—natural air conditioning.”

“So . . . you want to lock me in a dark cave all by myself for five weeks?” I couldn’t interpret the expression on her face, but my confidence in the merits of my plan was beginning to be shaken; even more so when I saw tears forming in her eyes.

“Well, honey, you know—”

“Thank you!” she cried. “Thank you so, so much! I love you.” She threw her arms around me, gave me a quick kiss and then ran off towards the cave entrance, suitcase in hand. She pulled the huge steel door shut and it made a loud clang as it locked.

I got back into the car with a self-satisfied smile. Now it was just me for five weeks, just like when I was a bachelor.

Uh, I guess I’ll have to cook for myself. Well, no getting around that. I liked ramen.

And do the laundry and dishes. Ugh. Maybe I could make a big pile for five weeks.

No sex for five weeks. Dang. Dang, dang, dang.

I jumped out of the car and pounded on the door of the cave. “Hey, honey! I was thinking, why don’t we put up dark curtains in the bedroom. I can try to snore less . . . sometimes. Honey?”

There was no answer. I turned and sadly got back in the car.

9 Comments | tags: caves, fiction, funny, vacation | posted in Light

June 14, 2012

Ants Go Squishie!

By David Stewart

Leroy put down his toothbrush and watched a column of ants brave their way up to the summit of his bathroom faucet. They reached the top and milled around a little, slipping off to a watery demise in the sink below or trying to make their way back down to the counter. On the counter, another group seemed to be making a base camp around his mouthwash bottle.

Leroy hated ants, but lately he had given up. What was the point? He couldn’t kill them all and when he killed them they left messy smears everywhere. He had put down poison, but it had been roach poison, and apparently ants were stronger than roaches.

He went out and shut the bathroom door in an attempt to keep the invaders contained. As he walked outside, all he could think of was some way to kill the ants. The air was hot and near his building was a new street vendor. A huge sign read “Mango Slushies”.

“Hey buddy, get a free mango slushie!” the red-headed twenty-something behind the cart yelled. He even wore a slushie-looking grin. “Today only!”

How to kill the ants…how to kill the ants. Leroy’s mind was filled to capacity, trying to think of a solution.

“Don’t you want a free drink? Hey buddy, I’m talking to you.” Leroy kept walking, trying to block out the annoying noise.

“Yeah, keep walking, jerk!” the slushie guy yelled finally. “Ignore the best thing that will happen to you all day. It would probably poison you anyway.”

Poison.

Leroy stopped. He turned around. “Did you say poison?”

The red-headed boy suddenly looked uncertain. “Yeah, I said it would poison you, probably.”

“Would this stuff poison ants?”

The boy gave a short laugh of disbelief. “Uh, yeah, sure. Why not. I’m sure it would explode their little heads.” With an effort, he pulled the grin back from the corners of his mouth.

Leroy gave him a long look. “Okay, I’ll take three.”

“Well, only one is free—”

“Then I’ll buy two more. How big are they?”

“Uh, they’re a liter each.”

“Sounds good. Can I get them to go?”

So it was that Leroy walked away a moment later with three huge plastic cups of mango slushie, perilously stretching out the plastic bag the boy had put them in. Leroy walked back up to his apartment and opened the bathroom door. The ants had scaled his small shaving shelf and had discovered half a sandwich Leroy had forgotten the night before when he had gone in to use the bathroom. They were busy disassembling it and belaying it down to waiting sandwich sherpas below. Leroy took it and put it in the tub, plugged the drain and waited for a crowd to form.

“See you in insect hell,” Leroy said, and poured all three liters of mango slushie into the tub, pausing only to shudder at the idea of seeing anything in insect hell.

The ants went crazy. Leroy shut the bathroom door to let the poison do its work.

Between work and going out afterwards with the guys, Leroy did not have an occasion to open the bathroom door until the next morning. He pushed it open a crack and peaked in.

The walls and sides of the tub were black with ants, but his elation soon crashed when he saw that they were still moving. Not only were they moving, they were busy. It looked as if thousands of ants had drowned in the slushie, but tens of thousands more were pouring down into the tub in ordered lines to drink at the shore of the slushie lake. They had apparently gotten into his toothpicks and dental floss and several tiny rafts were floating on the sticky yellow surface. He watched several ants float by in the cap of his toothpaste tube. He stared in dazed disbelief for several seconds before giving the whole thing a miss and shutting the door again.

He spent the rest of the day moping around the apartment and avoiding the bathroom. It felt eerily quiet. Outside of the bathroom, there was not a single ant in the rest of the house. When he went to check the mail, he heard other people in the building commenting on the sudden lack of ants and praising the landlord. He felt slightly cheated by this and printed up signs that read:

ANTS SUDDENLY ALL GONE? THANK LEROY GOOGLEHEIM IN APT. 5F! Several people did thank him and asked his secret.

“Special poison,” he said.

The only thing that was worrying Leroy now was the idea of the slushie in the bathtub running out. In his uneducated guess, there were now several hundred thousand ants in his bathroom, glutting themselves on mango-flavored slushie goo. If that were to run out, there would be a veritable wave of 6-legged sugar freaks rampaging around looking for their next fix. He went to visit the slushie cart.

“I need more of that slushie stuff,” he said. “A lot more.” It was only then that he noticed the red-headed slushie guy packing up the cart. “Where are you going?”

“I’m out of business,” the boy said. “It turns out I wasn’t far wrong when I said these were poison. The yellow dye— it causes cancer in lab rats. Are you feeling okay, by the way? You had an awful lot of that stuff.”

“Just peachy,” Leroy said quickly. “Listen, where is the rest of the slushie mix?”

“I guess I’m going to throw it all away,” the boy said sadly. “I couldn’t pay people to take it now.”

“That’s not true,” Leroy said. “You can pay me. You can give me ten bucks for the whole lot.”

Ten minutes later, Leroy was in possession of forty gallons of concentrated slushie mixture and ten bucks. He dragged the plastic jugs to the roof of the building and rigged up a tube that he fed down through his bathroom vent. A little adjusting and he could refill the tub without ever going into the bathroom again.

He sealed the bathroom door with duct tape and fervent prayers and abandoned it. As the days went by, people from buildings all around the neighborhood were dropping by to congratulate him on fixing the ant problem. He even got a commendation from the mayor and the title of official Neighborhood Ant Exterminator.

The only bad part was that now he had to use the bathroom in the McDonalds down the street.