Sympathy

When I was a child my father used to say:

"If you are looking for sympathy, look between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."

Ahh! Childhood memories.

I guess that is why I'm good at spelling.

A Short Story 2

Someone was banging on my door. I put down my cup of coffee and went to see who it was. When I opened my door, I saw Mrs. Johnson my next door neighbour.

"The birds are eating my husband!", she blurted out hysterically.

"What?", was all I could come up with for a response.

"The birds are eating my husband! Help me!", she repeated.

I didn't believe it; not for an instance. But I humoured her and put on my shoes and followed her as she hurried towards her backyard.I knew Mr. Johnson had died a month earlier of some unpronouncable illness that affects the elderly. I was thinking Mrs. Johnson must be having a nervous breakdown, or at the very least was drowning her loss with a little too much medicinal brandy.

I was just deciding what the next plan of action should be, when we entered her backyard.There were about 50 crows scattered across her lawn feasting on something in the grass: pecking the ground, squabbling, cackling, flapping their wings to hold their territory.

Mrs. Johnson looked at me speechless with tears in her eyes, and collapsed into a patio chair.

It was then that I saw her husband's urn, sitting on the table beside her, empty.

Another Page Off the Calendar

Goodbye February! Hello March!

I love ripping the pages off calendars.

You get to start with a nice clean month.

The calendar I have in my kitchen is too heavy for the blue tack I'm using to hold it up.

It keeps falling down, but I'm too lazy to get another wad of blue tack out and stick it on their properly.

I would use pushpins or a big nail, but I'm in a rental house and don't want to put too many holes in the walls.

It should probably stay up there by itself by June or July.