52 Short Stories

My great-grandmother had a pothos plant.  It's a type of viney plant that can look very similar to a philodenron. When my grandmother inherited the plant, she split it into three pots because it had grown so large. Pothos plants can grow pretty rapidly given the right conditions, and they are hearty survivors. When my mother inherited the three plants, she decided that when my siblings and I moved out, we'd each get one -- my older sister moved out first. One thing that pothos plants can't survive are cats that chew on them. So, my sister gave me hers when I moved out. Because this meant that I had two pothos plants, I kept "mine" at my apartment and "my sister's" in my office at work. Now undisturbed, her plant quickly recovered from the cats, and within a year went from having 4 vines and 30 leaves, to this Jumanji-aspiring beauty -- crawling along the walls for meters, filled with over one hundred leaves. Eventually, I took some cuttings and propa...

"No, I don't know what I want for dinner because I'm not even sure I've ever eaten dinner before.  In fact, it's possible that I'm incapable of consuming food.  But I guess, the shrimp in marinara sauce sounds good enough."     That used to be a typical daily conversation for me in the beginning -- if we go ahead and change a few details. Namely, that I was living alone in the woods and had never heard of "sauce" let alone marinara before, but of course I knew about shrimp -- no, wait...my mistake, that can't be right, let me start over. Some people think it would be rather nifty to have lived ten thousand lives. And maybe that could be true if they were all reincarnations and you couldn't remember any of them. Or even if you could remember a few of them, it was only  a few of them, and they were relatively neatly organized in your mind. You might say, "Oh yes, in this my current life, I had Mrs. Gellstahlt as my 2nd grade teacher. I...