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...

When Americans Think Of Scotland They try to recall what's the difference between it and Ireland. And whether or not it's part of Britain or England or whatever the UK is. They don't even bother trying to picture where it is on a map -- that's just stretching the powers of memory too far. And that's fine. That's the way the people of Scotland want it to be. The last thing they want is for Americans to go messing around with their affairs. Because then they might start to notice things...things that aren't easily explained. Like fog -- that talks to you. Britain's much better at explaining away their phenomena when the Yanks comes to visit. That's because Americans have always known that -- whether it's supposed to be called Britain or England -- it's a place that a long time ago was a contemptible place (although an American would probably use a different adjective) that tried to take their money, but nowadays it gives them many of their favo...

"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...

Poetry is not my forte, but I haven't yet been able to spin this into a story: I spent the day planting flowers, natives such as milkweed to attract pollinators -- bees and Monarchs. The neighbors cut two trees down, I saw the void when I came home. When I came home from planting flowers for butterflies and bees. In a book about beavers, and how critical they are to saving the planet, I read a quote, "when you're down to trying to save the insects, you know you're buggered." It had inspired me to plant the flowers, because trees take so long to grow. I walked in my neighborhood of "well-maintained" lawns. The sidewalks are covered with fluorescent fertilizer pellets to keep the grass an artificial green.  Gas-powered mowers growled, motors trimming, manicuring.  When Bradbury talks of colors, he describes carnivals and soda fountains, but he can describe the snow, the way it curls upon branches and crunches underfoot, as if it had all the vividness of a ...