Category: September Stories

Time to Reconnect

Photo by EmK Photography on Pexels.com

Do you remember Tom?

Your eyes are the first to understand. They open wide, drawn to a presence.

His cheeks not pale. Bright red, like the way they were that winter day. Electric day.

The day the snow fell in April.

And you met.

He came with a shovel. 

Cleared your sidewalk.

You had cookies and hot chocolate together.

The steam rose wet in the frigid air. 

Before he was your husband, walking boot deep in fluffy snow.

Tom. Laughing at unexpected falling flakes. Catching them in his mouth. 

Living life to the end.

The last word goes to Tom.

I Saw Strength and Sorrow in My Grandmother’s Art.

Photo by Monica McHenney

I try to imagine my grandmother’s life. When I met her in 1970, she was living outside of Jackson, Michigan. My father hadn’t seen her since he was five. I have one picture of her sitting between my parents, with my sister, under a watercolor of bare-masted boats and impressionist water. I thought she’d painted it. She showed us hers, smaller, unframed.

Calm, I can’t imagine that her life started that way. She bore twenty children; spent years in a mental hospital. Beginning in 1933, she lost her children; her world changed. I try to imagine, but it’s really hard.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the Dog Days of Summer

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The heat has drained the air of sound today. 

The birds have lost their voices to this hell of late summer. 

Furry squirrels are hiding in the shade of the maple tree and I guess that I would too if I wore a heavy coat like they do. 

But my dog is prancing from the front door to my chair. 

He’s licked my bare legs cool with sticky saliva. 

So we brave the heat though he’s not mad,

Nor am I English, like that saying goes. 

A Labrador, I guess he could be be English. 

I’ve never heard his accent.

Abstinence Based Sex Ed

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The President’s Ten Proven Methods for Pregnancy Prevention.

  1. Eliminate storks.
  2. Go through menopause.
  3. Read the Trump Bible, exclusively, just $59.99.
  4. Never wean your first baby.
  5. Keep your knees closed.
  6. Concealed carry, stand your ground.
  7. Download the Pope’s hundred best Chicago rhythm and blues tunes.
  8. Get a rhythm groove.
  9. Don’t lose your groove.
  10. When you’re late, say you’re not.

These suggestions have been curated by the president’s own human copy machine while on international jaunts with his majesty. They will be distributed through the Department of Miseducation for use in classrooms this fall.

The new curriculum will be titled Ex-say Education-nay.  

After the Funeral

Photo by Oziel Gu00f3mez on Pexels.com

Sven was filled with Guinness and peanuts. Distracted by a roadside fruit stand, he ran a stop light.

An ordinary goat in a neon vest and hard hat was selling a variety of grapes: blue concords, tiny green Champagnes and four other kinds. 

“I’ll take a pound of the Muscat,” Sven said through his open window. 

The goat ambled over, leaned on the roof and stared. “You’ve had enough.”

But Sven wanted grapes more than he could say. “They’re for my wife.”

There were no grapes. There was no wife. Sven began to weep for grapes and so much more.

Contemplating the Future with a Roof over My Head.

Photo by Peter Kessler 2025

Men with pitchforks remove the roof. Outside, tarpaper shreds cover the ground around the house.  A few shingles made it down, too. In one short week, our roof will be guaranteed to last for another 30 years.  

I will be 104 when this new roof is old enough to be replaced. I’ll be barely hanging on, more likely gone.

My children plan to keep the house. Such faith. In thirty years this house could stand on a desert or a flood plain. There might be no house. It’s silly to speculate. The future is not guaranteed; but the roof is.

A Mother Knows

Photo by Mike Bird on Pexels.com

A beloved king lived in a modest bungalow on the edge of the forest. His wife was the kindest and most beautiful of all women. Together they ruled the kingdom of Thryngia in peace and prosperity. If only they had a child to succeed them. 

A charlatan heard of their plight. He found his way into their confidence and promised to bring to life the stillborn child they had buried scarcely weeks before. The charlatan’s cousin, a witch, transformed him into an infant and raised him from the child’s grave. The queen was not fooled. A mother knows her child.

Gaslighting with the Little People

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Pexels.com

The sly leprechaun winked for the camera. ”Roll it.”
Invisible fairies heckled the TACO king on the golf green. “Heh, heh, ho, ho, fascism has got to go.” Don-Don landed in a sand trap. Brazen, he carried the ball to the cup. Now he was trapped.

Leprechaun Productions scored better ratings than the three hour snoozefest televised from a cabinet meeting or the new show, Oval Office Apprentice with TACO king scowling at Zelensky. Nothing was as popular as the grifter-in-chief on the 18th hole pleading with a fire-breathing dragon. 

Don-Don abdicated his throne. The dragon hologram disappeared. The leprechaun winked.

Three Times a Charm


Steve Ford Elliott, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By the third attempted murder, I was onto my stepmother. It was the almond smell that gave her away.  When she showed up at the door, I cheeked the apple and did a fake faint. Overconfident, she left without checking my breathing. That evening, the dwarves and I made a plan.

Doc certified the death certificate and the dwarves laid me in a glass coffin. Sleepy’s in a narcolepsy group with a few royal types. Before you could say Prince Charming, I was in another kingdom. At the wedding, Grumpy wrestled Mommie Dearest into iron shoes;  Happy lit the fire

The True Story Behind the Princess and the Pea

Open Media Library

The pea was the best part of that night. 

The Queen said, “Rest well my dear. Eighteen mattresses should be comfortable .” But the wooden ladder the princess climbed to reach the top had splinters that pricked and lodged in her hands. She squeezed and pulled with her fingernails to remove them. She couldn’t sleep; the mattresses swayed every time she moved. 

So she brought a quilt to the floor and tried to sleep beside the bottom mattress where she smelled a pea. It exuded a delicious smell, earthy and sweet. In the morning she asked where she could find more.