Four AM, there’s the garbage truck. Every other morning it wakes me up. I wonder if he’s as tired as I am.
Hopefully he doesn’t notice how big that darn bag is. It’s heavier than I had expected. I always told her she should diet.
Then I forgot the T.
Finding no medical explanation for his patient’s intermittent aches and pains, Dr. Ffarrigut said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re the victim of a hex.”
Later, the patient asked his wife, “Where’s our little ragdoll souvenir from the Caribbean?”
“I gave it to Mother. She needed a pincushion.”
The kitten sinks its teeth into my leg for the millionth time.
“Stop it.”
It ignores me.
“I was gonna give you a cool name, but from now on you’ll be called Princess Fluffylumps the Third!”
The male kitten blinks.
“Don’t push me. Or the glittery pink collar is next.”
I told him I had a dream.
He said,
“Dreams are for starry-eyed saps.”
So I told him I had a goal.
He said,
“Goals are for bankers and life-coaches.”
So I told him I had a thing
and he said,
“What the heck do you mean by a ‘thing’?”
Alana was great with numbers. They called her “hypotenuse” behind her back. She was across everything in the office and her colleagues hated her for it.
She wondered how long it would take them to realise she was taking the company’s money. Alana knew she’d disappear before they ever knew.
“That’s only if you take ‘dimwitted incompetent moron’ to have negative connotations,” he said, sliding his hand along her shoulder in a motion that could have been reassuring, patronising, controlling, threatening, loving or just brushing away lint. “No judgment implied.”
Later she hit him with a hammer. Non-judgmentally, but hard.
“To get to the other side!” he says, wiping tears from his eyes while I do my best not to roll mine.
Dad is getting harder to take, and holograms are expensive. In a couple years, when the kids are older, it might finally be time to let him go.
Grandpa’s pain stops with his heart. Amid brilliant white light and the fury of a whirlwind, he is lifted and flies rejoicing to God.
He wakes joyously. “Lord, I’m saved!”
His angel smiles. “Only just. It’s a miracle you got to hospital in time. We had to send a helicopter.”
She’s going to burn him for the affair.
So she disguises herself and hides in the back corner of the swanky bar where her friend saw them together that one time. And then she takes pictures of them pawing at each other at the bar and tweets them. With tags.
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Jennifer Hambrick was a winner in the 2017 international Golden Haiku Competition (Washington, D.C.) and received the Merit Award in the 2017 Montenegrin International Haiku Competition (English). Her chapbook of free verse poems, Unscathed (NightBallet Press), was nominated for the Ohioana Book Award, and she has received many awards for her work, which has appeared in Santa Clara Review, Third Wednesday, Mad River Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, River River, Modern Haiku, World Haiku Review, The Heron’s Nest, Bones, Sonic Boom, Eucalypt, Haibun Today, the major Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun (The Morning Sun), and in dozens of other journals and anthologies worldwide, in English and in translation. Jennifer Hambrick’s blog, Inner Voices, is at jenniferhambrick.com.
My two great aunts, Laura and Judy, loved to sidle up to me at weddings, poke me in the ribs and shout, “Don’t worry, you’ll be next … someday.” Then they’d shuffle off, cackling crazily.
They stopped after I did the same thing to them at my Grandma Minnie’s funeral.