Grampa rolled his rocking chair back and forth, back and forth.
He rubbed the twin barrels of his shotgun with the polishing rag, up and down, up and down.
He spit a wad of chewing tobacco into a jar, stood, and said,
“Missy, don’t you never–ever–kiss no boys.”
It was Jasmine’s birthday.
“It’s my birthday!” said Jasmine.
She had been born seventeen years before.
“I was born exactly seventeen years ago!” said Jasmine.
Jasmine wanted to have a party.
“Yay!” said Jasmine.
“Darling,” said Jasmine’s mother, “your birthday is tomorrow. Go back to bed.”
“Oh,” said Jasmine. “Whoops.”
The first day of school was like a nightmare for Billington Washburn Crabcakes. He tried to make friends, but everyone wanted to know what his name was, and he knew that if he told them he’d be made fun of for always.
So he kept to himself and ate crayons.
He flourished like a magician, his red cape brilliantly catching the light.
She looked up, and he thought he saw the briefest of smiles before she hid again behind her coloured fan.
His heart swelled, his soul soared, and his lungs collapsed under the hooves of the unusually aggressive bull.
Sunlight crept over the misty vale.
A small, spotted fawn nuzzled its motionless mother. “Get up, mother!” it said, its tremulous voice full of worry as tears fell from its wide, innocent eyes. “Get up!”
“Shut up, Bambi,” said mother. “It’s, like, six o’clock… Can’t a doe get any rest?”
“Want to go out tonight?” Kevin asked.
“I’d rather stay in,” said Jack. “It’s been a rough week. I went to break-up dinners with different girls on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
“I can see how that would be emotionally draining…”
“Emotionally? Heck no. But I’ve gained, like, seven pounds!”
The acorns had a happy, pleasant, relaxing kind of life. They hung from the boughs for days on end, swaying in the wind and not worrying about anything.
Then the squirrels arrived.
They were merciless, brutally slaughtering the acorns’ best specimens in broad daylight!
So the acorns befriended a coconut.
They showered baby Tabitha with adoration, affection, and kisses (of the Hershey variety), and their efforts were rewarded. She grew ever happier, ever more contented, and ever plumper.
Finally the day came. They placed her in the pot, placed the pot on the stove, and whipped out their cameras.
“Cheese!”
“I found them!” Todd squealed.
“Found what?” mumbled his wife disinterestedly.
“My box of old hockey cards!”
“Oh?”
“They must be worth hundreds of dollars by now!”
“Really!?”
“My dad and I made them when I was a kid and I hid them away in the attic.”
“You… made them?”
Gregor went to bed one night and woke up as a giant clumsy bug.
His family freaked out and locked him in his room. His little sister fed him garbage.
He scared some old guys and someone threw an apple at him which got stuck in his back.
He died.
This story is a microfiction treatment of Franz Kafka’s classic novella, The Metamorphosis.