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The Kiss

Long ago I spent a lot of time traveling between the homes of my father, an uncle, and an old, spinster aunt. All of them lived alone and I would make it a point to stop in on each of them from time to time to give them some company. Young people tend not to realize how much it means to older people to be in the company of young people. Young people make them feel young too. Sadly, most young people tend to be put off by older people, they find them boring I suppose and don't seem to want to be around them much.

So maybe you will understand why one night while eating alone in a very nice restaurant I took special notice of a beautiful young woman about 20 years of age seated with an older woman who I would estimate to be in her mid 70's. The young lady was engaged in an animated conversation with the older woman and I found it difficult to keep from looking at the beautiful smile which never seemed to leave the younger woman's face. The older woman wore a corsage and I could only assume it was her birthday or some other memorable occasion which was being celebrated that evening, but just by the two of them - there was no one else in their company. The young lady truly seemed to be enjoying the evening with the older woman who also appeared to be in very happy spirits.

I continued to eat my dinner but caught the eye of the waitress and signaled her to come over to me. I told her I would like to pay for the dinners of the two women at the other table but that she was not to tell them who their benefactor was. When they were about to leave and called for the check I watched the waitress saying something to the young lady which I couldn't hear and then made sure to avert my eyes for the natural impulse would be for her to scan the room to see who was watching and thus determine that it was I who paid the check. I stole glances at them as they made their way to the doorway of the room we were in. They walked slowly to accommodate the older woman who's arm was being supported by the younger woman. Just before they walked through the doorway the younger woman wearing her most beautiful smile of the evening paused, then turned and then blew a kiss to the room in general. That was many years ago, but I still treasure that kiss.

==============================

A Morning Walk

I have worked for a university for many years, and as some of you may know, campuses tend to be hectic places during the school year; but in the very early morning the campus paths are devoid of the teeming masses which later appear and despoil the mystic serenity of early morning light and adulterate the musical chorus of the morning birds who celebrate the dawn of each new day with their own rendition of 'Ode To Joy' heard by only the ancient granite block walls of wizened buildings who listen silently in their ivy covered robes.

It had become my habit to walk the campus paths every morning in the early dawn to betake what had become for me an almost religious experience of quiet solitude wreathed in the gothic beauty that only an old campus can afford. One day I decided to begin my daily constitutional early as some detail in my home life dictated and during my walk in the very center of the campus where two paths crossed I saw an older man walking in the same direction along the opposite diagonal path - it was obvious that our paths would cross. He walked a bit ahead of me and he reached the junction a moment before I did. We looked at each other, smiled, and exchanged unspoken nods of good-morning. I mildly resented the intrusion of this bipedal infestation to my otherwise paradisiacal sojourn which I had heretofore only shared with the occasional rabbit or squirrel until it occurred to me that perhaps I was the intruder since I had now arrived earlier than normal.

He was of a bulky, rugged frame and one could picture him in earlier days as a football lineman or a traffic cop. His grizzled grey hair was worn in a flat top style standing straight up and looked all the world like an ashen colored lawn in serious need of mowing. He wore faded light blue denim pants and coat and I thought it strangely coincidental that I wore denims as well - mine newer and a bright dark blue by contrast befitting, I mused, our difference in years. He had a jaunty step and it was apparent from his face that he shared my love of this time of day as well as the surroundings and peace of the early morning beauty and solitude of the campus. The next day I began my walk at the exact same time as I tend to be perfunctory in my habits and was surprised to find the same man at precisely the same place on the path relative to mine as the day before. Once again we exchanged nods of greeting and this routine was to follow for many years. Sometimes the nod would be returned with a salute and sometimes with a wave but words were never exchanged. I assumed he was a maintenance worker for no professor I knew or ever heard of would be up at that time of day walking the university paths for no reason; also, his consistently worn denim attire suggested manual labor.

After awhile he became a part of my morning experience - a comrade who, it was apparent, shared my appreciation of something precious and undefinable about these early morning walks. It became a sad day when I did not encounter my old traveling companion and I wondered if he felt the same way about not seeing me on days when I was either a bit early or late. As time passed I saw less and less of him during my walks and after awhile I saw him no more.

One day I picked up the local newspaper and the first thing that caught my eye was a picture of this very man. It seemed he had died and the article was about his life and accomplishments. So simple and routine was his life, so lacking in ostentatious public display that I had no idea what this campus icon looked like.

I continue my morning walks, and at a sleepy crossroad each morning I smile and nod to an old friend - Howard Nemerov - Poet Laureate of the United States.

/

That is so beautiful & inspirational ... I'm actually in bed reading on the laptop & now I feel like a little kid again being read a bedtime story & being given a gentle but important life message ever so subtly.
Goodnight DATo, sleep warm.

Two beautiful stories DATo.

Gannon wrote:Two beautiful stories DATo. :D

Thank you Fran and Gannon. I have always been interested in the small, day-to-day stories that take place unobserved and unknown to the general public. I believe everyone has had experiences such as the ones I describe above and I am always interested in hearing them - thus, I created this thread. Hopefully others will contribute to it and I'm sure there are many many stories such as mine which our forum members can share if they choose to ... I hope they do.

Gotta say, I enjoyed those two stories greatly. Do you write any actual novels that can be downloaded onto the kindle? I think with storytelling like that, I’d be much interested in reading them.
And in response to your request that others add their own, I’d like to oblige.

Regular Romeo

Nothing frees the soul and billows confidence quite like kicking a bad relationship. At least, for me it did, and after four long years of trudging through the necessary trenches of youth where we believe that in us lies an untold power to change the nature of others, I finally made my mother weep with joy by dumping my High School sweetheart. Her little boy had grown up and finally realized he could do better, and he’d been fortunate enough to solve this riddle only half way through college.

And god damn did he notice it too.

It was the first day of the semester and I was in my degree required, notoriously unnecessary, two-yawns easy “A,” introductory accounting class. The professor had already begun to introduce herself and I had eyes for no one but the beautiful women all around me. After willing binding my lustful self with vicious zealotry to an idol that had proved unworthy, I was ready to … unleash the kraken, so to speak, and would have turned down all nine of the rings of power given to mortal men at that time because only the One would do.

Then, suddenly, through the doors she came. Thirty seconds late and not a moment more, she strode down the aisle like an angel befit to succeed the almighty with a confidence clearly born from independence. Her black, straight hair flowed down her rosy cheeks and actuated her full lips. In front of her breathtaking eyes, she carried box-shaped glasses that perched daintily on a tiny nose, and wore modest clothing on an athletic figure that swayed as she walked. As she sat down and opened a notebook, her intelligent eyes snapped to the professor, putting to rest any doubts that her untimely entrance was due to anything more than a slight lapse in judgment.

I had but one thought: Who … is … she?

Clearly beyond your league, my old chained psyche cackled from the ledge it dangled upon. I frowned for I believed in my heart it was true, and had this story taken place at any other moment, this memory would have ended here. Thankfully though, I was no ordinary college kid at that moment. I was as fool-hardy as a drunken fraternity pledge, and when class was called, I kicked the old me off the ledge before following her out. As he screamed to his fiery death, my heart screamed with him, for I was now in the presence of a goddess.

I followed her out and walked next to her down the hallway. Quickly, I yanked out my phone and pretended that there was something, anything, in the world more interesting than her. She mercifully bought it, and when I struck up the first question about how she would buy the class textbook, she replied in kind with a smile on her face and a twinge of interest in her eyes. At that moment, I knew that her phone number would be mine.

I walked on air as we headed toward the building’s exit. Side-by-side the conversation continued and I could do no wrong. I asked her about her other classes, her major, and the club she was in. I was confident, suave, and debonair, a regular James Bond with no equal. She was one of a kind, and apparently I was too. Then she made a sudden sharp left turn into a crowded elevator, and my moment of glory came to halt.

I stuttered to silence as she waved good-bye. She couldn’t go yet! I still had not received the seven digits required to begin a platonic relationship with her! As the doors began to close, I saw my window of opportunity closing and I reacted like the nerdy, goofy, dorky guy I really am.

I stuck my arm out, tumbled from the clouds above, stopped the elevator door from closing and stammered, “Can I have your number?”

If you’ve never seen an elevator full of people do a coordinated eye-roll, you truly are missing out on an interesting sight. If you ever have the pleasure to do so at your expense with a beautiful girl jumping in surprise as you do so, well, you have my sympathy.

“Uh, sure,” she said.
“Thanks,” I replied.
“Get in the elevator, Romeo,” one of the men in the elevator said.

And that’s how I met my fiancé.

tbughi1,

Thanks so much for your kind words. Nope, I don't think I have the talent to write novels therefore nothing online for anyone to download.

You also write a nice story. I enjoyed it very much. I just finished a book called Ghostwritten and your story reminded me a lot of a romance between two young people contained in it. It was also told in 'first person' and your writing was much like the narrator's as well.

Thank you and ... congratulations !!!!

I think I did.

We bought him when he was two weeks old, and we chose him because at the pet shop, he was the only tiny tot with intelligent eyes, trying to claw his way out of the cage.

I fell in love.

I took him home, his cage seatbelted to the passenger seat and he slept all the way over to my place. The kids loved him from day one, and for the next few months, he was nothing but pure joy.

On my first trip away from him, we left him at a pet sitter, and she did a pretty good job but i worried about him all the way and back. Later that month we discovered that he had a growth in his ear. He was not even eight months old when he had his first surgery!

I sat up all night with him, half the time holding him in a cloth in my lap, and he slept peacefully, drugged by the medicines, in my hands. He seemed to like the cosy feeling because after that day, when I called out to him, he would peep out and come scampering over to where I was and peep his little nose out so I could rub it, which is so unhamsterlike!

I put him in a hamster ball and made him run around the room daily. He used to get all sweaty after a ten minute run and usually went to sleep in the ball.

He had another growth again and another surgery. This time it was in the other ear. Again the same ritual, me worried sick, and watching him snap out of it during the night.

He was a year and a half and now enjoying cucumbers and carrots. He didn't care for the carrots, but liked to eat the cucumber slice, one paw resting on my finger while he gnawed at it,like a little person.

When he was eighteen months, he had a swelling in the stomach. The vet said it was a tumor and they had to remove it. After that surgery, his stomach went in and his one leg started dragging. I don't know how that happened!

He was older now, and rested a lot. He was getting thinner,losing his hair, and a month before his second birthday, on a fateful day, he just huddled in the corner and started shaking.

I could see his time had come.

It took him eight hours to die. He was like a proper person in that too. Just one day ago, he had tried to roll in his ball to show me he was still fit. Now he lay there, quietly breathing. I touched him softly and he squealed like a rubber ducky, as if in pain, so I let him rest.

Five minutes before his time came, I picked him up, wrapped him in tissue and held him in my hands. He looked at me with still eyes, as if telling me he needed to go now. I started crying. He breathed a few deep breaths, and he passed away.

I cleaned him gently as his body went still and cold. I placed him in some bedding and we went to bury him in an empty place a bit far from our home.

After he left, I missed him terribly. I was now used to the routine of cleaning his cage, changing his begging, making him food and feeding him, pretty much like a baby, and he in turn had lived to the maximum his breed can, and that's around one and a half to two years.

Six months after his death, I decided, after a gap of twelve years, to have another baby. My husband was surprised but didn't oppose the idea. Nine months later, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who is actually a lot like a naughty hamster!

I decided to go for a human child instead of a pet because we can't predict the life span of a human being. We can for a pet who comes with a pretty accurate expiry date, if looked after properly. We can hope and pray that our kids outlive us and bury us as lovingly as we bury the ones we love and say our final goodbyes to them in the process.

asmaahsan,

Your true story is a beautiful one. It is a story that I think all people who have loved and lost pets, as I have, can relate to. Thank you so much for posting it. As I was reading it I was reminded of a poem by Norah Holland which was written, I believe, in the 19th century.

Quoting from memory so it may not be exactly correct:

The Little Dog Angel

High in the courts of Heaven today
A little dog angel waits
With the other angels he will not play
But he sits alone at the gates
"For I know that my master will come," says he
"And when he comes he will call for me."

He sees the spirits that pass him by
As they hasten towards the throne
He watches them with a wistful eye
As he sits at the gates alone.
"But I know if I just wait patiently
That someday my master will come." Says he.

And his master far on the earth below
As he sits in his easy chair
Forgets sometimes and he whistles low
For the dog that is not there
And the little dog angel cocks his ears,
And dreams that his master's call he hears.

And I know at length when his master waits
Outside in the dark and cold
For the hand of Death to open the gates
That lead to those courts of gold
The little dog angel's eager bark
Will comfort his soul in the shivering dark.

/

Thank you for your comment. You posted a beautiful poem.
The funny thing is that this hamster was my first pet ever. I had allergies as a child so I wasn't allowed to have a pet. I was very scared to even hold the hamster in the beginning, but the little devil won me over. He was a real sweetheart!

-- 20 Jan 2013, 16:46 --

Here you go. Found it for you online.



"The Little Dog-Angel." by Norah M. Holland (1876-1925)
From: Spun-Yarn And Spindrift. by Norah M. Holland.

[Page 7] 

SPUN-YARN AND SPINDRIFT

THE LITTLE DOG-ANGEL

HIGH up in the courts of Heaven to-day
  A little dog-angel waits,
With the other angels he will not play,
  But he sits alone at the gates;
"For I know that my master will come," says he:
"And when he comes, he will call for me."

He sees the spirits that pass him by
  As they hasten towards the throne,
And he watches them with a wistful eye
  As he sits at the gates alone;
"But I know if I just wait patiently
That some day my master will come," says he.

And his master, far on the earth below,
  As he sits in his easy chair,
Forgets sometimes, and he whistles low
  For the dog that is not there;
And the little dog-angel cocks his ears,
And dreams that his master's call he hears.

And I know, when at length his master waits
  Outside in the dark and cold
For the hand of Death to ope the gates
  That lead to those courts of gold,
The little dog-angel's eager bark
Will comfort his soul in the shivering dark.

-- 29 Jan 2013, 20:14 --

I started a new post here called "Let's write a new story"game. Ant, Bighuey and Clintessential helped me write it and it turned out so darn funny! I took all the comments from the posts and have complied it into a short story. The comments are true, the story is mad up. Adding it here so you can enjoy the humor of the story we cooked up. It was good fun!

Our combined story.


"B, help me!"

As usual, I burst open Bighuey's front door which was always unlocked for the likes of me, and barged in unannounced.

Bighuey was trying to fry an egg. I could see he had fixed the level of his stove, as the egg was not running to the side anymore, as it usually did. 

"Would you like an egg?" 

B, as I nicknamed him, was old school. Handsome guy, even now in his retiring years, once offered places in movies for his looks. I often teased him about his short lived career in films.

"No thanks B, maybe pancakes, but later please. Finish up and come to the table. We have work to do." 

I sat down on the dining table and started spreading my stuff around. I needed my laptop too, but right now, I just needed to jot down the basic story line of the new script I was working on.

Bighuey finished his cooking marvel at his own pace. He was a very restful guy who likedvto sit on the porch with a chilled drink in his hand, counting goats and wondering where the paca had scuttled off. There was a Rosemary bush in the front of the house, something that never seized to amaze me, and I was many a times treated to the culinary wonders this fresh herb complimented. 

"You have half an our only Asma," B sat down after wiping his hands off on a tea towel. "The cleaning lady comes after that."

I started telling him about how I had been contacted by a movie director and they required me to write a script for a comedy film. I always found comedies to the hardest to write, and I was no Steven Spielberg either, just a mom trying to establish her identity as a writer too, other than just being a loving mom and wife. 

The script had to be outrageous, but in a serious undertone, not crazy wacko style, so we had decided to keep it tongue-in-cheek humor, fitting in as many examples of real movies we could to make it a relatable parody of sorts.

I had come up with a plan to write about a detective. We would call him Frank Nosely, as a detective always had a nose for sniffing out trouble. He would have a team of junior detectives who would remain nameless.

"I like the idea," B smiled, now gearing up and flexing his brain muscles to go 'outrageous' so I could begin my script. "You begin," he gave me the que, "and I will follow your lead."

I reached out to take a bite from a donut B had just placed infornt of me and the first line of the script just popped into my head.

"I really loved the scent of donuts in this cafe," I began.

Bighuey said that  it reminded him of the day before when he and his friend Ant had been at this joint nearby where Ant had commented about their kitchen. We decided to add that line here.

"but the kitchen had a bad reputation!"

"Nice!" I already liked the opening sentence. It was my turn now.

"'Who is that guy in my regular seat,' I thought irritatingly as I entered the room, hoping it wasn't the health inspector as I wanted the place to stay open." 

B was beginning to enjoy the story. He suggested we call up Ant and get some tips from him too. After a five minute dialogue, Ant provided us the next 
Iine.

"He ordered tea and started scribbling something down in a notebook."

The story was building up now. I could sense it. We had now shifted focus from 
Frank Nosley to the new sinister character in the plot. 

"He looked familiar but I couldn't place where I had seen him before". I continued where Ant had left off. 

Ant was on the speaker phone, so I could hear him thinking aloud. He suggested with his line that we now move the character out of the cafe and make Frank Nosely follow him.

"I decided to follow him from the cafe." Short and sweet, the line moved the plot to scene two.

"I had to make sure he didn't see me as he rounded the corner and entered into a dark alley." It was my turn again.

"Make him pull a pistol from his pocket, check the clip and enter the building on his left with the pistol concealed in his hand," Ant continued the discussion on the speaker phone. I added that too.

"Man," I complained, "what's with you men and guns!" and then, at that exact moment, the name of the character came to me.

"It suddenly struck me that this was THE PISTOL they were looking for all over the country!" I had a flash of brilliance, followed by a shot of laughter from Ant from across the line, that drew a chuckle from B who decided to add  to the absurd.

"I then realized it was 'The Pistol' that killed paper books!" 

Now it was my turn to laugh at B's line. B had a thing for books. He had bragged once that he had 8000 ebooks on a flash drive he could hide in a coffee cup, pretty much like that woman in the movie 'The Recruit' starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

I needed to add some flesh to it so I came up with another idea.

"He had revealed in his interview to the paparazzi that he liked to shoot paperbacks with his gun, to make a point, and left the web address of their Internet edition at the scene of crime, as his signature."

B was laughing. I could see the naughty twinkle in his eyes. Any moment now, he was going a outrageous. I could sense it coming.

"He stated that next, he would be going after newspapers with a flame thrower. He was also distributing  pamphlets titled 'The Evils of Paper'." 

That threw me into peals of laughter. The imagery was amazing! Not to be left behind, I came up with a masterpiece, letting my knowledge of history work for me.

"To prove how serious he was, his pamphlets were hand-written with plant extract ink on banana leaves, since he was anti paper." I was a genius, I patted myself on the back. Bighuey was now on the roll.

"How he got the banana leaves is a fascinating story in itself. He lived in Norway, and as the climate there in not great for bananas, he went to the jungles of South America and had to fight disease, savages, and wild animals, finally cutting a deal with some head hunters to trade banana leaves for heads. That started him on a whole new project. Now he was armed with a machete collecting heads." Oh man, I gasped.  B was killing me! 

 "His machete was his trademark too,"  I added naughtily.

A dry voice joined in over the speaker phone. Ant had decided to channel us back to a more realistic storyline.

"A machete proved to be to messy, too close and personal, causing too much gore.  The pistol made things much easier, but the pistol left a paper trail which could be followed." Rightly pointed out, we decided to keep the story restricted to the pistol as his only trademark. 

"So he tried the Eco friendly brand." That was my helpful line as I was an Eco friendly person.

Bighuey insisted that we diversify on weapons. 

"Then he came up with a plan to put a chemical in the water system that was harmless to people except government officials that would dissolve paper." B was taking charge of the plot now. Unabashed, I decided to counter him.

"So the government warned everyone to have their books dry cleaned only, not washed." Beat that, I dared B with my naughty eyes. B decided to rise to the occasion.

"That only led to more problems, major cleaning fluid shortages, inflation, so the government sent in a 'Seal Team' to eliminate him." Touché, I marveled at B's imagination. 

I decided to bait him. 

"When Melissa Slyone entered the room where my Seal Team had assembled for their first meeting, I nearly fell out of my chair - what a knockout!"

Unfortunately, Bighuey dodged me.

"But we considered her just one of the guys, as she was a tough professional."

And so Bighuey butchered my romantic notion of striking a romance between Nosely and the 'femme fatale' of our plot. To make things drag on further, my half hour was up and the cleaning lady had arrived. I wrapped up and went home.

Later in the afternoon, I called Ant for a few more ideas. He was a bit busy but decided to help out a bit. He was amused at my efforts to make the absurd sound like a plausible story. I thought we were doing pretty well on it.  

Between Ant and myself, we moved the story further.

"I was asked to head the team to the field to find THE PISTOL, as I had seen him in the flesh and could identify him better." Ant liked  my line.

"Surrounding his hide-out, we made our move." The story progressed as Ant thrust Nosley into the thick of things.

"I knew he was a sneaky one, so to keep my team safe, I geared up and motioned them to fall back and cover me while I creeped to the backyard to enter the house from the back door." I decided to bring the hero out in Nosley's character. 

"The house was silent and in darkness." Ant wanted me to speed things up but I  refused to hurry.

"It suited me to enter quietly, and I was never more thankful in my life for the darkness because 'The Pistol" was snoozing in the very room I entered - what a lucky escape!" Ant liked the line and would have added further but there was someone at the door, so he hung up.

I got up and flexed my muscles, wondering if Bighuey was still busy. 

A call confirmed that he could be bothered, so I hurried over to his place, to find him trimming the Rosemary bush. 

He made a cup of coffee for me and we continued the story.

"I tiptoed up to where he was sleeping and reached my hands to his throat." Pretty much like Ant, B was determined to exterminate the poor fellow. I was a  woman, and unlike my male colleagues, wished to reform the character, so I became the angel of mercy.

"'Hey Boss,' the rough voice in the corridor stopped me in my tracks, and I quickly hid behind the curtains to hide from the newcomer." 

I had just saved a life!

The door opened and Clint walked in. Bighuey had invited him to join our brainstorming session. Clint probably read even more than B so I figured that his contribution would only help the story onwards in a better direction.

"My heart sank as it was him - The Pistol had the drop on me; the taste of fear, sharp and metallic, pervaded my mouth as I waited for him to commit to action."

The plot got thicker as Clint decided to do away with Nosely instead. No, I argued, much as I admired the suspense Clint had just injected into the plot, the protagonist needed to stay alive. 

"Luck was on my side again, because his hired assassin, after giving details of the bookstores they had just trashed, took him to check out the scene of the crime, with me on their tail." So basically, with my intervention, Nosely  had remained undetected and was now on their tail.

The men looked at me with distaste. They wanted some blood on Nosely's hand. I didn't. 

"They led me to an abandoned Barnes and Noble store; I always wondered what happened to them." Bighuey had no regard for copyright! I made a mental note to change the store name later to 'Bounds and Books'.

"The smell of rotting paper, dissolved by the chemical used in the water guns the pistol gang used filled my lungs, made me cough and splutter, making the men sharply turn and gun me with water bullets designed to harm me as I was a government official - the war had begun!" I gave the men some action at last. 

Clint rose to the occasion.

"We would have to change plans because the war was to be fought with chemicals, rather than fire." B and I liked his line so we added that to the story.

"The chemical manufacturers loved it, as they would now get fat government contracts for the manufacture of weapons." That was Bighuey, doing the math.

"Everyone, from Monsanto to Granola, knew what was at stake. Any company that had inventories of 'chemicals'  laying around, could dump them into the weapons systems the Government deemed most efficient to fight the war." Clint's line had me craving for a Granola bar.

"The pistol was on the phone now, applauding his team for the destruction well done, and made a move to the next venue where, tipped off by my informer, my team was already in place, waiting to arrest them." I distracted myself from the thought of food.

"But unfortunately, The Pistol escaped as we moved in for the kill and from intelligence sources we learned he went to Africa where he was developing a mutant army of giant termites to complete his dastardly plan to destroy all paper." Bighuey had guessed that I was trying to wrap up the story. He wouldn't have it, so he added a twist.

Oh man, my stomach groaned. I needed food. I told the boys to hold the thought as I got up and helped myself to some healthy snacks from B's kitchen. Munching in my nachos, I came up with a brilliant plan to counter the termites. We needed a botanist!

"I immediately took action, beginning with a call to my best friend doctor Bruce Banner, also known as THE HULK, and currently working in an African village, to meet me in the rainforest with his botanist girlfriend so we could develop a scheme to foil the pistols plan." I was proud of myself. I had always loved THE HULK. 

"I figured if anyone could stop the pistol, the HULK could. If necessary, we could call my old comrade Doc Savage and his crew to help out." Bighuey had to have the last word, as always.

"THE HULK and his botanist girlfriend Sage Bloom, greeted us at the front door of their cafe/bookstore, The Green Tome, looking like retired school teachers, rather than the Baddest Bad Since Shaft they really were." Clint had other ideas and butchered the poor duo!

"The years in the rainforest had taken their toll on the couple but I was sure that their skills had become even more lethal than before, something we required; it's important to mention that I had the hots for Sage bloom back in college, and to me she would never be old or retired." I wasn't a feminist for nothing!

"Sage and HULK rode with us to a giant staging area several hundred feet below the floor of the Rainforest. The music in the elevator? Shaft, of course, can you dig it? Working from Intel that showed photos of Giant Termites practicing hand-to-hand combat and reciting Conversational Zulu phrases in case they were challenged by locals, S & H had fabricated a working model of the Termite's Forward Staging Area in Libraria." Clint was a master at work!

"The fight had gone on all afternoon until we decided to call it a day and retired to our tents." I was tired too, so we called it a night, deciding to meet at the coffee shop nearby the following day.

I was going through the notes when Bighuey and Clint entered the shop, deep in conversation. I was very touched to notice that they were seriously trying to help me write the story. These were two mature, well-educated professionals, and for them to get down to my amateur level to help me become a better writer was just so phenomenal! 

"We reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, the door opened and there were two of the pistol's thugs waiting for us, but as Monk, one of Doc Savage's men had devised special chemical guns that would dissolve anyone we fired at, we shot them point-blank and they instantly turned into green goo." B did the honors and the story continued. 

Clint had been thinking. He thought that the story was not going anywhere and I needed to make it more happening. I liked his example of a story he was working on presently, about the famous Bonnie and Clyde, and he suggested some very good ideas to improve my story. I was pressed for time and had to follow a specific format, so I promise to follow his advice for the next story, and requested the men to help me complete this one first.

Maud, another friend popped in. She needed some help with something, so she took Clint away, joking at our combined effort to offer  an insight into the male psyche, and regretting that fame was not around the corner for us. I grinned back and turned to B, my last hope now, to help me complete my literary masterpiece.

"We hurried inside but were too late - the pistol was now headed towards area 89, the rendezvous point of aliens from planet nunu on their last visit to the planet, in the hope to find some alien allies." I figured we needed some aliens in there as well. B didn't disappoint me and dug up on his knowledge of the sic-fi realm.

"Area 89, things were getting serious and we knew we would need reinforcements so we contacted the Japanese government to see if we could get Godzilla as a backup, and went to a rendevous point on Monster Island to regroup and make plans to invade Area 89." No way was B getting away with that! Poor Nosely, to be outsized by a radioactively mutated lizard! Not happening! I stepped in and took control.

" Godzilla had just became a new dad, and the Mrs. was no mouse either, so he excused himself, leaving me no option but to tell our good friend Bruce Banner that I still had the hots for his girl, making him explode into THE HULK and beating the pulp out of the termites and the aliens who fled back to nunu in a hurry ; now leaving us to deal with the pistol himself!" My darling Hulk saved the day by throwing the mother of all tantrums. 

Bighuey had another one up his sleeve.

"We tracked him to Skull Island in the South Pacific, where he was trying to incite the natives to deal with us, they got on this wall and shouted Kong! Kong! Kong! and we knew what that meant so we entrenched ourselves!"

B was being the monkey's uncle now. I was not relenting on that either so I called upon the Mrs. again.

"We got lucky as Lady Kong decided to unleash baby kong, a bouncy little monster, onto the world - saved by a baby; darn, we had the luck of a leprechaun!" I added bravely but Bighuey's  eyes challenged me.

"Baby K chased the pistol, grabbed him and threw him into our camp, we tied him up but during the night he was transported to a renegade Klingon spaceship, where they needed his help to resurrect the Star Trek TV series." I knew that B was that baby's godfather! The traitor! I had to think fast.

"Luckily, I had connections in the Klingon community, an ex girlfriend had been a real Klingy, so after soothing her deflated ego, I got a chance to cross question the pistol, giving him a lie-detector test." Nosely was on the roll once again, thanks to yours truly.

"The truth test revealed that as a child, the pistol's father would beat him with a rolled-up newspaper, and it caused him great psychological damage, and that resulted in his hatred for paper, so we contacted Dr. Slumbubble, the world famous authority on paper fetishes." Bighuey was grinding  his teeth, and I was laughing my head off! God! B had a real flair for twisted plots! 

"Wow....there's a lovely twist, a roll of paper..." I gasped, laughing. 

"The doctor questioned him deeply until he broke down, crying hysterically, asking to write an essay of 100000 words, 'I will be a good boy' as his teacher made him write in school, revealing another reason for his hatred of paper." I humored B.

B crunched the deal.

"We then set him up a blackboard and supplied him with a truckload of chalk, and told him to get with it, hoping that would cure him." I laughed so much I fell off my chair. The waitress looked at us as if we had gone mad. 

Bighuey was having a laugh too, at my expense. As I was out of ideas now, he suggested that we conclude that since Nosley had a problem with 
The Pistol breaking the chalk, they got him a laptop and after he wrote he was 'a baaaad boy' 100,000 times, he was cured and became rich and famous as the author of the best-seller, 'Lord of the Paper'.

I loved the ending but we decide to end it differently as I didn't want The Pistol to get rich again and go bad  a second time. Thanking Bighuey for helping me with this one, I concluded it as follows,  promising to enroll his help for the second story of the story too, if this one came through.

"Three months later, reformed, retrained, and brainwashed, The Pistol, now known as Harry Papercut, was working in a printing press, concluding my case and allowing me to almost take off for my vacation when orders came to report to office - 'The Ink ' was on the loose ; a new case had begun!"

And so I wrote the first of a series of cases of Frank Nosely, the detective beyond compare, and decided to call the story,

 "Nosely's close encounter with The Pistol".

-- 29 Jan 2013, 20:16 --

I started a new post here called "Let's write a new story"game. Ant, Bighuey and Clintessential helped me write it and it turned out so darn funny! I took all the comments from the posts and have complied it into a short story. The comments are true, the story is mad up. Adding it here so you can enjoy the humor of the story we cooked up. It was good fun!

Our combined story.


"B, help me!"

As usual, I burst open Bighuey's front door which was always unlocked for the likes of me, and barged in unannounced.

Bighuey was trying to fry an egg. I could see he had fixed the level of his stove, as the egg was not running to the side anymore, as it usually did. 

"Would you like an egg?" 

B, as I nicknamed him, was old school. Handsome guy, even now in his retiring years, once offered places in movies for his looks. I often teased him about his short lived career in films.

"No thanks B, maybe pancakes, but later please. Finish up and come to the table. We have work to do." 

I sat down on the dining table and started spreading my stuff around. I needed my laptop too, but right now, I just needed to jot down the basic story line of the new script I was working on.

Bighuey finished his cooking marvel at his own pace. He was a very restful guy who likedvto sit on the porch with a chilled drink in his hand, counting goats and wondering where the paca had scuttled off. There was a Rosemary bush in the front of the house, something that never seized to amaze me, and I was many a times treated to the culinary wonders this fresh herb complimented. 

"You have half an our only Asma," B sat down after wiping his hands off on a tea towel. "The cleaning lady comes after that."

I started telling him about how I had been contacted by a movie director and they required me to write a script for a comedy film. I always found comedies to the hardest to write, and I was no Steven Spielberg either, just a mom trying to establish her identity as a writer too, other than just being a loving mom and wife. 

The script had to be outrageous, but in a serious undertone, not crazy wacko style, so we had decided to keep it tongue-in-cheek humor, fitting in as many examples of real movies we could to make it a relatable parody of sorts.

I had come up with a plan to write about a detective. We would call him Frank Nosely, as a detective always had a nose for sniffing out trouble. He would have a team of junior detectives who would remain nameless.

"I like the idea," B smiled, now gearing up and flexing his brain muscles to go 'outrageous' so I could begin my script. "You begin," he gave me the que, "and I will follow your lead."

I reached out to take a bite from a donut B had just placed infornt of me and the first line of the script just popped into my head.

"I really loved the scent of donuts in this cafe," I began.

Bighuey said that  it reminded him of the day before when he and his friend Ant had been at this joint nearby where Ant had commented about their kitchen. We decided to add that line here.

"but the kitchen had a bad reputation!"

"Nice!" I already liked the opening sentence. It was my turn now.

"'Who is that guy in my regular seat,' I thought irritatingly as I entered the room, hoping it wasn't the health inspector as I wanted the place to stay open." 

B was beginning to enjoy the story. He suggested we call up Ant and get some tips from him too. After a five minute dialogue, Ant provided us the next 
Iine.

"He ordered tea and started scribbling something down in a notebook."

The story was building up now. I could sense it. We had now shifted focus from 
Frank Nosley to the new sinister character in the plot. 

"He looked familiar but I couldn't place where I had seen him before". I continued where Ant had left off. 

Ant was on the speaker phone, so I could hear him thinking aloud. He suggested with his line that we now move the character out of the cafe and make Frank Nosely follow him.

"I decided to follow him from the cafe." Short and sweet, the line moved the plot to scene two.

"I had to make sure he didn't see me as he rounded the corner and entered into a dark alley." It was my turn again.

"Make him pull a pistol from his pocket, check the clip and enter the building on his left with the pistol concealed in his hand," Ant continued the discussion on the speaker phone. I added that too.

"Man," I complained, "what's with you men and guns!" and then, at that exact moment, the name of the character came to me.

"It suddenly struck me that this was THE PISTOL they were looking for all over the country!" I had a flash of brilliance, followed by a shot of laughter from Ant from across the line, that drew a chuckle from B who decided to add  to the absurd.

"I then realized it was 'The Pistol' that killed paper books!" 

Now it was my turn to laugh at B's line. B had a thing for books. He had bragged once that he had 8000 ebooks on a flash drive he could hide in a coffee cup, pretty much like that woman in the movie 'The Recruit' starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

I needed to add some flesh to it so I came up with another idea.

"He had revealed in his interview to the paparazzi that he liked to shoot paperbacks with his gun, to make a point, and left the web address of their Internet edition at the scene of crime, as his signature."

B was laughing. I could see the naughty twinkle in his eyes. Any moment now, he was going a outrageous. I could sense it coming.

"He stated that next, he would be going after newspapers with a flame thrower. He was also distributing  pamphlets titled 'The Evils of Paper'." 

That threw me into peals of laughter. The imagery was amazing! Not to be left behind, I came up with a masterpiece, letting my knowledge of history work for me.

"To prove how serious he was, his pamphlets were hand-written with plant extract ink on banana leaves, since he was anti paper." I was a genius, I patted myself on the back. Bighuey was now on the roll.

"How he got the banana leaves is a fascinating story in itself. He lived in Norway, and as the climate there in not great for bananas, he went to the jungles of South America and had to fight disease, savages, and wild animals, finally cutting a deal with some head hunters to trade banana leaves for heads. That started him on a whole new project. Now he was armed with a machete collecting heads." Oh man, I gasped.  B was killing me! 

 "His machete was his trademark too,"  I added naughtily.

A dry voice joined in over the speaker phone. Ant had decided to channel us back to a more realistic storyline.

"A machete proved to be to messy, too close and personal, causing too much gore.  The pistol made things much easier, but the pistol left a paper trail which could be followed." Rightly pointed out, we decided to keep the story restricted to the pistol as his only trademark. 

"So he tried the Eco friendly brand." That was my helpful line as I was an Eco friendly person.

Bighuey insisted that we diversify on weapons. 

"Then he came up with a plan to put a chemical in the water system that was harmless to people except government officials that would dissolve paper." B was taking charge of the plot now. Unabashed, I decided to counter him.

"So the government warned everyone to have their books dry cleaned only, not washed." Beat that, I dared B with my naughty eyes. B decided to rise to the occasion.

"That only led to more problems, major cleaning fluid shortages, inflation, so the government sent in a 'Seal Team' to eliminate him." Touché, I marveled at B's imagination. 

I decided to bait him. 

"When Melissa Slyone entered the room where my Seal Team had assembled for their first meeting, I nearly fell out of my chair - what a knockout!"

Unfortunately, Bighuey dodged me.

"But we considered her just one of the guys, as she was a tough professional."

And so Bighuey butchered my romantic notion of striking a romance between Nosely and the 'femme fatale' of our plot. To make things drag on further, my half hour was up and the cleaning lady had arrived. I wrapped up and went home.

Later in the afternoon, I called Ant for a few more ideas. He was a bit busy but decided to help out a bit. He was amused at my efforts to make the absurd sound like a plausible story. I thought we were doing pretty well on it.  

Between Ant and myself, we moved the story further.

"I was asked to head the team to the field to find THE PISTOL, as I had seen him in the flesh and could identify him better." Ant liked  my line.

"Surrounding his hide-out, we made our move." The story progressed as Ant thrust Nosley into the thick of things.

"I knew he was a sneaky one, so to keep my team safe, I geared up and motioned them to fall back and cover me while I creeped to the backyard to enter the house from the back door." I decided to bring the hero out in Nosley's character. 

"The house was silent and in darkness." Ant wanted me to speed things up but I  refused to hurry.

"It suited me to enter quietly, and I was never more thankful in my life for the darkness because 'The Pistol" was snoozing in the very room I entered - what a lucky escape!" Ant liked the line and would have added further but there was someone at the door, so he hung up.

I got up and flexed my muscles, wondering if Bighuey was still busy. 

A call confirmed that he could be bothered, so I hurried over to his place, to find him trimming the Rosemary bush. 

He made a cup of coffee for me and we continued the story.

"I tiptoed up to where he was sleeping and reached my hands to his throat." Pretty much like Ant, B was determined to exterminate the poor fellow. I was a  woman, and unlike my male colleagues, wished to reform the character, so I became the angel of mercy.

"'Hey Boss,' the rough voice in the corridor stopped me in my tracks, and I quickly hid behind the curtains to hide from the newcomer." 

I had just saved a life!

The door opened and Clint walked in. Bighuey had invited him to join our brainstorming session. Clint probably read even more than B so I figured that his contribution would only help the story onwards in a better direction.

"My heart sank as it was him - The Pistol had the drop on me; the taste of fear, sharp and metallic, pervaded my mouth as I waited for him to commit to action."

The plot got thicker as Clint decided to do away with Nosely instead. No, I argued, much as I admired the suspense Clint had just injected into the plot, the protagonist needed to stay alive. 

"Luck was on my side again, because his hired assassin, after giving details of the bookstores they had just trashed, took him to check out the scene of the crime, with me on their tail." So basically, with my intervention, Nosely  had remained undetected and was now on their tail.

The men looked at me with distaste. They wanted some blood on Nosely's hand. I didn't. 

"They led me to an abandoned Barnes and Noble store; I always wondered what happened to them." Bighuey had no regard for copyright! I made a mental note to change the store name later to 'Bounds and Books'.

"The smell of rotting paper, dissolved by the chemical used in the water guns the pistol gang used filled my lungs, made me cough and splutter, making the men sharply turn and gun me with water bullets designed to harm me as I was a government official - the war had begun!" I gave the men some action at last. 

Clint rose to the occasion.

"We would have to change plans because the war was to be fought with chemicals, rather than fire." B and I liked his line so we added that to the story.

"The chemical manufacturers loved it, as they would now get fat government contracts for the manufacture of weapons." That was Bighuey, doing the math.

"Everyone, from Monsanto to Granola, knew what was at stake. Any company that had inventories of 'chemicals'  laying around, could dump them into the weapons systems the Government deemed most efficient to fight the war." Clint's line had me craving for a Granola bar.

"The pistol was on the phone now, applauding his team for the destruction well done, and made a move to the next venue where, tipped off by my informer, my team was already in place, waiting to arrest them." I distracted myself from the thought of food.

"But unfortunately, The Pistol escaped as we moved in for the kill and from intelligence sources we learned he went to Africa where he was developing a mutant army of giant termites to complete his dastardly plan to destroy all paper." Bighuey had guessed that I was trying to wrap up the story. He wouldn't have it, so he added a twist.

Oh man, my stomach groaned. I needed food. I told the boys to hold the thought as I got up and helped myself to some healthy snacks from B's kitchen. Munching in my nachos, I came up with a brilliant plan to counter the termites. We needed a botanist!

"I immediately took action, beginning with a call to my best friend doctor Bruce Banner, also known as THE HULK, and currently working in an African village, to meet me in the rainforest with his botanist girlfriend so we could develop a scheme to foil the pistols plan." I was proud of myself. I had always loved THE HULK. 

"I figured if anyone could stop the pistol, the HULK could. If necessary, we could call my old comrade Doc Savage and his crew to help out." Bighuey had to have the last word, as always.

"THE HULK and his botanist girlfriend Sage Bloom, greeted us at the front door of their cafe/bookstore, The Green Tome, looking like retired school teachers, rather than the Baddest Bad Since Shaft they really were." Clint had other ideas and butchered the poor duo!

"The years in the rainforest had taken their toll on the couple but I was sure that their skills had become even more lethal than before, something we required; it's important to mention that I had the hots for Sage bloom back in college, and to me she would never be old or retired." I wasn't a feminist for nothing!

"Sage and HULK rode with us to a giant staging area several hundred feet below the floor of the Rainforest. The music in the elevator? Shaft, of course, can you dig it? Working from Intel that showed photos of Giant Termites practicing hand-to-hand combat and reciting Conversational Zulu phrases in case they were challenged by locals, S & H had fabricated a working model of the Termite's Forward Staging Area in Libraria." Clint was a master at work!

"The fight had gone on all afternoon until we decided to call it a day and retired to our tents." I was tired too, so we called it a night, deciding to meet at the coffee shop nearby the following day.

I was going through the notes when Bighuey and Clint entered the shop, deep in conversation. I was very touched to notice that they were seriously trying to help me write the story. These were two mature, well-educated professionals, and for them to get down to my amateur level to help me become a better writer was just so phenomenal! 

"We reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, the door opened and there were two of the pistol's thugs waiting for us, but as Monk, one of Doc Savage's men had devised special chemical guns that would dissolve anyone we fired at, we shot them point-blank and they instantly turned into green goo." B did the honors and the story continued. 

Clint had been thinking. He thought that the story was not going anywhere and I needed to make it more happening. I liked his example of a story he was working on presently, about the famous Bonnie and Clyde, and he suggested some very good ideas to improve my story. I was pressed for time and had to follow a specific format, so I promise to follow his advice for the next story, and requested the men to help me complete this one first.

Maud, another friend popped in. She needed some help with something, so she took Clint away, joking at our combined effort to offer  an insight into the male psyche, and regretting that fame was not around the corner for us. I grinned back and turned to B, my last hope now, to help me complete my literary masterpiece.

"We hurried inside but were too late - the pistol was now headed towards area 89, the rendezvous point of aliens from planet nunu on their last visit to the planet, in the hope to find some alien allies." I figured we needed some aliens in there as well. B didn't disappoint me and dug up on his knowledge of the sic-fi realm.

"Area 89, things were getting serious and we knew we would need reinforcements so we contacted the Japanese government to see if we could get Godzilla as a backup, and went to a rendevous point on Monster Island to regroup and make plans to invade Area 89." No way was B getting away with that! Poor Nosely, to be outsized by a radioactively mutated lizard! Not happening! I stepped in and took control.

" Godzilla had just became a new dad, and the Mrs. was no mouse either, so he excused himself, leaving me no option but to tell our good friend Bruce Banner that I still had the hots for his girl, making him explode into THE HULK and beating the pulp out of the termites and the aliens who fled back to nunu in a hurry ; now leaving us to deal with the pistol himself!" My darling Hulk saved the day by throwing the mother of all tantrums. 

Bighuey had another one up his sleeve.

"We tracked him to Skull Island in the South Pacific, where he was trying to incite the natives to deal with us, they got on this wall and shouted Kong! Kong! Kong! and we knew what that meant so we entrenched ourselves!"

B was being the monkey's uncle now. I was not relenting on that either so I called upon the Mrs. again.

"We got lucky as Lady Kong decided to unleash baby kong, a bouncy little monster, onto the world - saved by a baby; darn, we had the luck of a leprechaun!" I added bravely but Bighuey's  eyes challenged me.

"Baby K chased the pistol, grabbed him and threw him into our camp, we tied him up but during the night he was transported to a renegade Klingon spaceship, where they needed his help to resurrect the Star Trek TV series." I knew that B was that baby's godfather! The traitor! I had to think fast.

"Luckily, I had connections in the Klingon community, an ex girlfriend had been a real Klingy, so after soothing her deflated ego, I got a chance to cross question the pistol, giving him a lie-detector test." Nosely was on the roll once again, thanks to yours truly.

"The truth test revealed that as a child, the pistol's father would beat him with a rolled-up newspaper, and it caused him great psychological damage, and that resulted in his hatred for paper, so we contacted Dr. Slumbubble, the world famous authority on paper fetishes." Bighuey was grinding  his teeth, and I was laughing my head off! God! B had a real flair for twisted plots! 

"Wow....there's a lovely twist, a roll of paper..." I gasped, laughing. 

"The doctor questioned him deeply until he broke down, crying hysterically, asking to write an essay of 100000 words, 'I will be a good boy' as his teacher made him write in school, revealing another reason for his hatred of paper." I humored B.

B crunched the deal.

"We then set him up a blackboard and supplied him with a truckload of chalk, and told him to get with it, hoping that would cure him." I laughed so much I fell off my chair. The waitress looked at us as if we had gone mad. 

Bighuey was having a laugh too, at my expense. As I was out of ideas now, he suggested that we conclude that since Nosley had a problem with 
The Pistol breaking the chalk, they got him a laptop and after he wrote he was 'a baaaad boy' 100,000 times, he was cured and became rich and famous as the author of the best-seller, 'Lord of the Paper'.

I loved the ending but we decide to end it differently as I didn't want The Pistol to get rich again and go bad  a second time. Thanking Bighuey for helping me with this one, I concluded it as follows,  promising to enroll his help for the second story of the story too, if this one came through.

"Three months later, reformed, retrained, and brainwashed, The Pistol, now known as Harry Papercut, was working in a printing press, concluding my case and allowing me to almost take off for my vacation when orders came to report to office - 'The Ink ' was on the loose ; a new case had begun!"

And so I wrote the first of a series of cases of Frank Nosely, the detective beyond compare, and decided to call the story,

 "Nosely's close encounter with The Pistol".

asmaahsan wrote:Thank you for your comment. You posted a beautiful poem.
The funny thing is that this hamster was my first pet ever. I had allergies as a child so I wasn't allowed to have a pet. I was very scared to even hold the hamster in the beginning, but the little devil won me over. He was a real sweetheart!

-- 20 Jan 2013, 16:46 --

Here you go. Found it for you online.



"The Little Dog-Angel." by Norah M. Holland (1876-1925)
From: Spun-Yarn And Spindrift. by Norah M. Holland.

[Page 7] 

SPUN-YARN AND SPINDRIFT

THE LITTLE DOG-ANGEL

HIGH up in the courts of Heaven to-day
  A little dog-angel waits,
With the other angels he will not play,
  But he sits alone at the gates;
"For I know that my master will come," says he:
"And when he comes, he will call for me."

He sees the spirits that pass him by
  As they hasten towards the throne,
And he watches them with a wistful eye
  As he sits at the gates alone;
"But I know if I just wait patiently
That some day my master will come," says he.

And his master, far on the earth below,
  As he sits in his easy chair,
Forgets sometimes, and he whistles low
  For the dog that is not there;
And the little dog-angel cocks his ears,
And dreams that his master's call he hears.

And I know, when at length his master waits
  Outside in the dark and cold
For the hand of Death to ope the gates
  That lead to those courts of gold,
The little dog-angel's eager bark
Will comfort his soul in the shivering dark.

-- 29 Jan 2013, 20:14 --

I started a new post here called "Let's write a new story"game. Ant, Bighuey and Clintessential helped me write it and it turned out so darn funny! I took all the comments from the posts and have complied it into a short story. The comments are true, the story is mad up. Adding it here so you can enjoy the humor of the story we cooked up. It was good fun!

Our combined story.


"B, help me!"

As usual, I burst open Bighuey's front door which was always unlocked for the likes of me, and barged in unannounced.

Bighuey was trying to fry an egg. I could see he had fixed the level of his stove, as the egg was not running to the side anymore, as it usually did. 

"Would you like an egg?" 

B, as I nicknamed him, was old school. Handsome guy, even now in his retiring years, once offered places in movies for his looks. I often teased him about his short lived career in films.

"No thanks B, maybe pancakes, but later please. Finish up and come to the table. We have work to do." 

I sat down on the dining table and started spreading my stuff around. I needed my laptop too, but right now, I just needed to jot down the basic story line of the new script I was working on.

Bighuey finished his cooking marvel at his own pace. He was a very restful guy who likedvto sit on the porch with a chilled drink in his hand, counting goats and wondering where the paca had scuttled off. There was a Rosemary bush in the front of the house, something that never seized to amaze me, and I was many a times treated to the culinary wonders this fresh herb complimented. 

"You have half an our only Asma," B sat down after wiping his hands off on a tea towel. "The cleaning lady comes after that."

I started telling him about how I had been contacted by a movie director and they required me to write a script for a comedy film. I always found comedies to the hardest to write, and I was no Steven Spielberg either, just a mom trying to establish her identity as a writer too, other than just being a loving mom and wife. 

The script had to be outrageous, but in a serious undertone, not crazy wacko style, so we had decided to keep it tongue-in-cheek humor, fitting in as many examples of real movies we could to make it a relatable parody of sorts.

I had come up with a plan to write about a detective. We would call him Frank Nosely, as a detective always had a nose for sniffing out trouble. He would have a team of junior detectives who would remain nameless.

"I like the idea," B smiled, now gearing up and flexing his brain muscles to go 'outrageous' so I could begin my script. "You begin," he gave me the que, "and I will follow your lead."

I reached out to take a bite from a donut B had just placed infornt of me and the first line of the script just popped into my head.

"I really loved the scent of donuts in this cafe," I began.

Bighuey said that  it reminded him of the day before when he and his friend Ant had been at this joint nearby where Ant had commented about their kitchen. We decided to add that line here.

"but the kitchen had a bad reputation!"

"Nice!" I already liked the opening sentence. It was my turn now.

"'Who is that guy in my regular seat,' I thought irritatingly as I entered the room, hoping it wasn't the health inspector as I wanted the place to stay open." 

B was beginning to enjoy the story. He suggested we call up Ant and get some tips from him too. After a five minute dialogue, Ant provided us the next 
Iine.

"He ordered tea and started scribbling something down in a notebook."

The story was building up now. I could sense it. We had now shifted focus from 
Frank Nosley to the new sinister character in the plot. 

"He looked familiar but I couldn't place where I had seen him before". I continued where Ant had left off. 

Ant was on the speaker phone, so I could hear him thinking aloud. He suggested with his line that we now move the character out of the cafe and make Frank Nosely follow him.

"I decided to follow him from the cafe." Short and sweet, the line moved the plot to scene two.

"I had to make sure he didn't see me as he rounded the corner and entered into a dark alley." It was my turn again.

"Make him pull a pistol from his pocket, check the clip and enter the building on his left with the pistol concealed in his hand," Ant continued the discussion on the speaker phone. I added that too.

"Man," I complained, "what's with you men and guns!" and then, at that exact moment, the name of the character came to me.

"It suddenly struck me that this was THE PISTOL they were looking for all over the country!" I had a flash of brilliance, followed by a shot of laughter from Ant from across the line, that drew a chuckle from B who decided to add  to the absurd.

"I then realized it was 'The Pistol' that killed paper books!" 

Now it was my turn to laugh at B's line. B had a thing for books. He had bragged once that he had 8000 ebooks on a flash drive he could hide in a coffee cup, pretty much like that woman in the movie 'The Recruit' starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

I needed to add some flesh to it so I came up with another idea.

"He had revealed in his interview to the paparazzi that he liked to shoot paperbacks with his gun, to make a point, and left the web address of their Internet edition at the scene of crime, as his signature."

B was laughing. I could see the naughty twinkle in his eyes. Any moment now, he was going a outrageous. I could sense it coming.

"He stated that next, he would be going after newspapers with a flame thrower. He was also distributing  pamphlets titled 'The Evils of Paper'." 

That threw me into peals of laughter. The imagery was amazing! Not to be left behind, I came up with a masterpiece, letting my knowledge of history work for me.

"To prove how serious he was, his pamphlets were hand-written with plant extract ink on banana leaves, since he was anti paper." I was a genius, I patted myself on the back. Bighuey was now on the roll.

"How he got the banana leaves is a fascinating story in itself. He lived in Norway, and as the climate there in not great for bananas, he went to the jungles of South America and had to fight disease, savages, and wild animals, finally cutting a deal with some head hunters to trade banana leaves for heads. That started him on a whole new project. Now he was armed with a machete collecting heads." Oh man, I gasped.  B was killing me! 

 "His machete was his trademark too,"  I added naughtily.

A dry voice joined in over the speaker phone. Ant had decided to channel us back to a more realistic storyline.

"A machete proved to be to messy, too close and personal, causing too much gore.  The pistol made things much easier, but the pistol left a paper trail which could be followed." Rightly pointed out, we decided to keep the story restricted to the pistol as his only trademark. 

"So he tried the Eco friendly brand." That was my helpful line as I was an Eco friendly person.

Bighuey insisted that we diversify on weapons. 

"Then he came up with a plan to put a chemical in the water system that was harmless to people except government officials that would dissolve paper." B was taking charge of the plot now. Unabashed, I decided to counter him.

"So the government warned everyone to have their books dry cleaned only, not washed." Beat that, I dared B with my naughty eyes. B decided to rise to the occasion.

"That only led to more problems, major cleaning fluid shortages, inflation, so the government sent in a 'Seal Team' to eliminate him." Touché, I marveled at B's imagination. 

I decided to bait him. 

"When Melissa Slyone entered the room where my Seal Team had assembled for their first meeting, I nearly fell out of my chair - what a knockout!"

Unfortunately, Bighuey dodged me.

"But we considered her just one of the guys, as she was a tough professional."

And so Bighuey butchered my romantic notion of striking a romance between Nosely and the 'femme fatale' of our plot. To make things drag on further, my half hour was up and the cleaning lady had arrived. I wrapped up and went home.

Later in the afternoon, I called Ant for a few more ideas. He was a bit busy but decided to help out a bit. He was amused at my efforts to make the absurd sound like a plausible story. I thought we were doing pretty well on it.  

Between Ant and myself, we moved the story further.

"I was asked to head the team to the field to find THE PISTOL, as I had seen him in the flesh and could identify him better." Ant liked  my line.

"Surrounding his hide-out, we made our move." The story progressed as Ant thrust Nosley into the thick of things.

"I knew he was a sneaky one, so to keep my team safe, I geared up and motioned them to fall back and cover me while I creeped to the backyard to enter the house from the back door." I decided to bring the hero out in Nosley's character. 

"The house was silent and in darkness." Ant wanted me to speed things up but I  refused to hurry.

"It suited me to enter quietly, and I was never more thankful in my life for the darkness because 'The Pistol" was snoozing in the very room I entered - what a lucky escape!" Ant liked the line and would have added further but there was someone at the door, so he hung up.

I got up and flexed my muscles, wondering if Bighuey was still busy. 

A call confirmed that he could be bothered, so I hurried over to his place, to find him trimming the Rosemary bush. 

He made a cup of coffee for me and we continued the story.

"I tiptoed up to where he was sleeping and reached my hands to his throat." Pretty much like Ant, B was determined to exterminate the poor fellow. I was a  woman, and unlike my male colleagues, wished to reform the character, so I became the angel of mercy.

"'Hey Boss,' the rough voice in the corridor stopped me in my tracks, and I quickly hid behind the curtains to hide from the newcomer." 

I had just saved a life!

The door opened and Clint walked in. Bighuey had invited him to join our brainstorming session. Clint probably read even more than B so I figured that his contribution would only help the story onwards in a better direction.

"My heart sank as it was him - The Pistol had the drop on me; the taste of fear, sharp and metallic, pervaded my mouth as I waited for him to commit to action."

The plot got thicker as Clint decided to do away with Nosely instead. No, I argued, much as I admired the suspense Clint had just injected into the plot, the protagonist needed to stay alive. 

"Luck was on my side again, because his hired assassin, after giving details of the bookstores they had just trashed, took him to check out the scene of the crime, with me on their tail." So basically, with my intervention, Nosely  had remained undetected and was now on their tail.

The men looked at me with distaste. They wanted some blood on Nosely's hand. I didn't. 

"They led me to an abandoned Barnes and Noble store; I always wondered what happened to them." Bighuey had no regard for copyright! I made a mental note to change the store name later to 'Bounds and Books'.

"The smell of rotting paper, dissolved by the chemical used in the water guns the pistol gang used filled my lungs, made me cough and splutter, making the men sharply turn and gun me with water bullets designed to harm me as I was a government official - the war had begun!" I gave the men some action at last. 

Clint rose to the occasion.

"We would have to change plans because the war was to be fought with chemicals, rather than fire." B and I liked his line so we added that to the story.

"The chemical manufacturers loved it, as they would now get fat government contracts for the manufacture of weapons." That was Bighuey, doing the math.

"Everyone, from Monsanto to Granola, knew what was at stake. Any company that had inventories of 'chemicals'  laying around, could dump them into the weapons systems the Government deemed most efficient to fight the war." Clint's line had me craving for a Granola bar.

"The pistol was on the phone now, applauding his team for the destruction well done, and made a move to the next venue where, tipped off by my informer, my team was already in place, waiting to arrest them." I distracted myself from the thought of food.

"But unfortunately, The Pistol escaped as we moved in for the kill and from intelligence sources we learned he went to Africa where he was developing a mutant army of giant termites to complete his dastardly plan to destroy all paper." Bighuey had guessed that I was trying to wrap up the story. He wouldn't have it, so he added a twist.

Oh man, my stomach groaned. I needed food. I told the boys to hold the thought as I got up and helped myself to some healthy snacks from B's kitchen. Munching in my nachos, I came up with a brilliant plan to counter the termites. We needed a botanist!

"I immediately took action, beginning with a call to my best friend doctor Bruce Banner, also known as THE HULK, and currently working in an African village, to meet me in the rainforest with his botanist girlfriend so we could develop a scheme to foil the pistols plan." I was proud of myself. I had always loved THE HULK. 

"I figured if anyone could stop the pistol, the HULK could. If necessary, we could call my old comrade Doc Savage and his crew to help out." Bighuey had to have the last word, as always.

"THE HULK and his botanist girlfriend Sage Bloom, greeted us at the front door of their cafe/bookstore, The Green Tome, looking like retired school teachers, rather than the Baddest Bad Since Shaft they really were." Clint had other ideas and butchered the poor duo!

"The years in the rainforest had taken their toll on the couple but I was sure that their skills had become even more lethal than before, something we required; it's important to mention that I had the hots for Sage bloom back in college, and to me she would never be old or retired." I wasn't a feminist for nothing!

"Sage and HULK rode with us to a giant staging area several hundred feet below the floor of the Rainforest. The music in the elevator? Shaft, of course, can you dig it? Working from Intel that showed photos of Giant Termites practicing hand-to-hand combat and reciting Conversational Zulu phrases in case they were challenged by locals, S & H had fabricated a working model of the Termite's Forward Staging Area in Libraria." Clint was a master at work!

"The fight had gone on all afternoon until we decided to call it a day and retired to our tents." I was tired too, so we called it a night, deciding to meet at the coffee shop nearby the following day.

I was going through the notes when Bighuey and Clint entered the shop, deep in conversation. I was very touched to notice that they were seriously trying to help me write the story. These were two mature, well-educated professionals, and for them to get down to my amateur level to help me become a better writer was just so phenomenal! 

"We reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, the door opened and there were two of the pistol's thugs waiting for us, but as Monk, one of Doc Savage's men had devised special chemical guns that would dissolve anyone we fired at, we shot them point-blank and they instantly turned into green goo." B did the honors and the story continued. 

Clint had been thinking. He thought that the story was not going anywhere and I needed to make it more happening. I liked his example of a story he was working on presently, about the famous Bonnie and Clyde, and he suggested some very good ideas to improve my story. I was pressed for time and had to follow a specific format, so I promise to follow his advice for the next story, and requested the men to help me complete this one first.

Maud, another friend popped in. She needed some help with something, so she took Clint away, joking at our combined effort to offer  an insight into the male psyche, and regretting that fame was not around the corner for us. I grinned back and turned to B, my last hope now, to help me complete my literary masterpiece.

"We hurried inside but were too late - the pistol was now headed towards area 89, the rendezvous point of aliens from planet nunu on their last visit to the planet, in the hope to find some alien allies." I figured we needed some aliens in there as well. B didn't disappoint me and dug up on his knowledge of the sic-fi realm.

"Area 89, things were getting serious and we knew we would need reinforcements so we contacted the Japanese government to see if we could get Godzilla as a backup, and went to a rendevous point on Monster Island to regroup and make plans to invade Area 89." No way was B getting away with that! Poor Nosely, to be outsized by a radioactively mutated lizard! Not happening! I stepped in and took control.

" Godzilla had just became a new dad, and the Mrs. was no mouse either, so he excused himself, leaving me no option but to tell our good friend Bruce Banner that I still had the hots for his girl, making him explode into THE HULK and beating the pulp out of the termites and the aliens who fled back to nunu in a hurry ; now leaving us to deal with the pistol himself!" My darling Hulk saved the day by throwing the mother of all tantrums. 

Bighuey had another one up his sleeve.

"We tracked him to Skull Island in the South Pacific, where he was trying to incite the natives to deal with us, they got on this wall and shouted Kong! Kong! Kong! and we knew what that meant so we entrenched ourselves!"

B was being the monkey's uncle now. I was not relenting on that either so I called upon the Mrs. again.

"We got lucky as Lady Kong decided to unleash baby kong, a bouncy little monster, onto the world - saved by a baby; darn, we had the luck of a leprechaun!" I added bravely but Bighuey's  eyes challenged me.

"Baby K chased the pistol, grabbed him and threw him into our camp, we tied him up but during the night he was transported to a renegade Klingon spaceship, where they needed his help to resurrect the Star Trek TV series." I knew that B was that baby's godfather! The traitor! I had to think fast.

"Luckily, I had connections in the Klingon community, an ex girlfriend had been a real Klingy, so after soothing her deflated ego, I got a chance to cross question the pistol, giving him a lie-detector test." Nosely was on the roll once again, thanks to yours truly.

"The truth test revealed that as a child, the pistol's father would beat him with a rolled-up newspaper, and it caused him great psychological damage, and that resulted in his hatred for paper, so we contacted Dr. Slumbubble, the world famous authority on paper fetishes." Bighuey was grinding  his teeth, and I was laughing my head off! God! B had a real flair for twisted plots! 

"Wow....there's a lovely twist, a roll of paper..." I gasped, laughing. 

"The doctor questioned him deeply until he broke down, crying hysterically, asking to write an essay of 100000 words, 'I will be a good boy' as his teacher made him write in school, revealing another reason for his hatred of paper." I humored B.

B crunched the deal.

"We then set him up a blackboard and supplied him with a truckload of chalk, and told him to get with it, hoping that would cure him." I laughed so much I fell off my chair. The waitress looked at us as if we had gone mad. 

Bighuey was having a laugh too, at my expense. As I was out of ideas now, he suggested that we conclude that since Nosley had a problem with 
The Pistol breaking the chalk, they got him a laptop and after he wrote he was 'a baaaad boy' 100,000 times, he was cured and became rich and famous as the author of the best-seller, 'Lord of the Paper'.

I loved the ending but we decide to end it differently as I didn't want The Pistol to get rich again and go bad  a second time. Thanking Bighuey for helping me with this one, I concluded it as follows,  promising to enroll his help for the second story of the story too, if this one came through.

"Three months later, reformed, retrained, and brainwashed, The Pistol, now known as Harry Papercut, was working in a printing press, concluding my case and allowing me to almost take off for my vacation when orders came to report to office - 'The Ink ' was on the loose ; a new case had begun!"

And so I wrote the first of a series of cases of Frank Nosely, the detective beyond compare, and decided to call the story,

 "Nosely's close encounter with The Pistol".

-- 29 Jan 2013, 20:16 --

I started a new post here called "Let's write a new story"game. Ant, Bighuey and Clintessential helped me write it and it turned out so darn funny! I took all the comments from the posts and have complied it into a short story. The comments are true, the story is mad up. Adding it here so you can enjoy the humor of the story we cooked up. It was good fun!

Our combined story.


"B, help me!"

As usual, I burst open Bighuey's front door which was always unlocked for the likes of me, and barged in unannounced.

Bighuey was trying to fry an egg. I could see he had fixed the level of his stove, as the egg was not running to the side anymore, as it usually did. 

"Would you like an egg?" 

B, as I nicknamed him, was old school. Handsome guy, even now in his retiring years, once offered places in movies for his looks. I often teased him about his short lived career in films.

"No thanks B, maybe pancakes, but later please. Finish up and come to the table. We have work to do." 

I sat down on the dining table and started spreading my stuff around. I needed my laptop too, but right now, I just needed to jot down the basic story line of the new script I was working on.

Bighuey finished his cooking marvel at his own pace. He was a very restful guy who likedvto sit on the porch with a chilled drink in his hand, counting goats and wondering where the paca had scuttled off. There was a Rosemary bush in the front of the house, something that never seized to amaze me, and I was many a times treated to the culinary wonders this fresh herb complimented. 

"You have half an our only Asma," B sat down after wiping his hands off on a tea towel. "The cleaning lady comes after that."

I started telling him about how I had been contacted by a movie director and they required me to write a script for a comedy film. I always found comedies to the hardest to write, and I was no Steven Spielberg either, just a mom trying to establish her identity as a writer too, other than just being a loving mom and wife. 

The script had to be outrageous, but in a serious undertone, not crazy wacko style, so we had decided to keep it tongue-in-cheek humor, fitting in as many examples of real movies we could to make it a relatable parody of sorts.

I had come up with a plan to write about a detective. We would call him Frank Nosely, as a detective always had a nose for sniffing out trouble. He would have a team of junior detectives who would remain nameless.

"I like the idea," B smiled, now gearing up and flexing his brain muscles to go 'outrageous' so I could begin my script. "You begin," he gave me the que, "and I will follow your lead."

I reached out to take a bite from a donut B had just placed infornt of me and the first line of the script just popped into my head.

"I really loved the scent of donuts in this cafe," I began.

Bighuey said that  it reminded him of the day before when he and his friend Ant had been at this joint nearby where Ant had commented about their kitchen. We decided to add that line here.

"but the kitchen had a bad reputation!"

"Nice!" I already liked the opening sentence. It was my turn now.

"'Who is that guy in my regular seat,' I thought irritatingly as I entered the room, hoping it wasn't the health inspector as I wanted the place to stay open." 

B was beginning to enjoy the story. He suggested we call up Ant and get some tips from him too. After a five minute dialogue, Ant provided us the next 
Iine.

"He ordered tea and started scribbling something down in a notebook."

The story was building up now. I could sense it. We had now shifted focus from 
Frank Nosley to the new sinister character in the plot. 

"He looked familiar but I couldn't place where I had seen him before". I continued where Ant had left off. 

Ant was on the speaker phone, so I could hear him thinking aloud. He suggested with his line that we now move the character out of the cafe and make Frank Nosely follow him.

"I decided to follow him from the cafe." Short and sweet, the line moved the plot to scene two.

"I had to make sure he didn't see me as he rounded the corner and entered into a dark alley." It was my turn again.

"Make him pull a pistol from his pocket, check the clip and enter the building on his left with the pistol concealed in his hand," Ant continued the discussion on the speaker phone. I added that too.

"Man," I complained, "what's with you men and guns!" and then, at that exact moment, the name of the character came to me.

"It suddenly struck me that this was THE PISTOL they were looking for all over the country!" I had a flash of brilliance, followed by a shot of laughter from Ant from across the line, that drew a chuckle from B who decided to add  to the absurd.

"I then realized it was 'The Pistol' that killed paper books!" 

Now it was my turn to laugh at B's line. B had a thing for books. He had bragged once that he had 8000 ebooks on a flash drive he could hide in a coffee cup, pretty much like that woman in the movie 'The Recruit' starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

I needed to add some flesh to it so I came up with another idea.

"He had revealed in his interview to the paparazzi that he liked to shoot paperbacks with his gun, to make a point, and left the web address of their Internet edition at the scene of crime, as his signature."

B was laughing. I could see the naughty twinkle in his eyes. Any moment now, he was going a outrageous. I could sense it coming.

"He stated that next, he would be going after newspapers with a flame thrower. He was also distributing  pamphlets titled 'The Evils of Paper'." 

That threw me into peals of laughter. The imagery was amazing! Not to be left behind, I came up with a masterpiece, letting my knowledge of history work for me.

"To prove how serious he was, his pamphlets were hand-written with plant extract ink on banana leaves, since he was anti paper." I was a genius, I patted myself on the back. Bighuey was now on the roll.

"How he got the banana leaves is a fascinating story in itself. He lived in Norway, and as the climate there in not great for bananas, he went to the jungles of South America and had to fight disease, savages, and wild animals, finally cutting a deal with some head hunters to trade banana leaves for heads. That started him on a whole new project. Now he was armed with a machete collecting heads." Oh man, I gasped.  B was killing me! 

 "His machete was his trademark too,"  I added naughtily.

A dry voice joined in over the speaker phone. Ant had decided to channel us back to a more realistic storyline.

"A machete proved to be to messy, too close and personal, causing too much gore.  The pistol made things much easier, but the pistol left a paper trail which could be followed." Rightly pointed out, we decided to keep the story restricted to the pistol as his only trademark. 

"So he tried the Eco friendly brand." That was my helpful line as I was an Eco friendly person.

Bighuey insisted that we diversify on weapons. 

"Then he came up with a plan to put a chemical in the water system that was harmless to people except government officials that would dissolve paper." B was taking charge of the plot now. Unabashed, I decided to counter him.

"So the government warned everyone to have their books dry cleaned only, not washed." Beat that, I dared B with my naughty eyes. B decided to rise to the occasion.

"That only led to more problems, major cleaning fluid shortages, inflation, so the government sent in a 'Seal Team' to eliminate him." Touché, I marveled at B's imagination. 

I decided to bait him. 

"When Melissa Slyone entered the room where my Seal Team had assembled for their first meeting, I nearly fell out of my chair - what a knockout!"

Unfortunately, Bighuey dodged me.

"But we considered her just one of the guys, as she was a tough professional."

And so Bighuey butchered my romantic notion of striking a romance between Nosely and the 'femme fatale' of our plot. To make things drag on further, my half hour was up and the cleaning lady had arrived. I wrapped up and went home.

Later in the afternoon, I called Ant for a few more ideas. He was a bit busy but decided to help out a bit. He was amused at my efforts to make the absurd sound like a plausible story. I thought we were doing pretty well on it.  

Between Ant and myself, we moved the story further.

"I was asked to head the team to the field to find THE PISTOL, as I had seen him in the flesh and could identify him better." Ant liked  my line.

"Surrounding his hide-out, we made our move." The story progressed as Ant thrust Nosley into the thick of things.

"I knew he was a sneaky one, so to keep my team safe, I geared up and motioned them to fall back and cover me while I creeped to the backyard to enter the house from the back door." I decided to bring the hero out in Nosley's character. 

"The house was silent and in darkness." Ant wanted me to speed things up but I  refused to hurry.

"It suited me to enter quietly, and I was never more thankful in my life for the darkness because 'The Pistol" was snoozing in the very room I entered - what a lucky escape!" Ant liked the line and would have added further but there was someone at the door, so he hung up.

I got up and flexed my muscles, wondering if Bighuey was still busy. 

A call confirmed that he could be bothered, so I hurried over to his place, to find him trimming the Rosemary bush. 

He made a cup of coffee for me and we continued the story.

"I tiptoed up to where he was sleeping and reached my hands to his throat." Pretty much like Ant, B was determined to exterminate the poor fellow. I was a  woman, and unlike my male colleagues, wished to reform the character, so I became the angel of mercy.

"'Hey Boss,' the rough voice in the corridor stopped me in my tracks, and I quickly hid behind the curtains to hide from the newcomer." 

I had just saved a life!

The door opened and Clint walked in. Bighuey had invited him to join our brainstorming session. Clint probably read even more than B so I figured that his contribution would only help the story onwards in a better direction.

"My heart sank as it was him - The Pistol had the drop on me; the taste of fear, sharp and metallic, pervaded my mouth as I waited for him to commit to action."

The plot got thicker as Clint decided to do away with Nosely instead. No, I argued, much as I admired the suspense Clint had just injected into the plot, the protagonist needed to stay alive. 

"Luck was on my side again, because his hired assassin, after giving details of the bookstores they had just trashed, took him to check out the scene of the crime, with me on their tail." So basically, with my intervention, Nosely  had remained undetected and was now on their tail.

The men looked at me with distaste. They wanted some blood on Nosely's hand. I didn't. 

"They led me to an abandoned Barnes and Noble store; I always wondered what happened to them." Bighuey had no regard for copyright! I made a mental note to change the store name later to 'Bounds and Books'.

"The smell of rotting paper, dissolved by the chemical used in the water guns the pistol gang used filled my lungs, made me cough and splutter, making the men sharply turn and gun me with water bullets designed to harm me as I was a government official - the war had begun!" I gave the men some action at last. 

Clint rose to the occasion.

"We would have to change plans because the war was to be fought with chemicals, rather than fire." B and I liked his line so we added that to the story.

"The chemical manufacturers loved it, as they would now get fat government contracts for the manufacture of weapons." That was Bighuey, doing the math.

"Everyone, from Monsanto to Granola, knew what was at stake. Any company that had inventories of 'chemicals'  laying around, could dump them into the weapons systems the Government deemed most efficient to fight the war." Clint's line had me craving for a Granola bar.

"The pistol was on the phone now, applauding his team for the destruction well done, and made a move to the next venue where, tipped off by my informer, my team was already in place, waiting to arrest them." I distracted myself from the thought of food.

"But unfortunately, The Pistol escaped as we moved in for the kill and from intelligence sources we learned he went to Africa where he was developing a mutant army of giant termites to complete his dastardly plan to destroy all paper." Bighuey had guessed that I was trying to wrap up the story. He wouldn't have it, so he added a twist.

Oh man, my stomach groaned. I needed food. I told the boys to hold the thought as I got up and helped myself to some healthy snacks from B's kitchen. Munching in my nachos, I came up with a brilliant plan to counter the termites. We needed a botanist!

"I immediately took action, beginning with a call to my best friend doctor Bruce Banner, also known as THE HULK, and currently working in an African village, to meet me in the rainforest with his botanist girlfriend so we could develop a scheme to foil the pistols plan." I was proud of myself. I had always loved THE HULK. 

"I figured if anyone could stop the pistol, the HULK could. If necessary, we could call my old comrade Doc Savage and his crew to help out." Bighuey had to have the last word, as always.

"THE HULK and his botanist girlfriend Sage Bloom, greeted us at the front door of their cafe/bookstore, The Green Tome, looking like retired school teachers, rather than the Baddest Bad Since Shaft they really were." Clint had other ideas and butchered the poor duo!

"The years in the rainforest had taken their toll on the couple but I was sure that their skills had become even more lethal than before, something we required; it's important to mention that I had the hots for Sage bloom back in college, and to me she would never be old or retired." I wasn't a feminist for nothing!

"Sage and HULK rode with us to a giant staging area several hundred feet below the floor of the Rainforest. The music in the elevator? Shaft, of course, can you dig it? Working from Intel that showed photos of Giant Termites practicing hand-to-hand combat and reciting Conversational Zulu phrases in case they were challenged by locals, S & H had fabricated a working model of the Termite's Forward Staging Area in Libraria." Clint was a master at work!

"The fight had gone on all afternoon until we decided to call it a day and retired to our tents." I was tired too, so we called it a night, deciding to meet at the coffee shop nearby the following day.

I was going through the notes when Bighuey and Clint entered the shop, deep in conversation. I was very touched to notice that they were seriously trying to help me write the story. These were two mature, well-educated professionals, and for them to get down to my amateur level to help me become a better writer was just so phenomenal! 

"We reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, the door opened and there were two of the pistol's thugs waiting for us, but as Monk, one of Doc Savage's men had devised special chemical guns that would dissolve anyone we fired at, we shot them point-blank and they instantly turned into green goo." B did the honors and the story continued. 

Clint had been thinking. He thought that the story was not going anywhere and I needed to make it more happening. I liked his example of a story he was working on presently, about the famous Bonnie and Clyde, and he suggested some very good ideas to improve my story. I was pressed for time and had to follow a specific format, so I promise to follow his advice for the next story, and requested the men to help me complete this one first.

Maud, another friend popped in. She needed some help with something, so she took Clint away, joking at our combined effort to offer  an insight into the male psyche, and regretting that fame was not around the corner for us. I grinned back and turned to B, my last hope now, to help me complete my literary masterpiece.

"We hurried inside but were too late - the pistol was now headed towards area 89, the rendezvous point of aliens from planet nunu on their last visit to the planet, in the hope to find some alien allies." I figured we needed some aliens in there as well. B didn't disappoint me and dug up on his knowledge of the sic-fi realm.

"Area 89, things were getting serious and we knew we would need reinforcements so we contacted the Japanese government to see if we could get Godzilla as a backup, and went to a rendevous point on Monster Island to regroup and make plans to invade Area 89." No way was B getting away with that! Poor Nosely, to be outsized by a radioactively mutated lizard! Not happening! I stepped in and took control.

" Godzilla had just became a new dad, and the Mrs. was no mouse either, so he excused himself, leaving me no option but to tell our good friend Bruce Banner that I still had the hots for his girl, making him explode into THE HULK and beating the pulp out of the termites and the aliens who fled back to nunu in a hurry ; now leaving us to deal with the pistol himself!" My darling Hulk saved the day by throwing the mother of all tantrums. 

Bighuey had another one up his sleeve.

"We tracked him to Skull Island in the South Pacific, where he was trying to incite the natives to deal with us, they got on this wall and shouted Kong! Kong! Kong! and we knew what that meant so we entrenched ourselves!"

B was being the monkey's uncle now. I was not relenting on that either so I called upon the Mrs. again.

"We got lucky as Lady Kong decided to unleash baby kong, a bouncy little monster, onto the world - saved by a baby; darn, we had the luck of a leprechaun!" I added bravely but Bighuey's  eyes challenged me.

"Baby K chased the pistol, grabbed him and threw him into our camp, we tied him up but during the night he was transported to a renegade Klingon spaceship, where they needed his help to resurrect the Star Trek TV series." I knew that B was that baby's godfather! The traitor! I had to think fast.

"Luckily, I had connections in the Klingon community, an ex girlfriend had been a real Klingy, so after soothing her deflated ego, I got a chance to cross question the pistol, giving him a lie-detector test." Nosely was on the roll once again, thanks to yours truly.

"The truth test revealed that as a child, the pistol's father would beat him with a rolled-up newspaper, and it caused him great psychological damage, and that resulted in his hatred for paper, so we contacted Dr. Slumbubble, the world famous authority on paper fetishes." Bighuey was grinding  his teeth, and I was laughing my head off! God! B had a real flair for twisted plots! 

"Wow....there's a lovely twist, a roll of paper..." I gasped, laughing. 

"The doctor questioned him deeply until he broke down, crying hysterically, asking to write an essay of 100000 words, 'I will be a good boy' as his teacher made him write in school, revealing another reason for his hatred of paper." I humored B.

B crunched the deal.

"We then set him up a blackboard and supplied him with a truckload of chalk, and told him to get with it, hoping that would cure him." I laughed so much I fell off my chair. The waitress looked at us as if we had gone mad. 

Bighuey was having a laugh too, at my expense. As I was out of ideas now, he suggested that we conclude that since Nosley had a problem with 
The Pistol breaking the chalk, they got him a laptop and after he wrote he was 'a baaaad boy' 100,000 times, he was cured and became rich and famous as the author of the best-seller, 'Lord of the Paper'.

I loved the ending but we decide to end it differently as I didn't want The Pistol to get rich again and go bad  a second time. Thanking Bighuey for helping me with this one, I concluded it as follows,  promising to enroll his help for the second story of the story too, if this one came through.

"Three months later, reformed, retrained, and brainwashed, The Pistol, now known as Harry Papercut, was working in a printing press, concluding my case and allowing me to almost take off for my vacation when orders came to report to office - 'The Ink ' was on the loose ; a new case had begun!"

And so I wrote the first of a series of cases of Frank Nosely, the detective beyond compare, and decided to call the story,

 "Nosely's close encounter with The Pistol".

Thats cool. I was laughing my butt off

I can relate to the egg thing, my stove is cockeyed and they run all over the place. But thats OK, I like scrambled eggs.

-- Tue Jan 29, 2013 12:03 pm --

Asma, thats cool. I was laughing my butt off.

I can relate to the egg thing. My stove is cockeyed and they run all over the place. But thats OK, I like scrambled eggs.

Got to go, dog wants out and Ive got to go scramble some eggs.

Lol....I wrote it for you to thank you for being silly with me. I had a writers block. You helped me fix it.

..I needed some real info on you so I read some of your old posts. You wrote on a post a year back i think that you had fixed your stove. What happened. It broke again?

I think I remember that. I had to put new burners in it.

I wrote my life story a while back, something to leave my kids. Heres a couple incidents from it.

In 1984 I was a supervisor for a janitorial crew at a semi-conductor plant in Utah. I had this 18 year old girl working for me, she was a nice girl and a good worker, but she wore low-cut blouses and no bra. When she bent over her kazoobas would just about fall out. That was great for the guys, but one day my boss called me and said they were having problems with her. They were getting complaints from some of the people in the plant about her anatomy flopping all over the place. The complaints were probably from mostly flat women. He told me I would have to tell Cindy to wear a bra. I said I cant tell an 18 year old girl to wear a bra, I would really feel the fool. He said Well, thats part of your job. Youve got to do it. I said OK, Ill do what I can.

That night at work I was trying to think of a delicate way to tell Cindy she would have to wear a bra. I mentioned it to Frances, she was a middle-aged Mexican lady who was my lead, in charge on my days off. I asked her, What is the best way to tell Cindy she has to wear a bra? She said dont worry about it, Ill tell her. I said Thank you Frances, you are a life saver. She said thats a woman thing, a guy would probably get his face slapped or kicked in the gonads for telling a girl something like that. The next night Cindy had a bra, Frances said she took it good.

This one is a very sad and disturbing thing that happened to me. When I was 7 years old, I contacted a disease called Legg-Parthes, its a a very rare disease that children get that infects their hip bones. I was in the hospital for 13 months with a body cast from my toes to my chest. I was in a ward with a bunch of other kids, and one night they brought in this little girl whose dress had caught fire from some burning leaves. They put her in the bed next to mine, and I remember they put this purple stuff on her, and she was crying and moaning all through the night. She must have been in extreme pain. She died the next day. That was almost 70 years ago and I can still see it as if it were yesterday. Ill never forget it.

One more. This is a little lighter. In about 1980 a friend and I were going to set up a still and make our own gas, thats when gas went up to 50 cents a gallon from 20 cents. He had a huge yard, so we were going to set it all up at his place. We had solar panels we built to distill the mash, and we needed fermentation tanks to process the corn in. So we went to a Army surplus place and got four airplane wing tanks to use. We were in the process of unloading them off the truck, they were about 20 feet long and looked like rockets. Some kid came by on a bike, stopped and watched us for a few minutes, then asked, Wow, are those rockets? What are you going to do with them? I told him we were going to build a spaceship and go to the sun. He said you cant go to the sun, youll burn up. I said thats where youre wrong. Were going at night. He looked at me funny and went on his way.

Those are some of the incidents that happened during my life Just the story of an ordanary clod doing the best he can.

Lol.....

poor Cindy, thank God Frances was there to protect her from your extremely 'subtle' style.

The incident with the girl made you have a near death encounter actually. That's pretty hard on a 7 year old. Do the math by the way. You told me you were born in 1938. That's makes you 74 right now, my dads age, , so this incident took place 67 years ago, not 70. Be accurate historically.

As for the going to the sun at night, lol, don't forget to take your jacket. It may be cold! Lol!

-- 30 Jan 2013, 08:40 --

I was a couch potato. Then this radio jock said these golden words,

We rock when we walk.

I started walking just to look cool.

There you go, its not hard to be cool.

Sorry about not being accurate on dates. At least I said almost.

My grandmother wrote her life story, and so did my mother. I figured Id do the same, and pass it on down to my kids. my youngest son said he is going to write his, too. I think its important to keep your family history going on. I wish my dad had written his, he lived a colorful life from some of the stories he told. He had been everything from a bootlegger to a gambler when he was young.

I may put more of my story on here if I can think of anything interesting. I lived pretty much an ordanary life, never did much that was exciting.

Neither did I, still you read me.