Today, instead of a 50-word story, I offer you a 50-word song, which I composed, recorded and mixed today, all by myself.
Click the play button to hear the results:
Robots can’t play
Ukelele
Their fingers are all wrong
And they’re much too strong
They’d squeeze it too tight
Plus they can’t fly a kite
Robots can’t play
Ukelele
They don’t know ’bout melody
Mess up the harmony
They can get in the rhyth’um
But a uke isn’t a drum
“How does the defendant plead?”
Just then, the defendant got up and announced:
“Not guilty, your honor, on account of my wife not being dead after all!”
Before anyone could object, the doors to the courtroom flew open, and an obviously zombified woman walked in.
“My love!” said the defendant.
“Bees are cool.”
“What do you mean?”
He shows her the bee he’s holding.
“Well, look at this one. Iridescent wings, yellow and black stripes…”
“You’re weird.”
“Out of all the animals I’ve seen, bees are the most beautiful.”
“I guess beauty really is in the eye of the bee-holder.”
He’d killed himself so many times that all his jokes about suicide rang hollow in his heart.
But he soldiered on, moving along the probability axis, from one alternate universe to another, killing any of his alternate selves that he found had not lived as worthy a life as his.
The prints were confirmed authentic. Everyone handled the gun at one point or another.
Ballistics confirmed that that gun had shot them all. However, the gun itself had never been fired.
It was also proven that the drawer hadn’t been opened for fifty years.
The victims were all under fifty.
The last man on Earth died for the fifteenth time.
The machine jolted him back to life, repairing any damage within minutes.
It did everything to keep him happy, producing entertainment, stimulating conversations, and everything else it thought he needed.
But it could not give him a purpose.
Meaningless immortality.
“That woman has two vaginas! What the–”
“CUT! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked the director.
“Well, I thought the original line was a bit predictable, so I thought I might just–” said the actor.
“Play it as written!”
“I’m firing my agent tonight,” muttered the actor.
Writer’s note: this was written right before the most recent US presidential election. I found the absurdity that someone like Sarah Palin might be elected Vice President so compelling that I pushed it to its logical conclusion.
After the US falls under its own economic deadweight, and roving bands of ex-stock brokers and ex-bankers make war upon each other, the former country’s last president, Sarah Palin, will become its supreme ruler.
She will build an arena for the bands to fight each other to the death: Palindrome!
Another boring day at the office. Same old dreadfully tedious numbers.
Except when there’s a discrepancy, in which case it’s the same old procedure, even if the moment of discovery is exciting for about a second.
As my cubicle neighbor starts to sneeze uncontrollably, I login to my auditor’s account.
It was the ultimate closed-room mystery!
Everyone was found dead, with no trace of violence, poison, or disease.
A gun was found in a drawer, but it was proved conclusively that it had never been fired.
The authorities were baffled to no end: the gun had everyone’s prints all over!