CRUSHED!
Posted by Barry Willdorf in Short Fiction, What's New on January 18, 2012
I was in the eight grade. She was in the eight grade too. Who knows what does it. You see someone and you go crazy insane with attraction.
She was standing in a circle with a group of friends, laughing. I can still recall that she was wearing one of those high schooly sweaters, the kind of plaid skirt that has the big fake safety clip thing, vertical along a supposed end of the material, but you know it’s really sewed closed. I’m old enough to disclose that she was wearing bobby sox and saddle shoes. Her hair was done up in a bob. She was petite, with a tiny nose, which I found very attractive, since I was beginning to grow a big one. Read the rest of this entry »
RUPERT MURDERAXE ANNOUNCES GRAND OPENING OF NEW SUPERMARKET CHAIN
Posted by Barry Willdorf in Short Fiction, What's New on December 29, 2011
Giving a rare interview, news mogul Rupert Murderaxe told an admiring coven of blonde newsreaders today that with the demise of his oldest newspaper, Whirld, Noose, he has decided that it’s time to diversify.
“I’m getting into the grocery business,” the billionaire revealed with obvious pride. “People are tired of news, but they still want to eat. In fact, you only have to look at the guy seated next to you on a plane to see just how voracious for food the people are.”
Standing in front of a giant backdrop with the logo of “SCORTCHED EARTH FOODS” in a flambeau motif, Murderaxe told the blondies that all the food he intended to sell in his market chain would come from unsustainable plant and animal species. “When you know that you’ll soon be running out of something, you rush to buy what’s left,” he pointed out. “And that really jacks up the prices. How much would you pay to eat the very last polar bear? It’s nearly priceless. “
Asked who their target customer base was, Murderaxe’s wife, Ho Li Cao said, “We’re going after the one percent. The ostentatious eaters. Do you know that recently someone consumed a dessert costing $35,000? We’ve consulted all the experts in climate change and they’re unanimous. The more things change, the more food is going to cost. Extinctions promise to produce bigger profits than illicit drugs and it’s a whole lot safer than wiretapping has become,” she said with a wave of her infamous pie-blocking hand.
Giovanni’s Dump
Posted by Barry Willdorf in Short Fiction on July 27, 2011
When he came home from the war, Giovanni had two objectives, to marry my cousin Sylvia and to buy a business. They married. He bought a dump on a large chunk of marshland. Sylvia was happy about the marriage but lukewarm, to say the least, about Giovanni’s career choice. She volunteered to make a sign for the enterprise and christened it “Giovanni’s Dump.”
The dump’s amenities included a house — a flat-roofed, two-story stucco affair the color of peanut butter, or feces, depending on your point of view. A gravel parking lot separated their home from the dusty marsh road. The rear and sides afforded views of rusting mounds of detritus. Here, remarkably enough, dump-side romance produced Cheryl and Bernice — plump, pale, dumpy things with hair the color of the house and limpid eyes reminiscent of oil sludge.
One summer evening, Sylvia invited me for spaghetti and meatballs. Flies probed the screens for opportunities to enter. Mosquitoes whined a background rhapsody. Smells of salt marsh mingled with decomposing petrochemicals leaking from Giovanni’s inventory. It wasn’t long before Cheryl and Bernice were covered — lips, chins, hands and tee shirts — in gooey red sauce.
Sylvia shot them a disgusted glance. “Where are your manners?” she asked, grimacing. “You look like you were brought up in a dump.”
The Day I Became The Creature from the Black Lagoon (A mini-memoir)
Posted by Barry Willdorf in Poetry / Fiction, Short Fiction, What's New on June 3, 2011
They were on a scientific quest in the heart of the Amazon and discovered a webbed, hand-like claw. They returned to the States to get more funding, victims, and a girl-friend for the hero. They came back to find that everyone they left in their camp had been killed by an amphibious “gill-man” from the Black Lagoon, a paradise from which, inexplicably, no one had ever returned. 
With a bunch of fresh scientific meat on the scene, the gill-man, who looked a lot like a humanoid amphibian dunked in used motor oil, got the chance to kill some more. Conveniently, the girlfriend attracted the attention of the randy creature, allowing the hero to rescue her, which he did by shooting up the place in an exciting finale. It was The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I was among the hundreds of rowdy and sugar-dosed kids stampeding from the summer matinee as if it were the last day of school. Some got rides from waiting parents but the rest of us were simply loosed on the downtown. Pretending to be that creature, or the hero or the damsel in distress, we bumped into pedestrians, relishing our delinquency, the rebukes, the eye-rolls and disgust of the Saturday shoppers as we careened our way toward the bus stop. Little did I know that in just a few weeks, I would be cast into a more realistic version of the Creature, to the utter destruction of a dining experience. Read the rest of this entry »
The Very Tiny Man With The Big Chest of Medals – A Parable
Posted by Barry Willdorf in Poetry / Fiction, Short Fiction, What's New on February 26, 2011
Once there was a very tiny man. He was so small that whenever he tried to puff up his chest to make himself seem larger, he fell over. Now this very tiny man wasn’t very good at much, though he fancied himself good at quite a lot of things. But there was one thing he was very, very good at, everyone agreed — leading parades. Read the rest of this entry »