Short Stories to Entertain

  She was upstairs when the telephone rang but she had no problem hearing it. The polished wood flooring of the hallway and lack of soft furnishings created a hard space where the loud bell could echo and resonate throughout the house. She was sitting on the bed filing her nails into shape, the scraping she knew scratched at his nerves which was why she was doing it now. To avoid a later minor skirmish. She saved the doing of it in his presence for when she wanted to make a point, to emphasize an issue, to deliberately get under his skin. She did not rush to answer the call. She was not that sort of person. She rarely rushed to do anything. Slowly she put down the nail file on the bedside table deliberately placing it where she had asked for a phone to be installed just to remind her how ludicrous it was to deny such a simple and necessary luxury. The stairs were low rise meaning a long flight with shallow, wide steps, the consequence of having an expansive hallway and wide landing

  The day a highly dishevelled and ridiculous looking Henry Snook first thought he might be a comedian was the day he stood in the dock waiting to be sentenced. Those had been the judge’s words after all. Standing in a strangely lopsided way the pink six inch stiletto, so pink it would send shocking spiralling into space, was so small it screwed up his right foot in a painful ball. Obviously on the wrong foot and pointing outwards, the right footed calf length, hand tooled leather, cowboy boot, with two inch heel, on his left foot, was absurdly floppy being made for a giant that he hoped he would never meet again. Both were brand new. The four inch discrepancy between the height of his right and left feet was obviously the cause of his asymmetrical stance. All the evidence had been heard and the testimony of those involved including the blonde sales girl, the giant, the giant’s wife, the Car Lot owner, the patrolman, the custody sergeant and the owner of the dead steer had been noted

  Monday evening at six and Rich Lister was in the kitchen, feeling like crap, with three days of plates in the sink and a wilting some sort of green plant in a red plastic pot and an empty cat bowl. Puss had gone missing. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book, an epic novel full of excessive words and way too many pages, drinking hot, black coffee having pushed the screwed up copy of Racing Ahead to the other side. That is the copy with the black ink circles around five losing horses. He cut a piece of Victoria sponge cake that his Grandpa had made to cheer him up, who was a master baker, that was so light and tasty he thought It could have been eaten In heaven by angels. His hand had been resting on the open book as he had cut the slice and as he raised his hand with the cake the book blew back a number of pages. Or they seemed to blow back but there was no draft. The page number was 46 which did not have any significance for him so he Ignored It and returned it to pa