Wufniks

9 Things Stand Between You and Happiness

My Imagination, That Little Black Triangle, by Jason Lee Norman

Other Guff

If You Change Your Address Please Let Us Know, by Snehal Vadher

(What Jacob Hoxteth Posted on www.jacobhoxtethmoviefan.com After he Asked for a Copy of the Awesome Martial Arts Documentary ‘Future Punch’ for his 12th Birthday and his Lame Dad Got Him ‘Back to the Future Part III’ Instead), by Crispin Best

Stanley Finds a Defect, Stanley Rides the Subway, Stanley Buys a Coffee, Stanley is Late for Work, by Jason Lee Norman

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9 Things…

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JLN-London/Canada

#4 My Imagination

Everything I have ever imagined has never happened. Anything that I have ever allowed myself to daydream, ponder, or hope about in any way has never occurred. It is a very difficult thing to do- train yourself to NOT want something to happen so that it still has a chance of happening, but this is what I will have to do in the future if I want things to ever happen that i expect to happen, at least on some sub atomic level.
Let’s say I meet a girl, and I think to myself, I would like to kiss that girl. So far so good. But then, I think about what kissing that girl would be like, so I set up a scenario in which I may be able to put my lips to said lips. I start off with some easy ones: rescuing her from an oncoming train, burning building, wild dog attack, and then move on to some simpler scenarios such as carrying her books home from school in the 1950’s or asking her to dance at a 1960’s sock hop. As soon as I imagine these events happening, they will never ever happen.
I will never travel back in time to kiss her under the maple tree and she will never ever fall into the path of an oncoming subway train.
How tragic.
This also means that I am basically unprepared for every single situation that I am about to face for the rest of my adult life. This is because if I mentally ready myself for an event, that event will no longer take place. As soon as I walk out of my house every morning I must immediately imagine Serbian terrorists, napalm attacks, hang glider crashes, killer fog- in order to stay safe from such dangers.
Not only am I caught unawares for any kind of professional, social, or romantic eventuality, I am also in a state of cat-like readiness to somehow thwart the most vicious and horrific deeds that man has ever unleashed on man. Yay!

#3 That Little Black Triangle

This happens to me almost every night when I’m coming home on the train. A lovely woman or young girl sits across from me on the tube and is wearing a short skirt, sometimes leggings sometimes not leggings, and immediately crosses her legs like she was told to do by her mother or possibly a younger and more sexually adventurous aunt, and then it makes that little black triangle of what lies beyond it I can only imagine. It’s like an ice cream cone of darkness.
It’s as dense as a black hole and doesn’t let any light escape its massively powerful force of gravity. It must be as cold in there as that atom smasher in Switzerland, or as warm as a sun spot- I’ll never know.
My gaze fixes on it and I get in trouble.
My gaze fixes on it and I think about what happiness is.
I am never more unhappy than when I am looking at that triangle.

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A.J Adams, London

The Meat Shell

1 Health (less than hearty at the best of times)

2 Age (fifteen years older than Marie)

3 Teeth (colour and consistency of cheddar)

4 Genitals (shrivelled, misshapen)

5 Odour (once rather hurtfully described as ‘pungent’ by a colleague)

6 Physique (puny)

7 Nose (excessive size)

8 Relatives (genetic connections with unworthy people)

9 Hair (lack thereof)

At the last count there were nine things that stood between me and happiness, but they all share a single underlying cause. All these things are but manifestations of the same problem. For years I have been addressing these symptoms separately and with varying degrees of success; tackling the problem at its root has till now always been a task beyond my ingenuity. The tools at my disposal have been laughably ineffectual given the magnitude of my problems: deodorant and Regain, physical exercise and sadistic dental treatments. No magic bullets in this arsenal. I’ve done what I can of course, humiliated myself at the gym, brushed a few pitiful strands over my pate, wept bitter tears in the doctor’s office. One does. But all to little effect. I am the same pitiable gnome as I ever was, only with decrepitude threatening to worsen the situation further.

Marie, my brother’s wife, married him for his looks rather than his mind, and is now repenting at leisure. She told me as much herself, in an unguarded moment one afternoon as we sat in the drawing room looking out at the garden where Tom was trimming the box hedges bare-chested, his t-shirt rumpled on the ground nearby where he’d discarded it. How lovely she was, with her fair hair glowing around her face as it caught the late summer light streaming in through the window. She sat curled in an armchair, head tilted to one side attentively as she questioned me with evident curiosity.

‘Is there anyone special in your life at the moment, Harry?’ she probed.

‘No, no,’ I muttered. ‘There was a lady I met in the supermarket a while ago but it didn’t work out.’ (One brief, excruciating roll in the hay with me had been enough for her to change her phone number.) ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for all that, actually. I never meet the right sort of girl.’

‘Of course you are, everyone is. But you must give it time, and be realistic. Love is different to romantic fantasy.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, and a wistful look seeped into her features as she stared out towards where Tom was now shovelling earth into a mound.

‘I suppose I mean that you can’t have it all,’ she replied. ‘People expect to get everything from one person: sexual attraction, a soul mate, financial security. As you get older you realise that it is all too much to ask for in a single person. Sometimes you have to choose between these things, and when you choose you must weigh the long term against the short term.’

It sounded as though these were lessons she’d learnt from hard experience. We sat quietly for a moment, watching as Tom drove the spade down into the ground, his muscles rippling and subsiding beneath his even, sand-toned skin. I cringed at the contrast between his body and my own, his perfectly at ease in its outdoor surroundings, mine always at odds with its environment, always stumbling into things and inflicting some new bruise or injury. Tom must have felt my malevolent gaze on him because he turned and waved and Marie smiled and waved back at him, but the wistful expression didn’t leave her face.

Tom is perfect specimen, a collector’s item. He ought to be miniaturised and pinned to a board. Always, always, from the time we were just little boys, he drew people to him with his unnatural good looks and charm. He wasn’t much of a thinker, never too focused on academic pursuits, but this never seemed to be much of a hindrance to whatever he wanted falling from the sky to land at his feet. Still though, intellectually he wasn’t close to a match for a woman like Marie, with her double first from Cambridge, her blossoming career in the Foreign Office. What a rebuke to fairness that a woman like Marie ends up with a chump like him, because she was briefly unable to look past the corporeal to the essence of the thing. Okay, so he has the sparkle, the magics, but he’ll never have the curiosity, the love of reason, the rigour of thought. And me? I have all those things, but Marie is prevented from seeing them by the thing that is the root cause of all the problems: the meat shell.

Marie resents that they are forced by my brother the gardener’s, lack of earning power to live here in my house, which I bought outright with the royalties of one of my more successful inventions, the Rotavator, a cunning little device for separating plasma from blood. I am kind to her and try to make her feel as though they are not imposing. I give them the run of the house (except of course the attic where my experiments are), take pains never to intimate that they are anything other than welcome guests (if it wasn’t for her, he’d be out on his ear, though he’s too stupid to realise it).

It has long been obvious to me that to have a restrictive physical presence is undesirable, and it amazes me how little attention science pays to dispensing with these meat shells. After all, bodies make humans weak. They make us cowards, because we fear pain and incapacitation. They make us greedy, because their evolutionary programming took place in times in which food was scarce, and our physical evolution has not kept pace with our other achievements. Worst of all, they tie us to a tiny fraction of space and time, their frailty preventing travel at anything other than low speeds in a highly specific environment that meets the requirements for breathing, re-energising, excreting. And they are an insult to natural justice, a sort of lottery that somehow overrides all the other merit a person may have. If you’re tall, symmetrical and handsome, you will be more successful in your job, be paid more, have more friends, partners, offspring. All these things have been statistically proven time and time again. No matter whether you are kind, perceptive or ferociously intelligent; all those things are gazumped by the random factor.

Dare we imagine what sort of a creature man would be without a body? Not a brain in a vat, or even a being that could be downloaded onto computer circuitry, but a pure disembodied consciousness, not subject to the rules that apply to matter, not constrained by the need to feed and clothe and house the meat. Free to range across the earth and among the stars, free to be only that which he is in essence and not that which he is incidentally, or by accident.

Tonight, I will become just that. I have worked painstakingly on the process that will separate the energy of my consciousness from the matter of my body, and I am finally in a position to test it on myself. I confess to feeling a certain trepidation; it has not been possible to test the process thoroughly, since once the rats die I have no way of telling whether their consciousness has successfully decoupled from their little bodies, or whether they have simply karked it. Certainly my later experiments passed more peacefully than the earlier ones, from which I occasionally find some small clump of fur and flesh stuck to the wall in some obscure corner of the attic. There is still a piece of one of the earliest rats lodged in my arm, before I had considered the risk of organic shrapnel. I don’t think I managed to dig the whole piece out, perhaps there is still a fragment of bone in there, and it gets inflamed from time to time. But the latest ratty corpses have remained intact, simply sliding on to the table as their hearts cease to receive their instructions to pump. And tonight, it will be me on the table, and I don’t blame myself for a small amount of nervousness bobbing beneath the surface of a sea of excitement.

But first, one last wank. Yes, you heard me. None too dignified, I grant you, but then, doesn’t that rather prove my point? I writhe and strain on top of my bedclothes, my stolen, cherished picture of Marie in a bathing suit propped against the pillow beside me, arm pumping like a piston, face contorted into something even uglier than the usual. Again the mismatch: my body grotesque and my thoughts tender, closer to Marie than ever before. I won’t let her be nervous once it’s her turn. I won’t explain in case she panics, I will use subterfuge to bring her to the attic and once she’s there it will all be over in no time.

For my own part, in the moment before I flick the switch, I survey my body for one final time as it lies on the table in the attic. I feel not the slightest sorrow at our imminent parting of the ways. One damp, trembling finger lowers itself towards the switch and presses down hard.

My new consciousness coalesces slowly. It takes me some time to form coherent thoughts, they seem to ebb and flow, congeal and then disperse if I do not exert considerable will on keeping them whole. I have to practice holding them steady; this must have been a function that the meat performed previously. The world is silent and black like a sheet of velvet. I turn my attentions outwards and gradually I perceive different things. I seem to still be situated in the attic, but I am not alone. I can feel the presence of all the other living and non-living things in the room, the dull bulk of a trunk, the cold, spiky pinpricks of consciousness of the multitude of spiders inside of it. Across the floor, the heart of a rat beats at twice the pace of a human’s and just above it hovers an inquisitive little mind, not exactly thinking but rapidly processing sense data, smells, tiny sounds, all hugely magnified to this being.

I expand my range, let my awareness float outwards. One floor down, Tom is asleep in bed. One of his legs twitches. He’s having some puppyish dream of running across a field (or something else equally banal). Marie lies beside him, but she is not sleeping. I can feel her mind turning something over like a pebble, one side and then the other, this way and that. I can hear her breathe, whoosh, whoosh. I shift myself into the bedcover, and settle it more tightly around her. She likes this, I can feel it, she shifts and submits to me, drawing me in. I stay with her until she sleeps, and I can hardly bear to extract myself from the contours of her body, but there is much to learn about my new state, much exploring to do before dawn.

I will myself to rise upwards, no small feat this because without matter gravity is defunct and up and down have ceased to have much meaning to me, but slowly, slowly, I haul my essence, through the eaves and onto the roof. The night is silken black and beneath a bone white moon I prepare to launch myself out into the universe for the first time, and I push, push, fly up and out but oomph, something is stopping me, a new sort of gravity is tugging me back, preventing me from leaping out into the night sky. How can this be? I flow down the sides of the house and attempt to ripple out across the ground instead but there is a, a stickiness that holds me close to the house, tethers me to its walls. Can I not leave?

I pull myself back in and assemble in the attic. Feeling around I encounter one of those ratty consciousness with no associated body, it must be one from my experiments. Why is it still here? Can it not leave either? Have we swapped one prison of matter for another? I range about the house, trying to break free of the walls and being pulled back until there is no escaping the fact that I am unable to escape and then I pool my consciousness, now humming with panic.

Eventually the panic subsides enough for some minor disturbance to catch my attention and distract me from my predicament. I creep into the bedroom where Tom is now stirring in the first grey early morning light. His movement half-wakes Marie. She slides towards him, strokes his hair from his face and his eyes open. She smiles. He rolls over so that she is beneath him and I shudder for her at having to tolerate this and for myself for witnessing it. Even so, my instinct is not to leave before the image is indelibly printed on me, but to stay with Marie, to show my solidarity with her and also if I’m honest because I can’t help but want to see her body, and to know what she looks like from above when she is lying on a bed. It’s wrong of course, to fetishize such things, when I am planning to take them away from her, or rather to free her from them. I have a twinge of guilt at what I am going to do; somehow separating her essence from her body seems less an act of emancipation than it was for me, since her flesh is firm and beautiful and scented with flowers.

And my God, what a thing it is to behold. Lips parted, hair splayed across the pillow, curved stomach, and those breasts, what breasts, what man could resist an invitation such as this?  But as I swoop in towards her so does Tom, and I am reminded that this invitation is not for me. How revolting, how grotesque, the way she offers her meat up to him. Why doesn’t she push him away, this man who is such a disappointment to her? But she doesn’t seem disappointed now.

I rush from the room and bring myself together in the attic, but I can’t escape from what is going on below. I can’t switch off my awareness of any part of the house; every room and every creature in it clamours for my attention, from the lowliest woodlouse to the exalted Marie, or rather, the not-so-exalted Marie. After all, she is not what quite I thought she was. Still, I am not quite what I thought I would be either. Adapt and survive, that’s my motto.  Darwin made the point that it is not strongest of that survive or even the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change. I can adapt to this new set of circumstances. So what if I can’t leave this house? Who cares about the rest of universe when I can stay here with Marie, perhaps forever?

Not long now till we will be together; I will transform Marie at the earliest possible opportunity, before Tom gets a chance to lay his stinking hands on her again. Knowing I would most likely to be unable to exert physical pressure, I set a timer to trigger the process once a day at regular intervals.  All I need to do now is steer her up here in, let me see, six and a half hours from now… wait… six and a half hours? But that would be at twelve o’clock, and I’m certain I set the timer for a first activation at ten o’clock. Is it malfunctioning? I trickle into the mechanism and find everything intact… intact, but unmoving.  But what is this? I stream through the timer and out along the lead to the wall plug and am stopped short by a break in it. Beside the severed wire lies a little rigid corpse, ratty teeth bared in a rictus grin of electrocution.

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Valerie O’Riordan

#3 Dead Fish
Dead fish; nine of them, buried in empty matchboxes in the garden.  But our garden is paved over with hexagonal patio squares, except in one place, where a slab was left out to allow a raggedy hydrangea plant to poke through and slobber across the concrete, and it is under this bedraggled plant  that the fish are buried.  Every one of them had a solemn funeral and a sprinkling of tonic water to sanctify them before we shovelled the soil on top with a special funereal desert spoon, but none of them have managed to rest in peace, since at least once a week the dog escapes and scrambles under the plant and scrabbles about in the earth looking for god knows what, dislodging every dead thing under there, and on my way to work in the morning I have to re-enter the spiky little skeletons of the little rotten creatures before the kids realise what’s been going on.  I see their spines and empty sockets when I close my eyes.  Nine fish between me and happiness.

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Raoul Colville

#2 Postcards

Postcards about love;

Are open invitations.

From feelings,

To the postal servants of her majesty.

Envelopes are for jealous lovers.

That’s what i think. Burn all envelopes.

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Alistair Harford, Chorlton

#4 Alarms

If ever an invention was simply designed to torture us it must be the alarm. Work starts…alarm. Lunch ends….alarm. Gamma radiation leaks into our homes….ALARM!

Of course the number one entry into the ghastly list of horrors that alarms can vouch for is the…dum dum dum….morning alarm. It shrieks at the time when your body has reached maximum comfort. It snoozes to allow you 10 minutes of reprieve from your daily sentance and then strikes again when you just start to believe you can wait out the cold miserable day in bed.

In any film when the end of the world is nigh, alarm buzzers shock through a city. ALARMS AGAIN!

If there were no alarms, then there would be no work start, no end to lunch, you will never be snatched from sleep and the end of the world would slip by while everyone was warm and dreaming. I have no problem with that.

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Dave Hartley, Manchester

#8 The Unbearable Loudness of Car Horns.

“To have a polite conversation with one’s girlfriend,” I remark politely to my girlfriend, “or with a good friend, or relative, or even just a casual aquaintance, or someone you’ve only known for five minutes is the essence of common human decency. To begin, continue or develop a chat into solid conversation, without limits or bounds, takes a skill not found in any other beasts of the world and is reserved solely for the sphere of an intelligent and intelligible-”

“BLAAAR!” goes the car horn of a passing Vauxhall at nothing in particular. We both jump and I am so startled that I lose on of my toes. This is the ninth time this has happened and I am down to one toe.

Angry, I hobble over to the offending car, which has now stopped at a red light, and bang on the driver’s window. He winds it down to face me.

“Why the horn?” I blurt. “Why the beeeep?!”

His face cycles through bemusment, anger, confusion, cockiness and back to anger but he gives no reply. I ask again with a splutter and he turns to his wheel and hits the horn. Confused, I ask again. BLAARR! Again. BLAAR! Again. BLAAR!

This continues until the light turns green and the car behind hammers onto their horn, as if they felt left out. It is a sharper pitch and comes as another surprise – so much so that I lose my final toe and stumble backwards into a heap. The cars drive off together, blaring at each other in their own barbaric style.

My girlfriend rushes to my side and begins to bandage my stubby feet. She tries to pick up from where we left off but our polite conversation has been long lost somewhere, swallowed by the echo of the urban sprawl.

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Laura Webb

Nine Things that Stand Between Me and Happiness

Fuzz; lodged in hairbrushes,
or caught in the innards of the hairdryer,
which panics like a buzzard.
The hair-that-shall-remain-nameless
on the bathroom sink, incongruent, prepared
if necessary, to wait forever.

The sound of Velcro, like the sound
of eighty fat sparrows taking off
in attempted synchronisation.

Plastic aeroplane mugs the size
of postage stamps;

the early-morning thud of silence on the doormat.

Your empty deodorant bottle,
I’m done with keeping, and well beyond
throwing out.

Empty-ish sauce bottles left upside-down
on the kitchen table, like soap dispensers
(as still the hair clings to the sink,
the duster throws in the towel)

Between unsymmetrical curtains,
sudden window-cleaners,
their despondent faces in the vacant glass

and, more than traffic jams,
radio traffic reports from helicopters. Above all else,

in a kitchen drawer, laid out
like hostages in yellow dresses,
the rack of never-used
corn-on-the-cob holders.

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Tim Woodall, Manchester

#3 People Who Bring Their Babies to Work

What wretched rituals the human race has created. The office that sucks one’s soul dry for a less than modest hourly wage, then – introduced to it – these wailing lumps of pink flesh, whose parents parade them around the building with self-indulgent pride. What in the perfumed ARSE do they hope to achieve by inflicting their offspring on the rest of us?

‘Oh, isn’t he cute in his miniature United away shirt?’

‘Isn’t he just? It’s the 4 – 6 months old range, only £40 for the whole kit. He takes after his dad already…’

Get Out.

There’s forty years of Post Graduate office life all lined up and waiting for the boy – don’t make it worse. Take him to the park, let him gawp wild-eyed at a tree while you read Oscar Wilde to soothe him to sleep. Maybe that will stop his incessant crying. Because I’ve got precious hours to waste at this desk, daydreaming about what I can do to get out of here myself.

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Crispin Best

How to Rule Unopposed for 42 Years

The first thing is to put your dad in jail. Burn down an orphanage, squirt your dad with kerosene and tell the local dungeon to lock him up. Visit him once to tell him he is going to die in there; and so he will, three years later, halfway through Pet Sematary.

The second thing is to use your wife’s fist to hit yourself in the face. She will hate it when you do that and she’ll begin to whimper. Take her hand and hit yourself again.

The third thing is to off your big brother, Bernardino. Walk with him to the cathedral. Together, climb the 539 steps of the spiral staircase to the top of the tower. Enjoy the view. A boy will be flying a kite. A pig will be running directly towards a haystack. Say,

- Would you look at that, Bernardino?

- Would you look at…

And kick him down the first of the 539 steps and he’ll keep tumbling and you just look up, straight up, at nothing.

The fourth thing is to eat bagels. There will be plenty. Eat three. One cinnamon, two sesame seed. Look out of the window and lick your lips and think about all the foods you don’t like. You don’t like raw sugar snaps. You don’t like raw cabbage. You don’t like black pudding.

The fifth thing is to off brothers numbers two and three, Pietro and Azzo. Bury them up to their necks in the dry soil and sit in front of them eating fruit from a basket. When they cry, wipe their tears away. Leave a coconut one foot away from them. Two long straws will poke out that almost, almost reach their lips.

The sixth thing is to pour out the last of the orange juice and there will be just exactly a glass and you can nod to yourself as you crush the carton in your hand.

The seventh thing is to off brother number four, Albobrandino. Purchase one of those tiny guillotines which are actually a magic trick. Proceed to chop a carrot (but not Albobrandino’s finger!) in half. Next, buy an actual guillotine. Albo will clap his hands and stick his neck straight in there. Put your hands to your cheeks before the blade has even dropped.

The eighth thing is to learn the sackbut. Practice every day until you get it. The acoustics are good in bathroom. Play it when you are furious. Nothing expresses fury quite like a sackbut.

The ninth thing is to produce an heir. His name will be Ostasio. His name will be Ostasio, meaning ‘abundant’. His name will be Ostasio.

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Kamila Rymajdo, Manchester

#2 The Rachel cut

I used to have what you’d call a Rachel cut. Rachel from Friends, the TV programme. It suited my heart shaped face, and covered my overly large ears. You could say I wasn’t a million miles away from what Rachel looked like. You could say I looked a bit like her. Quite a bit. My hair was naturally brown but I got it coloured. I had five different shades of highlights painted on by the best colourist this side of South Manchester. They were various shades of honey. When I washed my hair I used Pantene shampoo. It wasn’t the best brand of shampoo, but I liked the smell. It lingered in the air after I left the room. I liked that.

My hair started falling out after my husband ran over our neighbour’s cat. I didn’t connect the two events. At first it started falling out when I washed it, so I stopped using Pantene. Then it started falling out when I had sex with my husband. We stopped having sex. Then it started falling out when I went to work. I stopped working. Then it started falling out all the time. I didn’t know what to do.

After my husband ran over the neighbour’s cat he picked it up in his hands, and went round to the neighbour’s house and said sorry. He had tears in his eyes. The neighbour told him to put the cat down and come in for a cup of tea. He was shocked by what had happened and she could tell. She made him Earl Grey with a dash of milk. It was Organic he said. They talked about the cat and about other things he said. I said, ‘what things?’ He said, ‘just things. And the cat.’

When all my hair fell out I stopped leaving the house. My husband said, ‘it’s no big deal, I’ll get you a wig.’ I said ‘no, a wig won’t do. I have to wait for it to grow back.’ It didn’t grow back. My husband took me to the doctors. The doctor said, ‘it might never grow back. But look at Gail Porter. She lives a good life.’ I said, ‘I’m no Gail Porter. My name’s Helen Cleaves, and I used to have a Rachel cut.’ The doctor didn’t know what to say. My husband took me home.

One day my husband came home from work. He said he’d been working late. I said, ‘OK.’ I was sitting on the sofa, watching TV, like I always did now. I had a headscarf around my bald head. It was brown and yellow. It reminded me of my hair. ‘How was work?’ I said. ‘OK,’ my husband said. He was hovering by the window. ‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Give me a kiss.’ He hovered by the window for a second longer then slowly walked up to me. He kissed me on the cheek, then left the room. I heard the bathroom door close. I sat back and breathed. And then I smelled it. Pantene. I’d thrown out my last bottle of Pantene months before. ‘Why do you smell of Pantene?’ I said to my husband when he walked back in. ‘I’m having an affair with the neighbour,’ he said.

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Anthony Richardson, Manchester

#4 Institutional racism in the cartoon version of Ghostbusters, also known paradoxically as The Real Ghostbusters.

The city had just been rid of some ghosts after a tough battle, and the camera panned across the four as they celebrated their feat. We saw Peter. We saw Egon. We saw Ray. We only saw half of Winston. Oh, only half of the black guy’s good enough for you animators, is it? That shit messes me up. That shit made me turn to my neighbour in the crèche and say, ‘God damn institutional racism in cartoons!’ My neighbour turned back to me and said, ‘Where’s my daddy? I want to go back to my daddy, now. You’re not my daddy. You smell of beans.

#5 Five year olds telling me I smell of beans.

Yeah, so I smell of beans! I smell of beans because I had beans, all right? Does that automatically give you the right to tell me I smell of beans, five year old child? When the opening credits of Thundercats came on, I noticed you’d messed yourself. Did I say anything? Did I say, ‘Small child, I believe you’ve shit your pants?’ Did I? No, because I have integrity. I just kept my mouth shut through the whole episode, which, by the way, you spoiled, because of your pooey smell.

Albert Landsman, Yorkshire

#6 My Wife

My wife kicks our cat for my mistakes. Yesterday I forgot that I had an appointment with my chiropractor and my wife launched Tiddles a good four feet. We don’t kiss before going to sleep anymore. Also, I’ve lost her passport. I don’t think she knows yet.

Adam Eaglesham, Roanoke Virginia

#7 The Wind

The Wind- I am not a sailboat or a clump of dandelion spores. The wind makes me angry and messes up my hair and blows trash around the yard. Sometimes it will take a tool shed that was in the backyard and blows it into the front yard. The wind is dumb. You’re better off without it.

If You Change Your Address Please Let Us Know

by Snehal Vadher

bingo

My uncle the bachelor, jobless and childless since God-knows-when, received a camel by post one pretty summer morning. The two hairs on his head stood in bewilderment to form the V of a TV antenna, flashing a message across the screen which read “What the hell am I to do now?” The postman asked him to sign, saying that all charges had been paid by the sender, one Honorious Friendly, a man unknown to uncle. After signing, he turned to the camel and said, “Come in, and please make yourself at home.” The camel ate curtains for lunch and chandeliers for dinner. But soon uncle’s worries about him came to an end, for at the end of the month Mr. Friendly sent an elephant by express delivery. Uncle blew up in rage, shouting “Bloody hell, bloody hell,” and the postman said, “Sir, no blasphemies please!” The elephant drank lots of water everyday, leaving uncle without a bath, and also ate all the veggies. But soon all trouble with the elephant was to end, for at the end of the second month Mr Friendly sent a hippo in a cardboard box marked “This Way Up.” My uncle could not take it any more, so after letting the hippo in he left for the jungle, making the postman promise to keep his new address secret.

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