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Boy sends
bomb threat to protest bank service
His mother promised, if he was good, they'd stop for ice
cream on the way home. But they waited and waited and
waited in line at the bank, then it turned out she had to see
a different teller, so they waited and waited again. By the
time they got out of there it was four o'clock and his
mother said ice cream would only spoil his dinner.
Colorado
Man Resuscitates Chicken
What a great idea! He fills a bucket with water, runs out to
the shed, grabs a kitten he hopes doesn't know how to use
its claws yet, and dunks it. Then he holds it down and
counts to twenty-five. Sure as hell looks dead. He grasps it
by its slippery tail and swings it around to revive it. He
cups his hands to his mouth, pries its teeth open, blows. He
screams that it's too young to die and waits for the kitten
to meow or something. He screams that his father will kill
him if he finds out. He pries its mouth open wider, takes a
deep breath, holds it, holds it, lets it all out. Nothing. It
doesn't even blow up like a balloon does. He walks back
toward the house, head down, shuffling his feet, tricked,
disgusted.
Hungary drivers to get
lemons and apples
If they meant Hungarian drivers why didn't they say
Hungarian drivers? Or drivers in Hungary. These
newscasters with their poor command of English drive her
batshit. Especially right now. She's been on the road for
the past five hours, fighting traffic around Boston, then
again around New York. She hasn't had a thing to eat, and
really she doesn't want to spend another long Thanksgiving
with family. Having finished his animal crackers, her son
slides down in the back seat, kicking. She could enjoy an
apple right now. Her son whines that he has to pee, that he
doesn't feel well. It's all a ploy, she knows: like single
mother, like bastard son. Mostly she'd get sick before a
history test. Not that she didn't study, but the sheer
thought of sitting there, chewing the eraser of her pencil
while the clock ticked off its minutes used to be torture.
She'd be up half the night sometimes, vomiting in the
bathroom that backed her parents' bedroom, gagging as
loud as she could. Lemons were the only thing that helped.
Indian police arrest 67 women in death of
barber suspected of black magic
And they plan more arrests. If you want to know the truth,
there were sixty-nine women arrested, but the papers
decided to change that figure. Just to be safe, like the Jews
won't allow you to count the number of people in a room.
They said the barber walked around the village throwing
lemons this way and that, and that lemons were thought
by the naïve to be used in black magic. That story was
published in papers all around the world, how the women
broke in, beat him, locked him in his shop, then said the
place on fire. What the reporters didn't understand was
that what they called lemons were women. Women
squeezed then tossed this way and that. 69 women.
London to Get Sexual 'Theme Park'
There's always a problem taking the children here. The
oldest wants to ride in that oblong P-place, sitting on the
bottom as if in a balloon, watching it fill up around him
then finally being ejected onto the pillows two feet below.
The younger son wants to climb up that wet and slippery
tongue machine, then slide down, while his twin brother
wants to go on what he thinks of as the wide, flat bungee
jump that dangles over a place just a little lower than the a
woman's stomach. And the youngest, his only daughter,
wants to curl up in the womb and be swished about as if
she was a scoop of ice cream in a milkshake. And of course
no one can agree, and they won't just stay with him,
waiting for one ride to finish before moving on to the next.
Then because he yells at them for whining that they need
just one more ride, and won't buy them more than one hot
dog each (his daughter only eats the tips), they go home
and tell their mother all about the day.
Rochelle Ratner
www.rochelleratner.com
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