Larry Wins A Million

By John McDonnell

“I hate the winter,” Dolores said one day. “I need a vacation at the beach, but we have no money.” Larry had gone into hibernation mode and he was asleep in the corner of the TV room in the form of an 800 pound male grizzly bear.

“I remember when Father used to take us to our winter home in Florida,” Edna said. She was watching a game show in a sequined pink tulle gown, bedecked with jewelry. “We’d spend our winters playing in the sand and watching the alligators maul deer that wandered too close to the lake. I missed a lot of schoolwork those years, but Father said with a mind like mine it wouldn’t matter.”

“You never had a house in Florida,” Dolores said.

“Didn’t I?” Edna said. “Oh, well, it must have happened to somebody else.”

Then there was a knock at the front door and when Dolores opened it a TV announcer smiled at her, temporarily blinding her with the glare from his teeth. 

“Is this the home of Larry the Alien?” the man said, shoving a microphone in her face. He was smiling so hard it looked like his face might crack, and his eyes were bulging with manic energy.

“Who wants to know?” Dolores said.

“I want to tell him that he won the ‘You Can Be Fabulously Wealthy Marketing Sweepstakes’, and he’s won a million dollars!!!” the man shouted. Dolores had the sensation that the oxygen was being sucked out of the neighborhood every time he opened his mouth.

“Oh, that’s lovely,” Edna said, from the couch. “But you’ll have to come back in several months. Larry is taking his winter nap.”

“That’s not possible!” the man said, whipping a poster-sized check out of a briefcase. “He needs to take his check today! I have TV cameras waiting!” He pointed to a group of people behind him, and they did indeed have a battery of cameras pointed at the house.

Before Dolores knew what was happening the group had brushed her aside and were inside the house.

The announcer found Larry in his corner, and said, “Here he is, boys! Make sure you get a good angle on my teeth!”

He started shoving Larry, prodding him to wake him up. Larry snorted once and tried to keep on sleeping.

“Come on, Mr. Larry,” the man said. “Wake up to the wonderful fact that you’re a winner! Did you hear me? You’re a winner!”

Larry growled once, but did not open his eyes.

“I’ll bet he’s dreaming about salmon,” Edna said. “It’s a lovely dream for a bear.”

The announcer picked up a pepper shaker from the kitchen table and poured some into his palm, then threw the handful at Larry’s big wet bear nose. Larry scrunched up his nose, snuffled, and then sneezed loud enough to rattle the windows. He opened his eyes blearily and looked at the announcer.

“There’s the sleepyhead!” the announcer said. He turned to the camera, grinning even more broadly. “Folks, we’re here at the home of an average Joe extra-terrestrial who just happened to sign up for the ‘You Can Be Fabulously Wealthy Marketing Sweepstakes’, and he won! How are you feeling right now, Larry?”

He shoved the microphone in Larry’s face, there was a pregnant pause, and then there was a blur of activity involving Larry, the announcer, and the camera crew, who abandoned their equipment and ran like a herd of stampeding buffalo through Dolores’s house and out to their van, where they drove off without saying goodbye. Larry roared and chased the announcer through the house, cornering him as he tried to climb a crystal chandelier in the entryway, and the man’s sobs and shrieks could be heard in the next ZIP code.

Dolores finally got Larry away from the announcer by offering him several pounds of salmon steaks from the freezer, and Larry went sleepily back to his corner in the TV room and curled up with his snack, after emitting several more thunderous roars.

“I’m so sorry,” Edna said, helping the announcer down from the chandelier. “He’s not very pleasant until he gets his coffee. Would you like to stay for some tea?”

The announcer seemed to have lost the ability to speak, and he simply picked up his microphone and hightailed it for the door, where he made a run for the high ground.

“Well, dear,” Edna said, picking up the check and handing it to Dolores. “I guess we can take that Florida trip now. I can't wait to see those alligators again."


THE END

Larry At The Mall

By John McDonnell

“In my day Christmas was a time for taking sleigh rides,” Edna said. “We’d bundle up in big fur coats and father would hitch up the sleigh and take us for a ride through the countryside. We’d visit the neighbors and they’d have steaming mugs of hot chocolate waiting for us, with peppermint sticks in them.”

“Mom, you never did that,” Dolores said. She had driven Edna and Larry to the mall for some Christmas shopping, and she was already regretting it. “You grew up in an apartment in the city, remember? You never went to the country.”

“Nonsense,” Edna said. “How did I get this memory if it never happened?”

“It be a false memory,” Larry said, from the back seat. For some reason unknown to Dolores he was in the form of a pirate, complete with a straggly black beard, earrings made out of gold doubloons, an eyepatch, and a gold front tooth. “False memories these days are as thick as barnacles on a sperm whale’s belly.”

It was going to be a long afternoon, Dolores thought, pulling into a parking space.

In the mall Larry went straight to the Santa Claus village and eyed the setup. “By my stars, here’s a freebooter if ever I saw one,” he said, looking at the mall Santa. “Why, look at all the swag this matey has got in his duffle,” he said pointing to the big bag of trinkets that Santa had beside him, for distributing its contents to the children who sat on his lap.

“He looks like my uncle Frederick,” Edna said. “All round and red and jolly. I remember when uncle Frederick would dress up as Santa and come to our house and give us pennies. ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he’d say. Of course, when I told him my thoughts he’d get a strange look on his face and tell me to run and get him an aspirin. I never did get my penny.”

“Why don’t we go shopping now?” Dolores said hopefully.

“Belay that,” Larry said. “I like this setup better. You just sit on his lap, and he gives you a bit of swag. Why, it’s better than hijacking a fat galleon filled with Spanish gold!”

“Why are you talking like that?” Dolores hissed, conscious that children were giggling at Larry and their parents had pulled out their cell phones and were dialing Mall Security. “Let’s get out of here before--”

But it was too late. Larry had pushed a host of small children out of the way, and he flopped down on Santa’s lap with such force that it momentarily took the poor fellow’s breath away.

“Avast, ye old sea dog!” Larry said.

“What?” Santa said, his glasses askew on his face from the force of the impact.

“Enough of this palaver,” Larry said. “Now, tell me, matey, what do I have to do to get some of that loot?”

“Ho, ho, you know the drill,” Santa said, recovering his composure. “You tell me if you’ve been a good boy, and then you recite your Christmas list.”

“Aye,” Larry said. “I be the roughest, toughest sea rat on the Spanish Main. If any man cross a friend of mine, I’ll cut his throat and feed him to the sharks for their supper, I will.”

Several children had started to cry, and Larry flashed his gold tooth in a smile, which unfortunately only made them cry louder. Santa looked alarmed, and his helper, a girl in a red and green elf costume, pushed a button under Santa’s chair, which caused several men in blue uniforms with “Security” on their backs to come running from all directions. They were talking into headsets and wearing sunglasses.

“My goodness,” Edna said. “Is the President here? I’ve never seen so many Secret Service agents. Maybe I can get his autograph. I have autographs of every President going back to Grover Cleveland. Did I ever tell you--”

“Not now!” Dolores hissed. She was trying to figure the odds on getting Larry and Edna out of the mall without collateral damage occurring. They were not favorable.

“Okay, me red-faced matey,” Larry said, reaching for Santa’s bag. “My part of the bargain is over. I’ll just be taking yer duffle now.” He reached over and grabbed the bag, then leaped off Santa’s lap and made his way through the throng of children, whose pitch raised considerably when they saw the gift bag retreating from view.

“Put the bag down and move away from it, sir!” a voice boomed, and Dolores saw to her horror that the cadre of mall cops had surrounded Larry, and all of them had guns trained on him.

Larry sized up the situation, muttered, “Arrrr,” and then the air shimmered and he had turned into a two-ton bull elephant seal that moved with surprising speed through the line of stunned security guards, down the mall corridor to the escalator, where he rode the escalator to the first floor and then proceeded out of the mall in the direction of the parking lot, with shoppers running in terror from him.

When Dolores and Edna caught up to him, he had turned back into the pirate, and was muttering, “Arrr, it’s a bad business stealing swag in this quarter. Best to trim the mainsail and make for a snug harbor.”

“Forget about the Christmas shopping,” Dolores said. “Let’s just go home before they throw us all in jail.”

“Father would make a Christmas goose with all the trimmings,” Edna said. “And then we’d sit around and sing ribald carols. Do you know any good ribald carols? My uncle Frederick knew quite a few of them. I remember one about Santa and the reindeer that--”

“That’s enough, mom!” Dolores said, pulling out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires.

THE END

Turkey And Organza -- A Larry Thanksgiving

By John McDonnell

“I love Thanksgiving,” Edna said. “It’s important to be grateful for what we have. I mean, what would we do without game shows, talk radio, organza ball gowns and White Elephant sales?”

There was no answer to that, of course, so the rest of the people around Dolores’ dinner table went on with their Thanksgiving dinner.

“Horst says this is a stupid holiday,” Willow said, holding up her fork for emphasis. “He says the Indians were stupid to give the Pilgrims their food, because the Pilgrims were only here to take their land. It was a setup.”

Horst nodded his head while attempting to stuff a whole turkey leg in his mouth.

“I had a rooster as a pet when I was a girl,” Edna said. “Father bought it for me. I called him Herbert. Father let me keep him in my bedroom, although he caused a tremendous racket every morning with his crowing.”

Dolores was going to ask Murphy to comment on Willow’s statement but it was obvious from the way Murphy was gulping his food that he wanted to get the dinner finished so he could go watch a football game on TV.

“Larry,” she said instead, “what do you think of Thanksgiving?” Larry was in the form of a Ming Dynasty Chinese guardian lion, and he smiled toothily and said, “Actually, Thanksgiving as we know it was the invention of a 19th century writer named Sarah Hale, who did a lot of embroidery of the facts to make up the whole Pilgrims and Indians myth. We don’t know much about the first Thanksgiving.”

“Huh,” Horst said, through a mouthful of food. “Myth or no myth, the Indians got the wrong end of that deal. They should have wasted those dudes, instead of giving them corn.”

“Well, we could verify that,” Larry said. The air shimmered and all of a sudden there was a Native American chief sitting next to Larry at the table. He was naked from the waist up, and wearing a bead necklace, feathers in his hair, and white paint on his face.

He blinked, looked around at the table, and said, “I knew I shouldn’t have taken that last round of the pipe. That was a definite mistake.”

“Not to worry,” Larry said. “We’re all friends here. We just wanted your opinion of the American custom known as Thanksgiving. Is it true you started this custom when you offered the starving Pilgrims some corn and other food?”

The chief laughed. “I get it, this is a dream. Okay, I’ll play along. Thanksgiving? You mean that dinner we gave to that pitiable lot of Englishmen who tried to make it through a New England winter without basic skills in woodcraft, animal husbandry, and agriculture?”

“Yes.”

He laughed again. “They were so inept, we felt sorry for them. I still feel sorry for them.”

“Dude, you’re so wrong,” Horst said. “Those losers took your land, slaughtered your families, and herded you all onto reservations. Seems you don’t have much to be thankful for.”

The chief smiled. “Two words -- Black Friday. Oh, and how about shopper rewards cards? Or those stacks of catalogs that come in the mail? The return line at Macy’s? December layoffs? Mince pie?”

“I think he’s made his point,” Larry said.

“But I like mince pie,” Edna said. “My mother made the most delicious mince pie. Do you know the secret is to soak it in brandy and then keep it in a tin for a year? It will make your hair curl when you eat it.”

The whole table looked at her in silence.

“I’d like to wake up now,” the chief said.

“Certainly,” Larry said. The air shimmered and the chief disappeared.

“Well, I for one am thankful for organdy,” Edna said. “Such a lovely texture it has! I’m also thankful for olives, champagne, handsome doctors, and, oh, all of you lovely people, even if I don’t know all your names. I’m glad the Indians gave the Pilgrims corn, because, my goodness, if they hadn’t -- well, I don’t know where we’d be.”

“Amen to that,” Dolores said.


THE END

Larry And The Wombat

By John McDonnell

Things slowly settled into a pattern at the Murphy house. Larry watched a lot of TV with Edna, Murphy spent most of his time at the bar, and Willow explored the higher levels of body piercing and tattooing with her boyfriend Horst.

Dolores was the only one who didn’t seem happy with her life. She felt a restlessness, a discontent. The fizz had gone out of her days.

“You need a craft,” Edna said. “That’s what’s always kept me going. Learn how to make something pointless and tacky, and you’ll feel better.”

“But I don’t like crafts,” Dolores said.

“Neither do I, dear,” Edna said. “But they keep us from listening to the voices in our head.”

Dolores thought maybe she was right. Maybe a busy mind would keep her from thinking about how dissatisfied she was with, oh, the entire last 20 years of her life.

“What type of crafting should I take up?” she asked Larry one night.

“How about a miniature proton beam collider?” Larry said. “You could make one that would fit on a keychain. You never know when you’re going to need to smash a few protons together. I think people would love it.”

There was a prolonged silence while Dolores stared at him.

“What?” Larry said. “You don’t like that one? Okay, then how about a subatomic--”

“No.”

“Okay, let’s see,” Larry said, scratching his head. Which, by the way, was hairy. He had come down for breakfast this morning in the form of a chimpanzee, and he was scratching himself a lot today and pooching out his lips.

“How about stuffed animals?” Larry said, wrinkling up his face and scratching hard. “Everybody loves them. You could make them cute and cuddly, and give them names like ‘Smoochy’ and ‘Cutiepie’ and ‘Huggums’.

“That might work,” Dolores said. She went to work immediately, and in no time the house was filled with a collection of cute, cuddly animals stuffed almost to bursting, and all of them complete with full biographies of their lives, written by Edna. The biographies were very long and went on tangents to discuss 1950s TV trivia and recipes for stuffed olives and mince pie, and although Dolores didn’t know how that would appeal to 8 year old girls, she didn’t have the heart to tell Edna to edit them.

Dolores set up a Web site to sell the animals and it was a big success. Before long Dolores had a staff of illegal alien workers in her basement sewing stuffing into the animals, and the money was pouring in. The most popular stuffed animal was a wombat named Huggsie, and the kids just loved it.

Then one day there was a knock at the door. Dolores opened it to find an official looking man in a black suit, wearing sunglasses, who said, “Is this the headquarters of the Huggsie operation?”

“Who wants to know?” Dolores said, eyeing him suspiciously.

“My name is Edwin Kibosh, and I represent the Walt Frisby company,” the man said. “Your Huggsie the Wombat doll is a copy of our Cuddles the Sloth product, and this is a cease and desist order. You must stop production at once,” he said, handing a sheaf of papers to Dolores, “or we will be forced to burn your house to the ground and destroy your family down to the tenth generation.”

“This is outrageous,” Dolores spluttered.

“Quite true,” Larry said, coming downstairs in a tweed jacket, bifocals, and a pipe, looking very much the professor. “Wombats are completely unlike Sloths. For one thing, wombats are marsupials, crepuscular and nocturnal, found in southeast Australia and Tasmania, while Sloths are arboreal mammals who live in South America. They both have extraordinarily slow metabolisms, however.  Did you know that it takes a wombat 14 days to digest its food? They also have distinctive cubic droppings. Now the sloth’s droppings--”

“That’s enough Larry!” Dolores said.

“Sorry,” Larry said.

“I repeat,” the Walt Frisby lawyer said. “You must stop making the wombats at once, or my company will be forced to --”

There was a shimmering in the air, and he disappeared.

Dolores turned to Larry, who was studying the weave pattern in a nearby set of drapes.

“Larry,” she said. “Would you by any chance know what happened to that man?”

“Me?” Larry said. “Just because I’ve had a passing familiarity with discontinuities in the space-time continuum, that’s no reason--”

“Bring him back, Larry.”

There was another shimmering, and Mr. Kibosh reappeared, his tie askew and his sunglasses sitting at a jaunty angle on his head. His hair was standing straight up, and he had the look of a man who had seen a charging mastodon head on.

“We’ll stop making the wombats, Mr. Kibosh,” Dolores said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Kibosh said, trying to stop the tremor in his voice. “N-not necessary, n-not nohow.”

He left abruptly, and Dolores turned to Larry.

“Larry coughed and tugged at his beard . “What?” he said. “I’ll be in my room solving Waring’s Prime Number Conjecture. I’ll be down for dinner.”

Dolores just smiled. 

THE END
Copyright John McDonnell, 2010. All rights reserved.

Big Hearted Fella

By John McDonnell

 

“It’s not goodbye, Sue, not at all.” He took another forkful of the fish and put it in his mouth. “This is delicious fish, by the way. Never had anything like it.”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “You’re saying goodbye.”

“No, I hate goodbyes. I hate endings.”

“But you cheated on me. I found the pictures on your computer terminal.”

“Now, Honey, I told you, I’m a man who can’t be tied down to one woman. My heart is too big. I see a beautiful woman and my heart turns flips. I’m a lover of beauty, a sentimentalist, a softie. That’s all it is.”

“We had vows.”

“I didn’t mean to break our vows. I had good intentions when I made them. I just, I just can’t help myself. You forgive me, don’t you Honey? Please say you do.”

“How can I forgive you? You cheated on me. Do you want some more fish?”

“Yes, I do. It’s delicious. I know what the problem is. It was hard for you to open up to me, wasn’t it? You don’t open up to many people. I think this will be good for you, it will open you up to new possibilities. We’ll all be friends. It’s a beginning, a new beginning for us, don’t you think?” He was getting very flushed, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.

She watched him closely. “A new beginning?”

“Sure, that’s it. It’s a new chapter in our relationship. I’ll still see you, along with Dakota and Mandy, and maybe one or two other girls, but we’ll have such good times. Don’t you think that’s better, Honey? A beginning instead of an ending? Gee, it’s awfully hot in here. And I’m having trouble breathing. Honey, why are you looking at me like that?”

“It won’t be long now,” she said.

Suddenly he slumped over and fell to the floor. He looked up at her with wild eyes, questioning.

“Can’t move?” she said. “That’s the poison working. The fish you liked so much, it was blowfish. A delicacy in Japan, although it’s also very toxic. You have maybe an hour of consciousness, and you won’t be able to move during that time, but you’ll feel everything I do to you.”

She went over the drawer where she kept her utensils, opened it and pulled out a large carving knife. She ran her finger delicately along its razor sharp edge.

“It will be interesting to see how big your heart really is,” she said.

 THE END

Copyright John McDonnell, 2010. All rights reserved.

No Place Like Home, a #fridayflash story

By John McDonnell

Although Murphy was reluctant to try flagging the alien again and risk getting zapped back to the Cretaceous era, he knew the creature was getting more intoxicated because it was morphing into an array of different body sizes, genders, and species.

"So," he said. "What's your name?"

"Larry," the alien said.

"Larry? That's a funny name. I thought your name would be Zork, or Xargon Four, or something like that.”

The alien had changed from a giant yellow squidlike thing to a dead ringer for Mrs. Walsh, Murphy's first grade teacher, complete with a pencil tucked behind her ear, glasses, and a bun.

"It's not really Larry," Larry said. "There are too many glottal stops in my name for your larynx to handle. Larry is easier for you to say."

"Oh." Murphy mixed up another pink fruity drink and the alien sucked it down.

"By the way,” Murphy asked. “What are you doing here? You here to wipe out humanity from the planet, or maybe turn us all into your mindless slaves?"

Larry was now the size of a Clydesdale horse, chestnut brown, and he laughed ironically at that, showing his teeth and shaking his head. "That's hilarious," he said. "Me taking over your planet. Now I've heard everything. You have a great sense of humor." He stamped his feet, rattling the bottles on the wall behind the bar. "Another drink, please."

"What's so funny about that?" Murphy said. "I thought that's what you aliens did. Take over planets and all." He mixed the drink quickly and set it down on the bar.

Larry slurped it up and then turned into an adult male orangutan, upwards of 300 pounds, with a protruding lower lip and a melancholy expression on his droopy face. "It's not funny. It's sad. I'm a failure. Nobody is interested in conquering this penny ante planet. It's a back channel two bit dump that has no strategic importance, populated by a race of idiot primates who are rapidly turning it into a toxic wasteland. I was sent here to monitor you." He began scratching himself pensively. "There is no career advancement in this posting. I have been marooned here, because they don't think I can handle anything more important."

"I know the feeling," Murphy said. "I once had a job where--"

"It's enough to make you crazy," Larry said. "Can you put a banana in the next drink? But anyway, as I was saying, I'm so ashamed, and then I get angry, really angry.” In the blink of an eye he had turned into a scaly green dragon, with smoke coming out of his nostrils and a tail that was wagging back and forth and knocking tables and chairs over behind him.

"Calm down, Larry," Murphy said, not wanting the creature to start breathing fire in his bar. "Maybe you should think about going home and sleeping it off. What do you say? Sound like a good idea?"

Larry started crying, and big tears were dropping on the bar. He made a sniffling noise and his huge body shook with spasms of grief.

"I don't have a home," Larry said. "Oh, I have a place to stay on this miserable planet, sure. But that's not a home. I'm 12,000 light years from my planet, and I'm stuck here until somebody reassigns me. That will never happen, though, because I've dropped off the map. They've forgotten me."  He put his head on the bar and started sobbing.

"Now, now," Murphy said, patting his head gingerly. "Why don't you come home and stay with me and the missus? I have a spare bedroom, and I'm sure it will be all right with Dolores."

"Really?" Larry said. "That's so nice of you."

"Don't mention it," Murphy said. "It's the least I can do, seeing as how you got rid of that hood Boom Boom for me.”

Now Larry had morphed into a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who looked like a Playboy centerfold. In fact, she was dressed like a centerfold.

"Uh, Larry," Murphy said, imagining the look on Dolores' face when he introduced Larry to her, "could you focus a bit better? I liked the UPS driver look you had before. I think that suits you better."

"Sure," Larry said, and in an instant he was the balding, pot-bellied guy who'd come in the bar several hours ago. Every once in awhile he'd hiccup, though, and for a second or two he'd transform into the orangutan, the centerfold, or some other creature, then immediately morph back into the middle aged man.

This is going to be interesting, Murphy thought, wondering how he was going to explain this to Dolores.

THE END
Copyright John McDonnell, 2010.

Markets For Flash Fiction

Flash fiction is short. It fits today's hurried lifestyle. Short words. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Readers love it.
If you write flash fiction, here are some markets where you can get it published.