Odyssey?

2001 was supposed to be the year we went on a space odyssey, but the biggest event of the year was 9/11.

Missing Notes

"Even though I haven't moved up the corporate ladder, I now and again merit these awards for excellence in various categories. One or two have had a high degree of prestige.
"I was nominated for one four months ago, and it came down to this: My last supervisor, a woman I had had a disastrous affair with, had to sign her approval to the nomination, as it was proposed by my current manager (a woman with whom I've always gotten along very well), and it upset my old supervisor to have to sign the form as she had written some bitter notes which she made part of my personnel folder. She checked the folder to see if the notes were still there and discovered they weren't.
"She let it be known the notes were missing and though they had only her word that they had ever been there, the bank started an investigation.
"They discovered that one day for about twenty minutes I had had access to my folder and they were ready to accuse me of tampering with bank records. I was put under pressure until one day last month when my old supervisor, my ex-girlfriend, had a nervous breakdown in the office and it became clear she had been ready to crack for some time.
"They found denigrating notes, scores of them in her desk, in which she had written false accusations of a plot concocted by me and my new manager, of whom she was insanely jealous.
"So they gave me this cruise for two to make up for it. I'm here with my new girlfriend, who's a writer. We intend to write my story and see if we can make some money from it.
"I know it is only a matter of time until they squeeze me out of the job. They don't like these kind of things occurring during working hours. I think they were surprised I didn't ask my manager to come with me."

Guatemala

Orange You Relieved?

There are no words in English to rhyme with month,
Unleth of courth you only uthe it wunth.
Another word for which there are no rhymes is orange, true
As it may be, I think I'm not, but aren't you
Relieved there is no exact match for silver,
Making it all much harder for a thief to pilfer?
And no dog's bark will suggest a rhyme for purple,
Nor a cat's meow, but a little birdie's chirp will.

Nothing Gets Done

As kids we seemed to have been able to do this, that or anything almost as quickly as the thoughts came into our heads. Now as we've grown older the same things seem to take longer to bring to completion. It is as if time has slowed down while our reckoning of it has sped up. Days fly by and nothing gets done.
Last night as I sat at my desk, I stared at my typewriter and smoked a cigarette, waiting for inspiration to strike. The clock on top of the bookcase struck first. Ten o'clock. The last note of the Westminster chimes resounded for a full minute. I had been sitting there daydreaming for nearly three hours. The sheet of yellow legal-sized paper peeked around the roller with seventeen words typed on it, twelve of which I had already decided to scrap.
I sipped cold coffee and wished for someone to ring the doorbell so I would have a valid reason for leaving my desk. All my friends must be out of town this month. Nobody has been apologetically interrupting me in the midst of a brainstorm in weeks. And there I sat without a usable idea in my head.

Stuck on 17

The sound of the creaky doors sliding open woke Miranda, but the view through them was enough to convince her she was still asleep and dreaming. She could see a barren hallway with a decor, if one could call it that, which appeared older than the lobby.
Apparently, the car was still stuck on 17, but at least they could get out. She tapped Richard's shoulder, and he woke with a start.
"Time for work already?" he asked.
She pointed to the open hallway.
"Damn," he said, rubbing his eyes. "I thought I had dreamt this."

Who Really Killed Lincoln?

Thumbing through a book about Lincoln, Leon is strangely attracted to a daguerreotype of John Wilkes Booth. There is a magnetism in the eyes. Leon is floating through some strange time warp. He spirals within a cyclone and spins through the years and lands in Brooklyn in the Roaring Twenties. He's Callie, super-blond, super-flapper. Callie lands in 1864 and goes mad because she doesn't understand what has happened. She gets involved in a conspiracy to kill President Lincoln. Slowly Callie (Boots)/Booth realizes what's happening but isn't up enough on her history. The end is inevitable. John Wilkes Booth lands in 1968, and accustoms himself to part of today's world. He is prepared for this because when his fate had been decided he had the picture of himself made and prayed to be absorbed by the spirit of whoever saw the picture after a hundred years, with such a desperation that when Leon, the first to see it in the prescribed time (he was cleaning out his grandmother's attic), magic occurred.

Booth is an 1860's southerner in 1968 Brooklyn. One day while crossing the street, he is killed by a speeding motorist.

Leon cannot be a super flapper. He isn't that friendly with people. The spiralling, that awful dizzying spin, had told him something supernatural had happened. He plans to make a fortune and sell stocks just before the Market crashes and buy property, etc. just after. A jumble. He dies from a heart attack.

Or, all this happens when Booth is in a barn and is looking at a photo of himself. The switch occurs after he sets fire to the barn and Herold shoots him, but the marshals know there is something strange about the dead man's face.

Callie dies, causing a timewarp discrepancy. The two live spirits, Booth and Leon, are in telepsychic battle with each other and only one can win. Leon, who is vain, kept a diary of how either the person who left his body, or Booth, will die through traps...No good, huh?

All right. Forget it. I'm going to bed.

Confessional

The odor of incense was overwhelming and I felt close to passing out. I wanted just to leave the church and go out to play with my heathen friends, but Sister St. William had always stressed the fundamental importance of making a good confession, and at the age of twelve, I lived in fear and fright of offending any of the good nuns who taught us at St John's.
I felt some trepidation also toward the parish priests, but because they were men and seemed to have a bit more freedom in their daily activities, I thought perhaps they could be more understanding of my small wayward proclivities. After all, hadn't Father Beaumont smoked a cigarette while giving us religious instructions? And each of the priests drove his own car, though none were as nice as Monsignor Seles' Cadillac.
In my lightheadedness, I had not noticed anyone leaving the confessional closest to me, but the door was now open and I thought, at last, I could fulfill my duty and be done with it, though truly, the hardest part would be surviving the fast before communion the next morning.
I walked over and slipped quietly into the confessional. The cool darkness was soothing and as I knelt, waiting for Father Glory to slide the little panel back I tried to remember all my current sins.
I had had impure thoughts about Cindy Ingdall, the lay teacher who assisted Sister St. William, but I didn't have to tell Father Glory who the impure thoughts were actually about. While playing stick-ball during the week, I had struck out, as usual, and I had sworn like some of the truck drivers who ate at Rosie Musto's store. Wednesday night, before going to sleep, I had played with myself...
...and then the odor assaulted my nostrils. It was not the incense. The previous confessor must have passed gas just before leaving the confessional box. It was such an unexpected thing to me, I hadn't realized it when I first knelt on the prie-dieu.

The little panel was sliding back.

Two Weeks in a Tiny Room

Alec, approaching thirty, overweight and out of shape, decides to make himself over, but becomes obsessive about it. He lost his job, his wife, his friends.
You cannot gain happiness unless the makeover is complete, and when you reach that stage, it starts to reverse itself.
Changing a picture frame can reduce the value. The picture is the same, but in this case the frame was everything.

The Road Not Taken [by Robert Frost]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Fuzzy Logic

She was innocent and naive appearing before they were married and during their first year, but after a baby boy was born, she seemed more calculating. As he had only enough love to give one person, his love went more in the boy's direction. Still, another child, a girl, was born. Now, the little girl was her focus. The children, spoiled, grew up to respect neither parent. The daughter produced a legitimate child, the son produced a bastard, and the cycle began again.

It was like God speaking, and you had to hear the beginning and the end, or you couldn't understand the middle.
Fuzzy logic can be useful.

Alphabet Story

A, B, C, D, E, F & G are parts of a group.
A & B are lovers, but B has turned his attention to C.
B comes on to C, but C spurns him.
B has himself "killed".
D is killed.
An investigation is set up by A.
C acts suspiciously, but can't be proved guilty because she knows nothing.
E is killed.
F & G begin to strongly suspect C, but can't prove her guilty.
A confronts C, but C admits she is now afraid they will all be killed.
B confronts C and admits how he faked his death to be able to have a "new life" with C, if she'll have him, but says he can't do anything now out of fear because he did not kill D or E and doesn't want to be blamed for it.
For the reader, at this point, the two suspects are F and G.
G learns B is alive and threatens to go to the police and have D & E's murders pinned on him.
In a final appeal to B to give himself up, while B and G are together, A is killed.
B now suspects F, while G suspects both C and F.
C is now scared of all three B, F & G and decides to come forward with what happened between her and B, but F confronts her and says he can't let her do that because he wants all the murders pinned on B. F tries to kill C, but B arrives in time to save her.
G arrives to see B saving C's life and together they get F arrested.
What was F's motive?

Song After Song

They were played in no particular order and with no particular significance, but they did remind him of moments when he had heard each of them before. In a coffee shop, on the way to work or in the elevator, or at the dentist's. They were those kinds of songs, adaptable and hummable.
It made him pause to reflect if any of the songs were very recent. Those were the ones he had not thought ready for this group yet, but then Bobby Darin would come on singing, Somewhere, beyond the sea...
And then he was somewhere, beyond the sea, maybe Ipanema, or maybe just somewhere in his own past when Astrud Gilberto told him of a boy who walked on that beach.
Strange, how all these songs evoked wistful memories with nary a happy moment among them. Happy times were always somewhere else, and not just around the corner, but perhaps as far away as beyond the sea.
He thought of one night in particular, when, as a preteenager, he had been left alone and he had frightened himself with his imagination. He pulled out a notebook that night and tried to exorcise his fear by writing about it in a fictional framework. He wrote his first story then, though it was not the first one published. In fact, it was never published, but he always kept that notebook somewhere within reach. It contained a few short works, a quick reading of which would easily humble him whenever he lost his grounding. He felt the notebook expressed some of his sense of futility.