Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Sports car or pick-up truck?

Dale Droot, 58, regional grit consultant

Allegedly parked at 22 Gravel Onion Road, Muncie, IN

Pick-up truck. A sports car says you have unresolved feelings about your hairline. A pick-up says you might help someone move, then mention it for twelve years.

Tessa Clune, 46, fragrance accountability officer

Allegedly reversing carefully at 7 Lilac Spur, Reno, NV

Sports car. I respect a vehicle that announces bad judgment before the driver even opens his mouth. A pick-up truck always looks like it is late to supervise gravel.

Marlene Bix, 69, retired driveway theorist

Allegedly idling at 301 Bent Hydrangea Lane, Utica, NY

Pick-up truck for life, sports car for lunch. One moves mulch, furniture, and shame. The other moves a divorced orthodontist toward a leather jacket he cannot justify.

Flash

Talking in the Present Tense

1 year philmaggitti 50-Word Stories, Dark Humor, flash fiction, Surrealism, Twist Ending

A concussion leaves Guido unable to speak in the past tense. One day a sinister-looking man in a pizzeria hears him say, “I get the stromboli when I’m here last week.”

The man, a local mobster, thinks Guido is in witness protection. When Guido leaves the store, the man follows.

***Faster than a speeding gummy, able to leap small buildings at a single bound Flash Fiction is a guaranteed page turner.

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The preceding is satire. Straight up, Skippy. No warranties are expressed or implied. For life advice, try a professional. For investment tips, try a dart board. For salvation, the gentleman in the robe has been handling that portfolio for 2,000 years.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly disguised as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval.

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

Read It All

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

You remember the thing you said—
not the words,
but the angle of them,
how they leaned slightly wrong
and stayed there.

A life is not ruined in grand gestures.
It goes soft at the edges first.
Corners round off. Standards blur.
You start calling things “fine”
that would have once kept you awake.

Which is the problem.

Because now you do sleep.

Beautifully. Efficiently.
Like someone who has made a series of
very small, very reasonable surrenders
and arranged them into a pillow.

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