Under The Wagon

Note: The Management has been advised to include a disclaimer about the risks of drinking any alcoholic beverages (much less these ones). We’re supposed to inform you that alcohol may cause liver disease, impair your ability to operate motor vehicles, and lead to birth defects. But frankly, we don’t care about your health, you’re already a bad driver, and we’re pretty sure your children would be ugly. In all honesty, we loathe you. So please enjoy:

Cocktails for the New Millennium: The Next Millennium, not this one.
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Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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“I appreciate that I’m not the type of girl you would think to bring flowers to. And I understand that roses are boring, and tulips pedantic.”

“But CARNATIONS???”

(Entry in the Three Sentence Story Contest)

Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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Oh wow! Lookit…Over by the dumpster.

What? The box? Yeah, somebody must have gotten a new refrigerator.

Let’s build a fort.

Excuse me?

Let’s get the box and build a fort. You could totally fit in that thing.

I’m not building a cardboard fort. I’m 27 years old.

C’mon. It’ll be fun. And whimsical. You like whimsy.

I think I can safely say that I have already fulfilled my whimsical obligations for the summer. I went to the zoo no less than five times, fed ducks at the pond, AND I built sandcastles at the beach last month.

You only did that because you were hoping some bohemian artist type would see you grubbing around in the dirt wearing a bikini, and fall in love with the “glow of child-like wonder” in your eyes.

Shut up!

Please. It wasn’t even that great of a sandcastle.

It had a moat.

You didn’t even do anything when those little kids stomped on it while their mother cheered them on.

What was I supposed to do? Yell at a 5 year old? Yeah, that’d be just great…The scary tattooed lady makes a pair of toddlers cry and slaps their mother for not teaching them to stay the fuck off other people’s sand property. Whatever.

So you gonna grab that box, or what? I figure we start by cutting a few circular holes down one side…Upright, it’s a spaceship. On its side, a submarine!

I’m not getting the box.

And we could run down to Walgreen’s and buy some markers, make it look really sharp…

Listen, that box has been sitting in a pool of alley water and garbage juice for god-knows-how-long, it’s dirty, it’s damp, it’s…

Or, or, check this out: We cut out the top so it looks like the turret of a castle, spend the day defending ourselves from the Gauls. Huh?

Listen. I CAN’T do this. I can’t anymore. This cutesy-little-girl shit is killing me. I don’t want to look at the world as something new and magical everyday. I don’t want to be the breezy free spirit living on a different planet. I’ve got a lot of shit going on and all the fucking cardboard forts in the world aren’t going to change that. I’m tired of being “delightfully eccentric.” I want to be like everybody else. This is just…I can’t anymore. It’s just too hard.

Okay?

Okay?

It was a good box.

Yeah, it was. I know. I’m sorry.

So I didn’t get the box.

I wish I had.

Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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*That one girl at the rock show who was totally rocking out, fist in the air, singing along amid a sea of nonplussed concert goers waiting for the opening band to end.

*”The lady at the container store totally blew my mind.”

*Calendars and buffet until 2am!

*Macaroni salad

*The Algonquin Kid’s Table (Okay, this one is just too good to resist…)

The cartoonist carefully traced it out…Lil’ Dottie Parker with a martini glass of milk tossed off a bon mot about naptime, Jimmy Thurber colored with crayons and Bobby Benchly was tweaking the braids of a wee Edna Ferber. As the cartoonist leaned back to examine his handiwork, he smiled confidently. If “The Algonquin Kid’s Table” didn’t get him into The New Yorker, nothing would.

I would like this cartoon.

Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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“…She thinks she might like the boy in the middle. She took a motorbike ride with him once (wherein she squealed appreciatively in a charming manner). She’s had a couple of decent “We’ve got friends in common, we probably have other things in common” conversations with him. She’s battered her eyes at him. She has pretty eyes, she’s heard…”

“Wait a minute…Battered her eyes?”

The author was slightly drunk.

“That can’t be right. It’s not “battered,” for Christ’s sake.”
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Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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She thinks she might like the boy in the middle. She took a motorbike ride with him once (wherein she squealed appreciatively in a charming manner). She’s had a couple of decent “We’ve got friends in common, we probably have other things in common” conversations with him. She’s batted her eyes at him. She has pretty eyes, she’s heard.

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Tags: Filthy Lies & Fiction by Karla
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