August 15 - Outlaw Zombie Killers

Sara Robertson and her sister Rebecca were on their way to Cutter's Gulch to begin work as school teachers when their stagecoach was attacked by a mass of flesh eating zombies.

In the ensuing fight, the stagecoach driver, the horses, and all the passengers besides Sara and Rebecca were killed, and they managed to escape from the zombies with only the clothes on their backs.

After three days of wandering through the wilderness, they happened upon the campsite of John Stanford and Edward Hicks, two Civil War veterans. By then the sisters were delirious with hunger, dehydration, and sleep deprivation, and in between ravenous bites of food and gulps of water, they told John and Edward about how a band of crazed murderers had attacked their stagecoach and eaten the flesh of the other passengers. John and Edward had heard--and then immediately dismissed--similar stories before, but they couldn't deny that something had scared the hell out the two women. They took turns sleeping while the other one kept watch.

The next morning, the sisters begged John and Edward to escort them the rest of the way to Cutter's Gulch. The murderers who had attacked their stagecoach were still on the loose, and someone had to warn the town.

At the mention of Cutter's Gulch, the men bristled. Up until two weeks ago, they had been part of a cavalry unit charged with keeping watch on the mining town; however, they'd been run out of town when their commanding officer found out about their "homosexual tendencies" and nobody else in their unit or the town had spoken up for them, despite the fact that they'd been among the best officers in their unit. The prospect of helping those people didn't hold much appeal to John and Edward.

And as far Sara and Rebecca's teaching jobs were concerned, John and Edward said, it was common knowledge that the town regularly lured young women there with the promise of such work only to force them to work at one of the town's brothels once they arrived. The few children who actually lived in Cutter's Gulch were homeless orphans who worked in the mines, and there were no schools there at all.

The four of them then weighed the pros and cons of venturing into Cutter's Gulch to warn the people that had exiled them to the wilderness because of their sexuality (in the case of John and Edward) or conspired to conscript them into sexual slavery (in the case of Sara and Rebecca).

After much deliberation, however, they decided the town had to be warned. Even though the adults may not have merited their help, the children did.

The next morning at dawn, they armed themselves with all the weapons they had and headed back to Cutter's Gulch.

They were too late.

They arrived to chaos; the town was teeming with zombies. The sheriff's office, Cutter's Gulch Bank & Trust, and Sherman's Hotel had all been burnt to the ground. Only smoldering timbers and ashes remained.

The windows on all the other businesses--Tinkerton's Livery, First Church of the Holy Redeemer, Millstone's Dry Goods, and Blackwell's Saloon--were all broken and/or boarded over. Same with the doors. Severed limbs and bloody bodies were scattered throughout the streets, and everywhere they looked zombies lumbered about.

The zombies were slow and uncoordinated. The foursome figured as long as they kept their eyes open and didn't get caught off guard, they would be fine. They worked their way down the main street, dispensing zombies as they went, quickly learning that the more damage was done to the head, the faster they went down. They were versatile and efficient. When a pick axe got stuck in a zombie's head, they switched to a sledgehammer. When the sledgehammer's handle broke after repeated blows, new weapons were easy to come by. The dry goods store had axes, hacksaws, and hammers. The livery had all manner of steel rods, hammers, and tongs. And guns? They were everywhere.

It was a long and exhausting day, but at the end of it, the four of them had put every zombie in Cutter's Gulch out of commission without suffering any injuries. They found no other survivors. Everyone in town had either been killed or turned into a zombie.

Rather than burying the bodies, they burned them en mass. The fire burned so high and bright that it attracted all the other zombies in the region of which there were thousands.

However, the fire also attracted all the other exiles in the area, all those who had been banished from the Cutter's Gulches throughout the Western states. Among the first to join them: a band of railroad workers from China who'd been kicked out of their camp by a zealously religious railroad baron when they refused to renounce Buddhism; a collection of Westernized Cherokees who'd been run out of town after advocating for fairer government treatment of their tribe; and a group of former slaves who had revolted against their owners and been on the run ever since.

Despite their cultural and linguistic differences, these and several other downtrodden societal outcasts banded together and dedicated the rest of their lives to wandering the Wild West and ridding the United States and her western territories of the zombie scourge. In doing so, they saved the country from certain destruction by the walking dead, a fact that gets nary a mention in U.S. history books.

August 14 - Common Ground

Man on the Street #1: It's a bad situation we're in these days. Gridlock in Washington. Mistrust all around, and the two parties can't find so much as a square inch of common ground. All they ever do is blame each other for everything that's wrong in the world, and this culture of finger pointing runs rampant throughout the entire voting population. If you ask me, this scapegoating is all the Republicans' fault.

Man on the Street #2: Whatever happened to politics? It used to be that the two parties would work together at least some of the time, but it seems that those days are gone. Now all we get are a bunch of loudmouths in Washington blaming the other party for everything that's broken in our country--and it's like that everywhere else you go in this country, too. We're not the United States anymore, we're the Divided States. And I blame the liberals.

August 13 - Friday, the 13th

Rachel Simpson never considered herself a superstitious person, but all that changed on Friday, August 13.
It was a normal Friday until she saw a black cat crossing the street. She had plenty of time before she needed to be at work, so she followed the cat into the alley it skittered down, thinking it would be fun to tell her co-workers, especially Cathy, who was superstitious, that she'd done so. This was also the reason why she followed the cat under a ladder and--perhaps a bit impulsively--broke a mirror she saw leaning against a dumpster along with some other household items that someone had thrown out.
It was immediately afterwards that she saw the guy standing near the dumpster, and she jumped a bit.
"Sorry I scared you," he said. "I always seem to do that. Anyway, I just got your call. Got here as fast as I could." He was blocking her exit.
"Um, I didn't call anyone, and I don't even know you." She backed away from him and furtively checked to see if there was another way out of the alley.
"We might have overlooked the black cat and the ladder," he said, ignoring her, "but there's no way we can ignore something as brazen as deliberately breaking a mirror--especially on a Friday the 13th."
"Sorry, but what on earth are you talking about?"
"Oliver Van Horn," he said offering her his card. She hesitantly took it and read: Universal Cosmological Enterprises, Accounting Division.
"We're the 'maintain the order and balance in the universe' people," he said, using his fingers as quotation marks. "And you've got a serious luck debt you need to balance, Ms. Simpson."
"How do you know my name? Who are you?"
"It's basic cosmological accounting, Ms. Simpson. Find a four leaf clover, rub a rabbit's foot, so on so forth, you get good luck credit and good things happen to you. Have a black cat cross your path, walk under a ladder, break a mirror--again, all on a Friday the 13th--and you incur bad luck debt and bad things happen to you. With me so far?"
He took her silence as a yes.
"Usually we let these things play themselves out in a sort of behind the scenes capacity, but in special cases such as yours, we have to step in and intervene. You see, it's barely 10 in the morning, and you've already racked up well in excess of seven years of bad luck. This can't go on. Now, I'm here for two reasons. One, to tell you to knock it off already. And two, to put you on a cosmological debt repayment plan."
"Wait. What?"
"There are two ways we can do this. One way is you can sign this affidavit agreeing to stop deliberately bringing bad luck upon yourself and accept the consequences of the bad luck that is due you. In your case, we'll call it seven years even."
She let him continue.
"Or you can agree to a luck deferral program in which you pass your luck on to someone else of your choosing. It may surprise you to hear that most people go with option one."
"Wait. First of all, I can't believe I'm even having this conversation, but OK. Secondly, I can just pass my bad luck to someone else?"
"That's right."
"But then what happens to me?"
"You go about your life and try to be a good person."
"And someone else has my bad luck? That hardly seems fair."
"Fair is a pretty relative and subjective term, Rachel. Besides, depending on who gets your bad luck--if you decide to go this route--this person may or may not have already racked up a tremendous amount of good luck. In which case, their good luck and your bad luck cancel each other out and you both go about your lives."
"Yeah, but who would have that much good luck?"
"Probably someone who was really superstitious."
Cathy from work.
The name came to Rachel immediately, and as soon as it did, she had pretty much made up her mind. As superstitious as Cathy was, she had to have banked an enormous amount of good luck credit. Surely it would be enough to offset her debt. And even if it wasn't, Cathy was such an optimistic person, she probably wouldn't even recognize anything bad that happened to her as the results of bad luck. She would just shrug it off and keep going.
Rachel made her decision and signed the necessary papers, including the one which stated that all her bad luck would return to her 13-fold if she ever told anyone about her meeting with Oliver Van Horn. Then she went to work unable to conceal her sly grin, feeling like she'd gotten away with something. But what she didn't realize--what she couldn't have known--was that Oliver's colleagues in the Karma Division of Universal Cosmological Enterprises had witnessed the whole thing. And they never let anybody bargain their way out of anything.

(Co-written with Misako Goto)

August 12 - Dr. Procacelli and Sam

Dr. Suzanne (Susie) Procacelli never would have thought she would meet the love of her life in the rain forests of Borneo, but she did.
His name was Sam, and he was one of several orangutan that were being studied by Dr. Procacelli and the two other zoologists that had accompanied her to Borneo more than two years ago.
They were focusing on interspecies communication; more specifically, gestures and other body language between humans and orangutan. Dr. Procacelli and her team found that the orangutan would mimic the zoologists, moving their heads and using hand gestures to accompany their grunts and hollers. Sam in particular showed an astounding capacity for mimicry. During communication sessions with Dr. Procacelli and her team, Sam would sometimes become distracted by the calculator he always had in his hands. Very often he would tap keys on it at random, a behavior that Dr. Procacelli theorized was meant to mimic the scientists' use of cell phones.
Over the course of their two years together, Dr. Procacelli succeeded in teaching Sam and the other orangutans the meanings of basic gestures, such as thumbs up, thumbs down, OK, etc. This rudimentary education provided a sometimes unwelcome window into the orangutans' true feelings about her cooking which she regularly shared with them. Clearly, the orangutans did not have a notion of white lies.
But knowing that Sam and the others didn't care for her cooking gave Dr. Procacelli a more specific communicative goal for their language project. Through gestures and simple sign language, she would learn what kind of cooking Sam and the others did enjoy and cater to it as much as possible.
This project led to her spending a lot more time working one on one with Sam, who by then had emerged far and away as the star of their class. As they became more comfortable with each other, Sam began joining Dr. Procacelli in the kitchen, and together they developed a cooking style that drew equally from the traditions of Dr. Procacelli's ancestral Tosca and the typical orangutan diet. They called their unique Eurasian fusion "orangtosca cooking"--and it put smiles on the faces of zoologists and orangutans alike.
The more time they spent in the kitchen together, the more Sam and Dr. Procacelli developed their ability to cook, communicate, and--to the giddy shock of both of them--flirt. They always seemed to know what the other was going to say before he/she said it. They often finished each other's sentences. And no matter how many times they teased each other about their mutual lack of rhythm (they usually listened--and danced--to Toots and the Maytalls while they were cooking), they always ended up laughing about it and then looking into each other's eyes for a second or two before breaking off and getting back to work. It was exhilarating to both of them.
Yes, Dr. Procacelli would admit to herself in her journal after several glasses of pinot, Sam is an orangutan. But he's also the kindest, gentlest, brightest and handsomest (in his own unconventional way) male I've been around for ages. And this is not just the wine speaking. And it's not just the fact that I've been in the jungle for more than two years. I like Sam. I mean I like him like him. And I think he likes me, too.
He did.
She was kind, intelligent, and funny, and he was happy when he was with her.
But Dr. Procacelli had mixed feelings about the whole thing for so many reasons. For one thing, there was the ethical can of worms of a scientist developing personal feelings for one of her subjects. For another, there was the fact that they were from different species. As much as she hated to admit it, she knew any relationship they had would be doomed. The world wasn't ready for it.
And so Dr. Procacelli took the lead as she often did. She decided that Sam needed a mate, a female from his own species, and she worked with the other zoologists in her team to select the most suitable prospect.
Sam showed up the next day to find that his cooking partner had been replaced with a rambunctious female orangutan named Roberta. Dr. Procacelli and her colleagues watched the live video feed in the lab.
Sam tried to engage her with gestures, but Roberta ignored him. Instead, she picked through the raw ingredients that had been set out for them, ate her favorites, and discarded the rest.
They tried again the next night and every night for a week, but the results were the same. After a week, Sam stopped trying to communicate with Roberta. After another few nights, he stopped eating.
Dr. Procacelli and the others tried different females with him, but nothing took. None of them had the linguistic capacity that Sam had. Nor had any of them had anywhere near the amount of one on one tutelage that Sam had had during his sessions in the kitchen with Dr. Procacelli.
When it became clear that an intractable divide existed between Sam and the other orangutans, Dr. Procacelli decided to reestablish contact with Sam. She showed up in their kitchen with an armload of ingredients, but Sam didn't respond to her gestures. After several minutes of silence, she put on their favorite Toots and the Maytalls CD and danced around as arrhythmically as she could, but he just looked the other way. Finally, she made their favorite orangtosca dish and set it out for him before leaving him in the kitchen on his own. But when she went back later on to wash the dishes, he hadn't taken a bite.
She tried apologizing to him, explaining why she'd done what she'd done, but Sam was distant and unresponsive. The next morning when Dr. Procacelli and her colleagues went to collect the orangutans for the day's research, Sam was gone. All they found in his sleeping area was a smashed copy of Toots and the Maytalls Greatest Hits. They never saw him again.
As for Dr. Procacelli, she continued her work with the orangutans in Borneo, and she made a lot of progress with interspecies communication. But she never connected with any of them like she did with Sam.

(Co-written with Misako Goto)

August 11 - This Could Work

Instead of Pimp My Ride, why not Pimp My Bride? Contestants could give their special lady a sluttified upgrade for their Big Day and mack easy knowing that even though all the fly guys in the house would totally want to hit that, at the end of the reception she'd rolling with the groom for some of that extra special prima nocta boom boom.
And Flavor Flav would host--the show, not the prima nocta boom boom. Or actually, hold on. Why not both?
Seriously, why not both?

August 10 - First Train

All night, every night for more than six months, like a lottery addict afraid to skip a day because he's sure that'll be the day she wakes up and he won't be there.
The green glow of life sustaining machines, sleep on a bunk fashioned out vinyl cushioned chairs, vending machine coffee on his way out in the morning.
Every night.
The one night he did miss was the longest of his life. Emergency at the office. Just couldn't get away. And when he talked to her doctors the next morning and they assured him that no, she hadn't woken up, what he felt was a sense of relief.
One more reason to hate himself.
The wait for the first train was always the most peaceful part of the day. He was invisible. He'd done all he could do.
Now it was time to go to work.
But first, home. Shower, coffee, change of clothes.
Then work.
Some of the other people on the platform were still up, some were up already. It was easy to tell the difference, but they all had a cell phone in hand.
She was there again that morning.
Ride the same train at the same time every day and you start to recognize people.
She all but collapsed on the seat next to him on the bench.
She took off her heels, and fell asleep almost immediately, hunched over like she'd been shot. Lycra mini skirt. Knees locked together, but legs splayed apart. The candy red toenail polish she was wearing was chipped.
A few other people shuffled in, checked their cell phones.
A recorded announcement said the train was arriving.
A gust of wind blew stray newspapers around and the train whooshed in.
He was about to wake her up, but she woke up on her own.
She got on the train and found a seat. He got on behind her and handed her the shoes she'd left at the bench and she nodded thank you. The doors closed and the train left the station.

August 9 - FAQs

Is that what you're wearing tonight?
Um, apparently not.

Do these pants make me look fat?
Yeah, but I likes me a big ass. Get over here. Rrrr!

Do you think that girl over there is pretty?
God, yeah! Why, do you? Do you think she'd be into a three-way? Because I could ask. Oh, come on. You know I'm kidding.
But seriously, do you?

Do you want to see what else is on?
Not really, no. But I'm going to feel self conscious if I insist on watching WWE Monday Night RAW, so go ahead and change it, I guess.

Which outfit do you think looks better, this one or this one?
Oh, Jesus. I don't know. I haven't been able to figure out your tell on this one yet. Um, the first one . . . right?

Were you planning on keeping this in here forever, or can I throw it away?
What is that, last spring's General Tso's chicken? Yeah, I guess that can probably go, but let me have a moment alone with it first.

What is "West Coast Productions"? It's on our Visa statement.
I don't know. Let me see that . . . Oh, yeah. You know what that is? It's, uh, something I was doing for work. Nothing interesting. Don't worry about.

Who was she?
Oh, her? We work together . . . and we kind of went out for a while. A few times. We went out, um, twice I think it was.

When were you planning on telling me about her?
I'm telling you now.

Right, I can see that. But when were you planning on telling me about her?
I never mentioned her before? Wow, that's weird. Don't worry about her. We're like so over.

Do you think she's prettier than me?
Don't be silly.

Don't be silly why? Because of course she is or of course she isn't?
Silly, because of course she isn't. Come on, you're being jealous and paranoid.

Am I?
Yes, you are. But you're cute when you're jealous. Meow!

Is that a joke? Are you trying to be funny?
I haven't decided yet.