When Cats Attack (Comic)

                                             

Mom (Short Story)

Mom

As a 47 year old mother, Kathleen wanted nothing more than to relive her high school glory days.  After marrying her high school sweetheart, settling down, having a daughter, and growing older and fatter with her cookie cutter life, Kathleen watched as the best years of her life as a cheerleader dating the quarterback faded before her very eyes.  In the real world, her lifestyle of bullying and cat calling the other kids was not exactly appreciated in her job as a receptionist.  As her looks deteriorated, and her layers of makeup and wrinkle concealer piled on, and her thigh fat went from “fab to flab”, and her sandy blonde hair wilted to grey, Kathleen became merely a poorly done caricature of the queen bee she used to be as a teenybooper.  Settled down in a grey suburban mini-mansion in a wealthy neighborhood filled with mostly retirees, she gave up her hope of reconnecting with her inner youth as she watched the small amounts of joy and excitement in her life die.

When Kathleen’s daughter started to have her own spotlight in high school, with attention from all the guys and fashion compliments from all the gals, Kathleen grew green with envy.  She began to change her image to match her daughter’s.  Although Kathleen’s first nose job just used her daughter’s perfect slim snout as a picture reference, Kathleen soon transformed her entire aging face and body into her daughter’s image.  Four nose jobs, two chin fat suctions, a face lift, a few hair bleachings, three lip injections, and two tummy tucks later, Kathleen looked like a hideous Botox monster to everyone- except her and her drunken beer-bellied husband.

The caterpillar that was the frumpy middle-aged suburban mom broke out of her cocoon into becoming the preppy pretty-in-pink high school girl-or at least she looked like one from a few yards away or in dim lighting.  Kathleen was ready to begin the transition back into the cliques, backstabbing, and gossip of high school.

Walking in the freshly-mowed high school courtyard to her first hour class, Kathleen stood out like a sore thumb in comparison to the practically baby-faced teenagers frolicking and texting their friends on their cellular devices. High-pitched laughs of kids happy to see their long-lost friends after the summer filled the large sunny and grassy entrance to the school.  The high school itself was modern, large, and luxurious-only the best, because Kathleen also sent her daughter there.   The kids displayed newly sprouted dangerous fashion trends and wacky new hair colors, ready to have a brand new start this year.  Needless to say, none of them had as big of a comeback as Kathleen.

Intimidated but determined, Kathleen fastened her bleach blond hair into pigtails with her frilly pink scrunchies.  She was ready to have the best second first day of high school in her life.

At her first hour class, Kathleen, of course, arrived fashionably late for roll call.  The classroom had colorful, almost childish posters telling students to “do what is right, not what is popular” and other worn-out phrases told to high school students.  Posters and pictures from students adorned the bright yellow classroom walls.  At the front of the class of barely pubescent high school freshmen stood a smiling teacher.

“Paulina?” called out Ms. Honey, the thirty-something sweet and mild-mannered English teacher.  She was well meaning and believed that all students were inherently good-her biggest mistake.  “Is Paulina Gomez here?”

“Who the hell keeps calling my name?” retorted a short girl with abnormally large golden hooped earrings sitting in the back of the class, as she took out the dangling headphones from her ears.  She had a big mouth and even bigger, sharper teeth for a bite to match her bark.

“My apologies!” said Ms. Honey, “It will take me a few days to get to know all of my student’s names by heart.”

In walked 47 year old Kathleen with her black miniskirt and pink purse.

“Sorry I’m late,” Kathleen sneered sarcastically, chewing her bubblegum.

“That’s okay!” Ms. Honey exclaimed.  “I know that it can be difficult to find all of your classes on the first day.”

Kathleen laughed at Ms. Honey and strolled to the back of the classroom, right next to Paulina, who was blasting Eminem from her iPod. As time went by, Paulina and Kathleen became B.F.F.s despite the generational gap between them.  They went out to the downtown mall on Friday nights to eat pizza, color coordinated their outfits and accessories for the day, and even fought over the same guys at the high school.  However, the new friends also shared a love of tormenting others.  Like two peas in a strange and somewhat deformed pod, every day Paulina and Kathleen took advantage of Ms. Honey.  They removed the screws from her chair, locked her out of her own classroom, and even stuck gum inside of her hat, leaving a prominent bald spot on the top of her scalp.  Unfortunately, their rampage did not stop there.

After they had had their fun harassing the teacher, Kathleen and Paulina moved on to the general student body-or at least the portion that couldn’t defend itself.  They tripped the kids in crutches.  They mocked people who spoke with a stutter.  They gossiped about how “loose” the other girls were that seemed interested in “their guys”.  The Kathleen and Paulina duo dominated the high school social hierarchy like Kathleen used to in the old days.

One day, Paulina and Kathleen were eating their processed chicken tacos in the busy high school cafeteria.  The lunchroom was too bright, too crowded, and too loud. Like a can of sardines, the kids were packed, but it was better to swim with the herd rather than be isolated. Still, the two queen bees isolated themselves from the cafeteria with a small group of faithful and thoughtless minions amidst the jungle of lunchroom chaos. 

“Do you see that blonde a few tables across?”  Paulina asked Kathleen scowling, pointing to a relatively friendly girl talking with her group of friends a few tables away.  Kathleen nodded yes, although she wasn’t sure if she had met the girl herself.  “That tramp was flirting with the linebacker I had my eyes on today.  What should I do to get her to back off of my territory?”

“Allow me!” Kathleen grinned.  Public humiliation was one of Kathleen’s specialties.  Ever since she took up bullying as a hobby when she was back in high school for the first time, she had loved pantsing her latest victims or bringing their darkest secrets to light in front of a live audience. 

Kathleen grabbed her bright red plastic lunch tray from the table, and marched to the blonde, who was turned around, laughing with her friends.  Kathleen dumped the brown chunky mixture of a taco salad, spaghetti, and cheese soaked in chocolate milk on top of the unsuspecting girl’s long blonde hair.  Milk and unidentifiable chunks of solid food dripped down from her head onto her face and down her spine.  The girl turned around, showing her smeared mascara and tomato red embarrassed face.

“That will teach you, hussy!” laughed Kathleen, finally feeling the same powerful wrath that she had held back when she was a teenager in high school.  The girl started to cry loudly as all of the eyes of the lunchroom were staring at them.  Kathleen looked into the eyes of the girl, which actually looked a bit like Kathleen’s herself.

The girl wiped a few spaghetti noodles from her face multi-colored with cafeteria goo, looked Kathleen in the eyes, and sobbed, “Mom?”

Crazy Lady Bagged Up (Short Story)

Crazy Lady Bagged Up and Thrown into Kidnapper’s Rusty Basement like Trash

All I could hear in that cold empty room was my own hysterical laughing.  I’ve been trapped here for … so long that I can’t even remember.  Ever since the driver asked me if I needed a ride, and then bagged me up and threw me into rusty basement like trash, I have been cut off from society.

Other than the granola bars and juice boxes that are stuffed under the metal door, all I have is my own imagination.  You might call me crazy talking to myself, and laughing at my own jokes, but I prefer to think of myself like the guy from Castaway, except instead of trapped on a deserted island, I am locked inside of my kidnapper’s basement.

I can see the man in the van that kidnapped me even now.  He was old and the remainder of his grey hair was balding away – his head was quite shiny.  I would not have taken his ride, but I was running late for my best friend Wanda’s 21rst birthday party and we were all going barhopping.  As I got into the strange man’s car, I started primping myself with the reflection off of his bald head because there were no mirrors in his car.  Soon, I realized that the entire interior of his van was stripped of metal so that I could not open the door.  I began to panic.

I grabbed for my pepper spray and pointed it in between his eyes.  Unfortunately, it was pointed back at me and I maced myself in the face.  My eyes felt like they were going to burn off of my face.  I was completely blinded.  I screamed, but the creepy old man just chuckled sinisteringly.  I may have been blinded, but in my head I could still see that nasty bald head laughing at me.

I reached for my phone and called speed dial 1, my bestie.  Unfortunately, the elderly man caught on and duck taped my mouth shut.  I screamed, “Help me, Wanda! I just got kidnapped by an old guy in a van!”, but it just came out as a murmur.  I could only faintly hear her yell “Are you drunk already!?” before she hung up on me.

By the time he finally locked me up in his basement, I had almost recovered from painfully blinding myself accidently in both eyes enough to be able to see again.  Now, I have been down here so long I am not sure how many weeks or even months it has been.  He is probably planning to fatten me up and bake me into a pie!  For all I know, the last time my friends and family will see me is on the nine o’ clock news.  I can already picture the headlines: “Naive Hitchhiker is baked into Human Meat Pie by City’s Cannibal.”

As I was crouched next to the thick steel door separated me from freedom, I heard faint footsteps that were so light I would not have heard them, except for the fact that I have been locked in a basement with only my dead silence for the past weeks.  The sound of a crinkling granola bar wrapper came closer and closer to my door.  With the sight of the slightest tip of his pointer finger, I grabbed and just kept on pulling.  I pried every one of his little piggies out from under that door until he screamed begging me to stop – but I knew who still had the key.

Ankle Biters (Short Story)

Ankle Biters

Children are the most disgusting and obnoxious creatures on the planet.  The six dollars I make an hour babysitting is not worth the number of times I have been bitten, licked, kicked, scratched, and slapped by these “people” half my size.  Being a babysitter is the most stressful and underappreciated job (and it really is a full time production) that I have had in my entire life. 

However, one day, everything changed.  It started out just as painfully as any other babysitting gig.  I looked at the two children I was going to babysit for the day.  The big one had a dumb look on its face, with its mouth open, looking like it was about to speak at any moment.  I’ll call that one “Mouth Breather”.  It earned the nickname from the horrible slurping wheezes it made while breathing.  The smaller child was looking down, nervously, obviously never separated from its parents for long.  

“Can it speak?” I asked.  Neither child attempted to say a word.  I knew that this was going to be a long day…

Finally, after arriving in the park, I could finally take a break to not smell the roses.  The grass was a yellowish puke green from lack of maintenance, and the sidewalk was the perfect dirty shade of brown that screamed, “Tetanus shot needed!” I rummaged through my backpack, filled with diapers, hard candy, baby powder, and a few cans of gourmet chicken and turkey select cat food in case the kids got hungry.  I took out my two child leashes and harnessed the two kicking and screaming brats to a tree vandalized with a few obscene graffiti images.  Out of everything in my babysitting arsenal, the child leash is my favorite because it constrains them to a limited area, yet gives them enough room to exercise and run around, just like they would in the wild. 

Taking care of these kids was already starting to stress me out. 

“Okay kiddos, today we are going to use the buddy system.  You watch you, and you watch you.” I’m not quite sure if they could understand me, or even if they were old enough they to form sentences yet.

With my afternoon chores busy, I had plenty of leisure time to spend in my favorite café across the street, sipping my mocha.  I really deserved that break.   

By the time I got back, three hours later, to the two kids, they were lying in the grass under the shade of the tree, panting.  I hollered “Hey!” at them, but they didn’t respond, even when I came running.  I grabbed the little one by the collar and picked it up. 

It growled.

“What are you doing to my Chihuahua!?” yelped the lady resting on the park bench a few meters away.  I looked down at what I thought were the two children I was supposed to be babysitting, to see two miniature dogs, both head to toe in designer clothes.

Out of my entire babysitting career, I had never lost two kids.  Well, actually I had, but never both at once.  If the parents’ two children were kidnapped due to my negligence, they might fire me- or at least cut my hourly rate.  Sometimes it takes the parents years to produce another child.  I could not afford to take that kind of loss in my clientele. 

I looked at the ground below to see faint stubby little footprints starting from under the tree that the kids were at only a few short hours ago.  I followed the trail throughout the park until I reached the park’s playground, infested with youth.  I should have known the kids would be here- children prefer to travel in packs for protection.  The sound of little people trampling about and screaming into each other’s faces literally made me gag on my otherwise delicious dark chocolate mocha.

I spotted the runaways at the top of the playhouse.  Using a spare leash, I lassoed the two kids by the waists and pulled them down the cheap plastic yellow slide that led down from the playhouse.  Dragging them through the park like the dogs that I thought they were only minutes ago, I heard Mouth Breather’s wheezing turn into a sort of out-of-breath sobbing.

It cried to me, “Where are you taking us?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I sneered back.  I wasn’t just furious with the kids- I was disappointed.  If two pre-adolescent children couldn’t even babysit themselves for a few hours, then how could anyone expect me to?  Do parents expect me to watch their kids 24/7?  Maybe if I would have known that they were going to try to escape, I could have brought the electric dog collar that I used to potty train my nephew.

When I first became a babysitter, I just wanted to not have a real job, not get married, and never have kids- the American dream.  Cut to me wasting the worst years of my life teaching toddlers how to not pee all over themselves!