Narrative Humor
A place to read humorous stories
I don’t expect to find the hotel clerk dead sitting on a chair and stuffed halfway into a closet. Family vacations bring many surprises and many adventures. Let’s do a head count: One tired dad who’s been on the road for eight solid hours, one wife who is pleading for relief from our three kids and their constant farting, one mother-in-law that can not stop correcting my grammar every single second of those eight hours, and one dead hotel clerk named Kevin.
Kevin’s chin rests on his chest, spittle glistens in fluorescent light, and his right arm hangs limply to his side. The chair sits halfway out of a closet in a staff-restricted hallway. The smell here reminds me of a Tom Petty concert I went to in college. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe Kevin is just tired. I take two fast steps and shake him by the shoulder. I get nothing. His name tag jingles. This was not on the itinerary for the first stop of our family vacation. But you know what, I got you, Kevin. I’m a man of subpar grammar and action.
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“Seems far,” Acorn said, staring across the solid, Black River.
“And loud,” said Cashew. Acorn squeezed the soft dirt between his paws. The Black River was at least a hundred tails across. No squirrel worth his fur feared crossing it. But not all made it back. “Yu kan dot,” Cashew said. “What?” Acorn lifted his ears toward his friend. “Sorry. Eating nuts.” “Where did you get nuts?” “I had some in my cheeks. I eat when I’m nervous.” Crumbs fell from Cashew’s mouth. If you take the train to Matlock in Derbyshire, and can find a cabbie at the station who knows the way, you can drive the few miles out to Over Ferndale. There you may view Grindlow’s folly. If the weather is unusually fair, you can see it from a distance and save yourself the fruitless errand of hiking up the dale to look at it any closer.
Further, if you doubt the strength of your will and good judgement to overrule your curiosity about such things, I can tell you all about it now, and you may save yourself a hike, a cab fare, and even the return ticket to Matlock, unless you have some other reason to go there. “We’re here!” Matt cheered as the car screeched over the surface of the obvious curb he’d missed in his revelry.
“Where, Daddy?” chirped Chloe from the backseat. “The --” Matt squinted towards the roof of the hotel to verify where they’d ended up. “Oh, let’s say the Overlook Hotel.” “Let’s not,” said Audrey. “Haha, then a HoJo,” laughed Matt. “Everybody out of the car.” “You want to, I don’t know, park the car first?” Audrey asked. So the University rejected “Does God have a sense of humour?” as a thesis topic. Someone had even scribbled, “Have you read the holy writings?”
I had. I did, again. All of them. Many made me feel as if I’d landed in an outer circle of hell. Then it hit me. Hell? That was it! The ‘The Divine Comedy’ would give me answers! I bought up copies/translations of Dante’s classic work. Next, I hired people to distribute them to the world’s most famous places of worship – all of them. The gods would be watching. Omniscient beings are often accused of being literal-minded, joyless sticklers for discipline. Here was their big chance to disprove the nay-sayers. They’d approve of my distribution of ‘The Divine Comedy’ to church doorsteps, right? Yesterday was hot and I wanted ice cream. Like most German cities, mine has its fair share of ice cream parlors. There is the new trendy place that refuses to use ice cream scoops and thinks cilantro belongs in a waffle cone, and there are the Italian places that, for the low price of all of your money, will serve you elaborate arrangements of ice cream and fruit that taste like heaven despite looking like funeral arrangements.
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