Worth 50,000: A series of short stories based on images
an excerpt

“David, you’ll be late again!” cried the desperate voice from the speaker on his phone handset, which lay abandoned on the table next to him. “Please hurry up and get ready!”
“I will, I will,” he insisted. “Just a few more pieces!”
The person on the other end of the speaker sighed. “You said that twenty minutes ago when I first called you. I have a job too, you know. I can’t just spend every morning taking care of you as if I’m your mom!”
“I know, Trianna,” said David, really just spouting what he knew she wanted to hear. “I promise, I’ll get to work on time. I really want to keep this job, I do. For our sake!”
“I hope so, David. I need to get ready myself, so I’m going to hang up now. But please get up and get ready. Your boss won’t put up with this again.”
David sighed, knowing she was right. He tore himself away from the jigsaw puzzle that covered most of the floor in one room of his four-room apartment (four including the bathroom) and went to get ready to go.
He worked for a nondescript company, doing a nondescript office job which essentially involved sitting in front of a computer all day typing things, and forwarding phone calls to people more important than he. Anyone who knew him would say immediately that he was easily intelligent enough to quickly get promoted through the ranks and soon have a manager’s position, at least. They would also say that he would never do this. He just didn’t care enough.
You might reply to this that he should find a job he was truly interested in, one that would inspire him.
If you would really say that, get your head out of the clouds. This is the real world.

.......

Freddy JoeBob whistled merrily as he walked towards school. In his lunchbox, he carried a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich, two cookies, and a baggie of carrot sticks. In his head, he carried some dust bunnies. They were very friendly bunnies. He had named most of them. There were Fluffy, Buffy, Wuffy, Tuffy, Muffy, Duffy, Huffy, Stuffy, and several more besides. He carried on conversations with them occasionally. All in all, his life was decent.
However, this morning, lost in his mumblings, he took a slightly different route towards school. This route carried him through the baaaad part of town, as his mother liked to refer to it. Being so preoccupied and otherwise distracted, he failed to notice the menacing music that got louder and louder as he went towards a certain hedge. Suddenly, an even more menacing figure jumped out from behind said hedge.
“OOOGABOOGA winkyLay!” it shouted triumphantly, wiggling its fingers at Freddy.
“Oh, no!” he cried. Suddenly, he couldn’t see anything. “Wait, come back! What’s happened to me?” he cried. He reached his hands up towards his eyes, and felt something odd there…then he realized the horrifying truth.
“MY EYES!” he screamed. “They’ve been replaced with MUFFINS!”
How could he have let this happen? He went over everything he had done recently, but couldn’t immediately find anything that could have led to this awful turn of events. Then he thought back to the menacing music…maybe he should have steered clear of that area. Ah well. Muffins for eyes could be potentially useful. He wondered if they would grow back if he ate them. Then he’d always have food with him. Of course, there was the minor downside of not being able to see anything…well, too late to do anything about that. He reached up and ripped a chunk out of his left muffin and tasted it cautiously. Banana nut! His favorite! Scrumptious.

.......

Lina had always been fascinated by the little things. She could get lost in watching raindrops land in a puddle, or in the interlocking threads of her shirt. For her, they were what gave life meaning. But she never knew that one little thing could become so big…

When the pancake flew off the spatula and into the air, time slowed to a crawl. Lina stared at it, mesmerized at its graceful flight and how it gradually flipped over to land perfectly on the griddle again. Even from across the kitchen, she could see the little edges where the batter puckered out to form crusty ridges – her favorite part of the pancake.

.......

“Grampa’s coming! Grampa’s coming!” the kids shrieked as they ran around the house with glee. At least it made someone happy.
My father was so naïve. I lived practically, holding down a job to feed my kids, living the stereotypical single-mother life. He always went on and on about how I should really get in contact with Frank again and see if we could ‘sort out our differences’ somehow. He had always liked Frank – they were two of a kind, really. Frank had always had his head in the clouds, too. I suppose that’s how artists are. They’re really not the best people to marry if you want to support a family. Our fights always crushed him, too. A day never passed when we argued and I didn’t feel guilty afterwards as he retreated to his art room to paint morose abstracts to let out his feelings. But their marriage never could have worked out, she told herself for the million and first time – he never made much money on his art, and her job couldn’t feed both of them and the kids and still hold on to their modest apartment. They were blessed with a kind landlord, but even she couldn’t keep them on when they didn’t pay for months on end. He kept insisting that he had new ideas, that he would really hit it big with this new project, but he never did; could never accept that it just wouldn’t work.
“Mom? Hellooo-oo. You okay?” asked my oldest son Kevin, while waving his hand in front of her eyes. Nothing like a twelve-year-old to bring you out of a recurring reverie.
“Yeah Kev, I’m fine,” I replied. “Just thinking.”
“About Dad again?” he asked. Nothing like brutal honesty, either.
“Yes, about Dad again.”
“You don’t like Grampa that much, do you?”
Way too perceptive. “I don’t not like him, we just disagree on a lot of things,” I explained.
“Hmm. But he’s your dad,” Kevin said, unable to comprehend this concept.
“I know,” I replied, not sure how to explain it.
“Mommy?” asked Marietta, who had sat down to attempt a crossword. “What’s a four-letter word that means excrement?”
I jumped. “What crossword book are you using, honey?” I asked, trying not to sound alarmed. Great stuff for a nine-year-old.
“I found it in Daddy’s pile,” she said.
I sighed. “Could you use your book, please?”
“Okay.” Phew. I collected the book and discreetly threw it in the trash. Abnormally smart kids got into everything.

.....

Chris was awoken by a small four-year-old body jumping on him.
“Wake up, Chris! Wake up!” his little sister Sarah shrieked. How could she be so lively at 6:30? “Wake up! Evvy’s trying to make toast again, and Ben spilled the milk all over the floor!”
Evelyn, or Evvy, was seven, and Ben was ten.
Chris jumped out of bed and started to stomp his way downstairs. “Sarah, could you please wake David up, too? Don’t leave him alone until you see him get out of bed.”
“Yayy!” she cried. She loved waking people up.
Chris hurried down to the kitchen, where the toaster was starting to emit curls of smoke. He ran over to turn it off, but slipped in the puddle of milk on the way, nearly falling over but instead sliding across the linoleum floor and running into the counter on which the toaster sat. Evelyn, whom he hadn’t noticed because she was so tiny, giggled. “Evvy, we asked you not to make toast without help…”
“I was hungry,” she said matter-of-factly. “And you weren’t up yet.”
Chris mentally kicked himself yet again for not being a morning person. “Another cereal morning!” he announced. “What does everyone want?”
“Rice Krispies!” yelled Sarah from upstairs, from whence Chris could also hear thumps, and wondered what she was doing to get David up.
“Me, too,” said Ben, who had miraculously appeared as soon as Chris mopped up his spill.
“Me, three,” said Evvy, who did everything Ben did.
“Well, that makes things easy,” said Chris. “Three bowls of Rice Krispies, and I’ll have Cheerios,” then he shouted, “David, if you’re not down here in three minutes, you’re eating the oatmeal!”
A chorus of “Eeww!”s replied to this threat. Every morning, the kids’ mother and father both left for work incredibly early. Their mother always made a huge amount of oatmeal, insisting it was good for them. Their morning ritual was to dump it down the kitchen sink and eat what they wanted instead, which usually turned out to be cereal since there was never time to do anything else. One would think she would notice that five kids’ worth of cereal disappeared every morning along with her oatmeal, but she never had. All five of them really felt more like their own family, even though they lived with both parents – they didn’t see either of them very often, and weren’t terribly close. If anyone was a parent figure to them, it was probably Chris.
David, who was thirteen, appeared two minutes and forty seven seconds later, according to Ben’s stopwatch, Sarah proudly heralding his arrival. “’K, Dave, what do you want?”
“Honeycomb,” David replied, panting slightly from his hurry.
Chris poured him some, and took stock of everything while they were eating. Sarah had dressed herself, but her shoes were on the wrong feet. Ben couldn’t find his backpack (it was probably behind the couch in the den, where he always left it). David hadn’t done some of his homework, but insisted he could finish it on the bus. Evelyn had slept in her glasses again and popped out a lens, which Chris managed to get back in for her when she brought them downstairs, looking sheepish.
When all five of them were finally more or less set and on the bus...

........

I’ve never told anybody this, because it would sound really weird, but I can’t wait to get old – I just want to have all those great stories to tell. So many older people I know have all these amazing stories, like how when my grandpa was a kid, there was a huge storm and when he opened the front door, snow fell in and his mom made him shovel it out and then shovel a path through to the road. Or my English teacher told us a story once about an amazing prank he pulled with his friends in college. My uncle said when he was in the army, his friend went fishing by throwing a hand grenade in a pond. He swears if you go back there, you can still find the spot where it blew up. He also swears it was the best fish he ever had.
Except all the greatest stories happened when people were young – or when they were older and their kids did weird stuff. Maybe life was just more exciting ‘back in the old days.’ Nothing cool ever happens to me. Everything’s too safe; too sanitized – it makes things boring. Probably the coolest, most interesting thing that’s happened to me (if you can call it happening) is this: We live in a really old house, so it’s kinda quirky. The door into our attic is ancient, and if you turn the doorknob lightly enough, just right, then it squeaks and sounds like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ And it’s not just my imagination, either. Everyone who hears it agrees.
But still, how boring is that? A singing doorknob? Not nearly as cool as fishing with hand grenades, fantastic booby traps, or saving your canoe from sinking with a roll of duct tape.
Even my friends are cooler and have better stories than I do. Every summer, my friend Lisa goes off to Nantucket for two months, and she has this crazy family there with like, two hundred cousins. She always comes back with stories about her wild adventures or crazy games with her cousins, and her superfun aunts and uncles. I’ve met some of them. They’re way more fun than my waspy old family. They’re not wasps at all, we’re Muslim, but you’d swear they were, even with the dark skin. I’ve never met more boring people. My mom’s a secretary and my dad’s a stockbroker. Seriously.
So really, I don’t know if I’ll have good stories even when I do get old. Or maybe things will be even more boring then, so singing doorknobs and friends with exciting lives will rile people up. Or I could just recycle other people’s stories. Who knows?
But I’d rather cool stuff happened to me. Something where I’m scared out of my mind or really flipping furious at the time, but then I laugh about it later with all my cool grandchildren. They’ll be really cool for the time, but I’ll think they’re boring, and I’ll think by then that I had an exciting life. And I’ll tell them thrilling stories about how once, I went through the whole lunch line, and then they were out of sandwiches! And they’ll gasp appreciatively and mutter to themselves that I’m exaggerating. But I’ll know I’m not. And somehow, I’ll think that all that’s incredibly thrilling. Because, you know, when you’re old, a new brand of raisins in your oatmeal is thrilling.