Notes on Stories I May Never Write

1. A hitman flies to a particular city to whack some evil corporate menace, only when he arrives, the rental car place doesn't have the black Towncar he specifically requested. Instead he ends up with a tan Ford Taurus, which puts a damper on his hitman style and really ruins his whole trip.

2. An alien discovers that his family crashed into earth more than one million years ago, somewhere in northeast Africa. Since time means nothing to aliens, it was conceivably his grandfather who took part in the crash and it has been a cover-up ever since. During the time it took them to repair their ship, the aliens were approached by a bunch of Australopithecus cave dwellers. The monkey men stared at the long thin aliens with awesome reverence. Then the aliens fixed their ship and left. However, this particular alien finds out that his family's little crash created a sense of other, higher, godlier beings for these monkeys, and it evolved the monkeys closer and closer each day to the noble, intelligent, alien form. And now these monkeys are humans and they are killing each other each day over various versions of this brief encounter with his alien people, which they are all calling "God," and he has to go down and fix the mess.

3. A pharmacist goes to work everyday supplying medicine to a bizarre assortment of wounded characters. The manic depressive, the depressive, the manic, the chronic pain patient, the junky with the false prescription, the old lady, and the massively fat diabetic. When she gets home, the pharmacist drinks two or three glasses of wine. The pharmacy assistant smokes weed in his car during lunch breaks. There is a culminating event in which all of these characters is in the drugstore at the same time and the manic flips out and takes everyone hostage. During this period they all come to the realization that everyone uses some medicine to help them make it through the night. The manic surrenders and everyone is a bit wiser about his or her own relative addictions and place in the world.

posted by ZHorton at 7:11 PM