This Transient Visitors Tiny Tale, “The Last Ride” pairs well with a bag of red chewy candy that sticks to the back of your molars. By the time you get the residue out with your tongue you’ll be more than finished with the story, at which point, perhaps you can contemplate how odd it is that “Dental services are not included as part of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) essential health benefits. Therefore those services are not mandated to be included in ACA-compliant plans.”
Maybe that’s why teeth fall out. It isn’t from candy. It is from how embarrassed teeth feel towards the rest of their fellow ESSENTIAL body parts.
Besides pairing with the above, I think this tiny tale ranks high on the adult bedtime story list. Let it put you to sleep (not sure what that says for my writing ability). Read the beginning below:
When Lonny heard the whistle, he put his belly on the ground and turned his head to the mountains. From there, he had the best spot to watch the train descend into the valley.
The conductor was first to pass. He drove the locomotive like a dog sat in a car—with a big smile on his face and his head out the window. Lonny returned the conductor’s joy like always, with an enthusiastic waive and an even bigger smile back. When the passengers in the cabin cars came next, he gave the same salutation; as he did with the businessmen in the dining car reading the Chicago Tribune who followed; and to the three engineers working on the exterior of the caboose.
Lonny loved the engineers. Armed with modest hand tools, he delighted in how they spent their days watching the world roll away in reverse, fixing whatever problem the moving train encountered next. To Lonny, engineers were machine doctors, borderline superheroes. One day he hoped to join their noble calling… READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE
-Dave
Disclosure: This story is part of the Transient Visitors very short stories series written and published by David O’Boyle. Thus, it is pure fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidence.
The goal of the Transient Visitor series is to create 365 very short stories (some are not as short as I would like, but I do what I can. Once the equivalent of the days in a month are completed, an installment of the series is published as a book number in the series. Therefore, January has 31 stories; February has 28 stories, March has 31 stories…you get the point. At the time of this writing, most of the 365 stories are drafted, but only book 1 is published. It is my life’s work. If I do not finish it before leaving this world, I will be sure to arrange a better writer to finish it off. My intention is to befriend one of those great writers out there that is too whatever to sit down and show their talent, and guilt them in to doing it on my behalf. Sort of like what Qui-Gon Jinn did to Obi-Wan Kenobi in regard to training Anakin to become a jedi.
Then again, I am no jedi. More importantly, I hopefully have more than a few decades left until you are granted that reprieve as one of my readers to get someone else to finish this off. Until then, feel free to order the book, digital if possible to save the trees. If you don’t want to pay for the book, I eventually publish the stories on my website here. So feel free to wait. Another thing you could do is shoot me an amusing brief email to dobsuniverse@davidoboyles.com. More than likely I have a copy of one of these bad boys laying around gathering dust that I can send over. I don’t have a big enough to get rid of all of them. For some additional background on the Transient Visitors Series, feel free to read the back-book summary of book 1. That sums up the gist of it. Enjoy!
A quick fix of fiction. Something to read at breakfast when you finish the back of the cereal box. Novels never fit that mold. Neither do magazine-length short stories. That’s why I wrote Transient Visitors: Month 1 of 12, a Collection of 31 Very Tiny Tales.
In addition to complimenting your soggy second layer of Cheerios, this book will send you into space, underground, and through the tapestry of time in between. Along the way, anticipate encounters. Fellows will emerge that seem strange… they probably are. Other fellows will emerge that seem fine…they probably aren’t. My advice is this:
Avoid aliens and intergalactic criminals, especially the moody ones. Before boarding a train, confirm its destination. Dine with sasquatches, but don’t be their dinner. And finally, watch your spouse, your in-laws and your employees.
Everyone…and everything, is up to something.