COUSIN JULIE'S NOSE
a short story 

©2013 William H. Payne

You guys remember cousin Julie, right? She's awesome cute, and she has all her teeth.

So she called the other night, really late, and said she needed help, and to come over quick. Well I ain't about to ignore a distress call from either family or cute girls, and Julie is both, so I got in my pick up and went over.

"What's the matter?" I asked, and she pointed to her nose. I walked over closer to get a better look, and sure enough, her nose was swollen and red. "What does that look like?" she asked, and pointed to the reddest nostril of the two.

"Well," I said, "it's either the biggest booger I've ever seen in my life, or it's a space alien took up residence in your nose." She looked scared.

"What should I do?" she asked.

"I think we ought to call cousin Cletus," I said. "He'll know what to do if anybody will." I got my cell out of my pocket and sent Cletus a text.

Cletus was over in a couple of minutes, probably for the same reasons I was.

Now, some of you may not know about Cletus. See, those of us in the Tater family (the Arkansas Taters, not the snotty Texas Taters) don't always do too well in school, for whatever reason. Most of us drop out in the third or fourth grade to, you know, support our wives and kids and such, but Cletus - Cletus, he dropped out of medical school, so you know we're proud of that boy. He rushed into the room, and took a look at Julie's nose. He turned his head this way and that, and turned her head this way and that, and considered, and thought, and then he said, "I'd say it's either the biggest booger I've ever seen in my life, or it's a space alien took up residence in your nose." I felt good to have my diagnosis confirmed by an expert.

"Bubba," he said to me, "I want you to go out to your tool box and get me some needle nose pliers." I went right out and opened the passenger side where I keep my tool box, and then I saw the bottle of Old Nuclear™ I had stashed behind it. It occurred to me that Julie might need a sedative, so I got it, too, and hurried back inside.

Cletus agreed that it was a good idea for Julie to pull a couple of good draws out of that bottle before we commenced, and so she did. They were good draws, too. Drained about a third of the bottle. Julie Tater can put that stuff away, see.

We gave her a minute or two for her eyes to glaze over, and Cletus went to work on her. We both figured it was probably a giant booger, but just in case, he poised the needle nose for a quick grab, since either way, it would need to come out in a smooth operation.

He took a deep breath to steady himself, and Wham! He grabbed that thing firmly, and started pulling, and out it came! And here is the part you're going to argue with me about. It started screaming and snapping its little teeth! I swear to you, it was struggling, and it was all Cletus could do to hold on tight to the pliers. "Get me something to put this thing in, Bubba!" he shouted, and all I could find was the partially consumed bottle of Old Nuclear™ with the screw cap off. I held it out to him, and he crammed it into the bottle, and I screwed that cap on as tight as I could. That little rascal thrashed and hurled itself into the walls of the bottle, and then settled down to doing a nice little backstroke, and then its little eyes crossed, and it smiled - it smiled, I tell you!

Cletus and I looked at each other, and we looked at the bottle, and we looked at Julie, and we looked at each other again.

"Bubba?" he said.

"Yessir?"

"I guess you know, we have to report this to the proper authorities."

"Yessir, we surely do."

So we went into the kitchen to try to look up the phone number of the National Enquirer editorial offices, and we didn't have much luck. So I figured maybe we should call 911 instead, and we went back into the living room where we left Julie.

And our hearts nearly stopped, because Julie was awake, and she was holding the bottle, and it was empty, completely empty.

And that's why I wrote you this letter, Ray. That bottle of Old Nuclear™ was gonna be your birthday present, and I'm sorry, I really am.

How to make your world a better place

How to make your world a better place

1) When you unload your groceries from the cart, walk a few extra steps and put the cart in its place. This could prevent a ding for somebody's car, and make at least one parking spot more accessible. To really improve the world, put somebody else's cart away, too.

2) If you find yourself sitting next to a mom with a crying baby on an airplane, offer to hold the baby while mom takes a nap. She is almost certainly tired. Be careful not to come on like a creep.

3) When in a public place, and you encounter a gang of hoodlums making noise and attracting attention, identify the loudest and most aggressive person in the gang, and also the quietest, most introspective of the gang. Quietly and discreetly kill the loudest one, and then offer the quiet one $20 to dispose of the body. Statistics show that many young people get into gangs because of economic stress, and this will help encourage some young person to escape his fate.

4) Wash your hands after you pee. Use the paper towel to open the door, so you avoid getting germs on your hands when you pull it open.

Movie Moment

A wonderful thing happened last night.

First, you need to know that we leave the living room lamp on a timer - it comes on at 5:00, and goes off at 10:00, whether we're home or away. (note to burglars: the weapons room is down in the basement).

We were watching Jurassic Park for the 2,447th time last night. We've come to the scene where John Hammond passionately orders Mr. Arnold to "shut down the system," because none of these people can figure out how to find the on/off switch on the CPU, or even how to trace the power strip to the wall to unplug it, or even how to find an external subroutine called "white rabbit" with a simple line command that would search for a text string, or possibly even just display the list of filenames. (I'm assuming Nedry coded out the escape key). Anyway...

So Mr. Arnold flips the switches, one by one as we see terminals stop displaying, and we hear CPU's whirring down (which means the problem is already solved, but that's another story). We pause, and the camera pans in for a close up as he prepares to flip the very last switch, the one that tragically sets the raptors free.

And at the EXACT SAME MOMENT THAT HE FLIPS THAT SWITCH and the lights in the control room go out, our living room lamp goes out. 

It. Was. Awesome. #CoincidencesFor500Alex