Cat Pollock Writes

This is a short story I wrote waaaaay back in the day - September 11, 2002, to be exact. It was a much-needed brightening of spirits at the time, and a story I knew I would end up sharing again at some point when I started the "Short Story Sunday" series, as it has so much to do with fathers in the first place. The site it was originally posted on shut down several years ago, so I'm sharing a heavily revised version of it in its entirety today. After the jump, of course.

I am sitting on the couch in my living room, trying to write a blog. It's kind of hard to do that, though, when one of my brothers and two of my sisters are hanging out in the living room with me. Scratch that, because my brother just left the room. One sister is yawning, and the other is making a bracelet. They're commiserating over shared problems with jewelry making, and it is all. very. distracting. So instead of writing a blog tonight with anything of substance, I'm writing about what is going on in real time. Because the sister that is yawning is now shaking tubes of beads, and the other is commenting about how convenient the tubes of beads are. They've both decided that the tubes are a good thing. And just as I'm starting to get my writing groove on (aka finally catching up to the point in the conversation they're at), the sister that doesn't live here decides it is time for her to go home. I protest, because her departure is interrupting ...

There was a morning six months ago where I walked into the women’s bathroom that my office suite shares with several others to find a sticky note taped over the light switch. It looked a little something like this: At the time, I did the whole "roll my eyes and carry on" because anyone with common sense would know that the actual solution to getting rid of cockroaches would involve a visit from an exterminator. A few weeks later, the note disappeared, and that was the end of it. Or... I thought that was the end of it. Yesterday, after a week of working from home (thanks to Vacation Bible School last week), I went into the same bathroom expecting the status quo of the five months to have remained intact. It wasn't. As I was walking out and back to the office, there was a new note, and that new note looked something like this: " Turn me off... And my vengeance will be cockroaches ." What I wanted to do was write about how funny and ridiculous t...