AcmeShorts

“When I look back at the slow shady days of childhood, and hear the laughter that echoed off the school walls in the playground, feel the grass against my cheek as I lounged in the sunny field that used to stretch behind Grandpa’s cabin, I cannot help but smell my bitter Age, whose putrid stench overpowers all the sweet memories of Youth long gone. Some might say I wanted it this way, but even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Time robs Youth, but just because my particular youth was unguarded, wide open, doesn’t mean I deserved it. Is the theft of an unlocked house any less of a crime? It doesn’t matter now, of course, because the house has been stripped clean. But what is that stench, that awful stench of Time gone by? I have a theory: when Time was robbing my Youth, it was drunk and reckless. It brought its friends, Death and Disease. After they had taken my toys and the gentle touch of my mother (God rest her soul), long after they had boosted my innocence and jacked my hope, they loitered in the night and crazed by their own power, egged each other on to vandalize my Youth further. The rampage lasted for hours (and, to be sure, continues in its slow pace even to this day). But that one night, with Disease and Death there to embolden him, Time crouched and dropped his pants. He grunted with an effort that even sickened Disease and Death, who thought he had really gone too far, as he squeezed out a long black coil of shit on my coffee table.”