An astronaut woke up in a ditch alongside Hwy 63. His white spacesuit was scuffed and burned, torn at the knee, and the oxygen cord that connected him to his spaceship had been cut free. Broken shards of his escape pod were still falling from the sky, landing in four lanes of traffic. Hwy 63 was almost deserted. The astronaut glanced at his space-age wristwatch. It was 4AM.
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All of the residents of Stagsgradilsgrad, Russia, were gathered in an abandoned nuclear bunker underneath the city for the last round of the International Sudden Death Chess Tournament. A team of Russian horsemen waited on either side of the chess board, with sabers drawn, ready to behead the loser as soon as his king was taken. Defending the white pieces: Pyotr Stankovich, the mathematical genius, a shriveled man with a white moustache and two crippled legs. Defending the black: Jim Krooskos, the master of disguise, who was currently dressed as a simple Peruvian farmer. If the Russians discovered his real identity, Jim wouldn’t even receive the honor of getting his head chopped off. Instead, they would drag him to the mouth of the nuclear generators and kill him slowly with toxic radiation. So before that happened, Jim would have to find a way to win the match.
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American towns in the Old West were in constant danger of going up in flames. Since they didn’t have a standing fire department, the townsfolk relied on volunteers to line up with buckets of water and douse the fires. But many of the early settlers were opposed to the idea of a fire bucket brigade. They didn’t want to stand in line with everybody else. So they formed a secret alliance to undermine the fire bucket brigades. The alliance was known as the Ice Bucket Brigadiers. (They made the mistake of believing that the fire bucket brigades actually carried fire in their buckets, so they decided to carry the opposite.) But their dream of distributing ice to all the hideouts and bandit holes of the Old West didn’t go exactly as planned.
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Michael told me never to repeat this story, so you have to promise you won’t tell anyone. Back in the early 1990s, Michael was a huge fan of The Arsenio Hall Show. He was an audience guest for at least forty-seven different episodes. He ran away from home and camped out in front of a film studio lot in Los Angeles, with nothing but a sleeping bag and a jar of Skippy peanut butter, so he could be closer to Arsenio. This is really embarrassing, so you have to promise not to tell anyone: Michael even tried to get a haircut like Arsenio’s, which they called a Hi-top fade. It ended up looking like a toothbrush that someone had used to scrub the bathroom sink. But then, after Michael ran into Eddie Murphy taking a leak behind the studio lot, his life changed forever.
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Ernest Shackleton, the famous Antarctic explorer, who survived for twenty-four months on an iceberg and still managed to bring his crew home alive, finally made it home to his wife. His wife gave him a kiss on the beard. "Sit down in the parlor,” she said, "and I’ll cook you some carrot and raisin soup.” Ernest went to the parlor and scratched behind the ears of an old basset hound named Molly, one of his many hunting dogs. On the walls he saw paintings of kittens and gardens and fruit baskets. Molly was drooling all over his favorite wool trousers. "I don’t even like carrot soup,” said Ernest. "This is retarded. I’m going back to Antarctica.”
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"And what did you bring for show and tell today, Colin?”
Colin stood up at his desk. "It’s going to be so awesome!”
"Why don’t you come up here and share it with the class?”
Colin shuffled up to the blackboard in a pair of worn sneakers with the laces undone. He wore a green Incredible Hulk sweatshirt to disguise the fact that he sometimes wiped his nose on his sleeve. Swinging from his right hand was a white plastic bag. It looked wet and smelled faintly of vegetables and vinegar.
"God damn,” said Colin. "This is so awesome.”
"Watch your language!”
"Sorry, Miss Applebaum.”
"Why don’t you tell us something about the…interesting parcel you’ve brought.”
Colin faced his classmates. "Hang on.” He reached inside the plastic bag. "Almost got it.” There was a sticky, sickening noise. "I want this to be so awesome that all you little kids have heart attacks and die!”
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After he lost his late shift at the grocery store, and he stopped paying rent on his little bungalow by the lighthouse, Caleb sort of disappeared for a while. At the end of August, when he showed up again, he wasn't the same old Caleb. Some people said he wasn't Caleb at all.
Emma Richards used to sit next to Caleb Richefort in the general assembly at high school. She still remembered the way he would secretly fold bits of paper into swans, cups, frogs, and tiny hats—but never a paper airplane. If he flew a paper airplane during the general assembly, Caleb might have gotten the people around him in trouble. And Caleb was too considerate to make trouble for anyone else. That's why Emma didn't believe it was actually Caleb who came back in August. She said it must be a stranger, a random guy who ran down the slick, quiet streets of Half Moon Bay in the middle of the night, at full speed, being followed by a pack of mangy dogs. Ten or twelve bloodhounds and retrievers and scruffy mutts chased him all over town. They ran in a pack, whooping and barking outside everyone's windows, tipping over trash cans, snapping their teeth, on an endless search for food and garbage and mischief. People had trouble sleeping at night, with so many dogs charging down the streets like a landslide.
The boy Emma knew in high school would never be responsible for anything so reckless and destructive. But she had seen the man outside her own window, and he wore Caleb's favorite coat—red and black plaid, with holes in the sleeves and most of the collar shredded. For the first time in years, everyone was talking about Caleb again. So Emma devised an experiment to see who was really behind all the chaos.
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We are the BRITISH LOYALISTS and we don't give a DAMN what you think! You can sit on your fat American arses, eating COOKIES instead of BISCUITS, stinking up the BATHROOM instead of the LOO, and obeying a PRESIDENT instead of a KING for all we care. It makes no difference. All you right-hand-side-of-the-road drivers and PISS OFF!
Oh, wait a minute. We didn't mean it like that. Come back. You really must accept our sincerest apologies. Please have a seat. We'll buy you a pint of lager. It's not easy being the British Loyalists. We get a bit touchy sometimes. With all this fuss about re-instating a monarchy in the United States of America, we sometimes feel like lords and nobles ourselves—even though we're technically Americans (born in Santee, California in 1978, if you must know). And of course there is only one of us sitting here in the pub today, but we prefer to use the royal "we." I know it must be dreadful to try and understand all of this. But sit down. Drink up. And we'll tell you why America needs a king.
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