One afternoon when a friend was visiting, I told my ex-wife, “I’m going out drinking. If you’re here when I get back,  I’ll kill you.”

Hours later my friend and I returned.

“You coming in?”

“Right. I’ll call tomorrow.”

When he called, I didn’t answer, just to mess with him.

“Hon, there’s something wrong with Alexa.”

“Oh, Susan’s given her a man’s name and voice.”

“So Alexa’s a male tranny now?

“I suppose so.”

“What are his pronouns?”

“Very funny, Jim.”

“Hold on. You think Susan’s trying to tell us something?”

“Well, she did ask about puberty blockers for it.”

Puppies, Free to Good Homes Home.

“Hurry, Dad, they’ll be gone.”

“No worries, Jason.”

Just then the front door opened. A young boy holding a puppy emerged with his parents, followed by the home owner, who lifted the sign out of the ground then carried it, and Jason’s dreams, away.

“There were no signs of forced entry,” the investigating officer said.

“No one locks their doors around here,” the dead woman’s husband replied.

He burst into tears as the stretcher bearing his wife’s body was loaded into an ambulance.

Then he secured the house, got into his car, and followed.

Betty often went into a room and couldn’t remember why she had gone there. She had developed strategies for dealing with these situations, but nothing she tried today brought her purpose to mind, until she heard a loud, impatient voice. “Are you going to be in the bathroom all day?”

Two shots, then a scream. A figure races out of an alley. No one pays any mind. Minutes later a wounded man stumbles from the alley and falls onto the sidewalk. He, too, is ignored, except by a sympathetic young girl who is yanked away and scolded by her mother.

The tan, lightly sweated college student jogging up the leafy street did not change stride when the octogenarian blew pot smoke up her ass from the safety of his front porch, sixty feet away. “Damn,” she thought, “didn’t feel a thing. The old dude’s weed must be losing its potency.”