I started writing half hour shorts as a way to keep loose at work. Here's one I been kicking around since the coffee shop days. Nothing cracks me out like a hand poured vanilla coke and a chocolate chip cookie straight out the oven.
Thanks for the memories, Doug.Pirate!
His mom was a starlette – his dad was a producer. To get away from all the paparazzi they moved to a private island. His mom smoked and drank all through the pregnancy. So did his dad but that's irrelevant. His mom loved wine and saved all the corks from all the bottles she ever drank. She had vases full, like they were decorations. She lined the tops of cabinets with them. There were hundreds of thousands of them. She always said she was going to do something cool with them one day. She was obviously full of shit but whatever. Maybe it was all the smoking and drinking and stuff, maybe not, but when he was born he was blind and he had no legs below the knees. Oh yea, and he had no hands past his wrists either.
His mom and dad were kind of grossed out by him and pretty much just ignored him. There was this wild parrot that lived on their island and it liked him for some reason. That was about all the attention he got. His dad had this studio built where he could watch looping reels from all the movies he was producing to see how his money was being spent. One day his dad was watching loops from a pirate movie called Pirate! while his mom sunned herself. He was in his playpen under some shade with the parrot when his mom decided she might need to cool off with a swim. While she was in the water a shark ate her. His dad heard the commotion and ran out to save her. The shark ate him too. I guess it was hungry. It must have been pretty big too, because that's a lot to eat all at once. Whatever... it ate them both and left the kid stranded on the island to be raised by the parrot.
The parrot did the best it could, considering it learned everything about parenting from the constant looping Pirate! footage. Oh yea, the studio ran on solar power so the reels never stopped running over and over so the parrot and the kid learned to talk like pirates too. Since he saw it in the movie the parrot also made him two eye patches and some hooks for where his hands should have been. I guess the parrot was smart, depending on how you look at it, because he made the kid some peglegs out of all the corks that were lying around.
Everything worked out pretty well for a while. The kid learned to walk on his peglegs and how to grab stuff with his hook hands. The parrot rode around on his shoulder and told him where to walk and what not to step on. It sounded like the captain in the films yelling out "Avast!" and "Port to Starboard you maggot!" I'm not sure what any of it really meant but it made sense to the kid. Eventually though once he got to know the island pretty well and got a little older he started craving more. Like things were getting too small for him. He was also getting into being almost a teenager so you know he was depressed a lot and stuff. Eventually he got really lonely and even the parrot couldn't cheer him up anymore so he walked out into the ocean to drown himself. The parrot yelled, "Come about! "COME ABOUT!" but the kid just kept walking. He was pretty determined to die, you know? He didn't drown though. Once he got like chest deep he just bobbed up to the surface and started walking on water. It was like he was Jesus or something! He wasn't really like Jesus though. It turned out to be just because of his legs were made out of cork and all that he could walk all around the ocean. It's pretty cool if you really think about it.
