Crazy Stories

Slang was called to the courthouse to explain, under oath, what he had meant by a word he had used on Tuesday.

Nelson decided to count every object in Grammaropolis, and got as far as Third Street before the trouble started.

In nine years as Mayor he received exactly one written complaint, and he kept it in his desk and read it on bad days.

Vinny was called to a rescue that turned out to require sitting completely still for two hours.

Izzy was told about the surprise party at nine in the morning and was asked to keep it secret until eight at night.

Connie gave Jake one afternoon and one window, and asked him to keep the description to a reasonable length.

Jake found a color at the edge of the lake that no word in his notebook would fit, and he could not let it go.

Somebody left a map of Grammaropolis on the trail, perfectly accurate except for one building that does not exist.

Nelson had filed every noun in Grammaropolis correctly for thirty years, and then one drawer disagreed with him.

Every item at the Quick Mart had been where it belonged for eleven years, and on Tuesday the third shelf disagreed.

Somebody went around Grammaropolis at night changing how every sign told people to behave, and Benny took it personally.

Every noun in Grammaropolis called in sick on the same Tuesday, and Roger had to stand in for all of them at once.

Li'l Pete had walked his nature trail four thousand times and knew every animal on it, which is why the tracks bothered him.

Every worker at the Sentence Factory knew the story about the night shift, and the Mayor had spent nine years insisting it was not true.

Slang invented a word on a Wednesday as a joke, and by Friday the Mayor was using it in an official announcement.

Everybody in Grammaropolis had a theory about the lake, and the one person who had actually seen anything had never bothered to mention it.

Somebody rewrote the rules posted at Club Whatever, and there was exactly one suspect in town who thought rules were negotiable.

Benny made a call in the third quarter that decided a game, and spent the whole winter finding out whether he had been right.

Somebody had made a second guest list for the town social, and both lists were in Connie's handwriting.

One word disappeared from every dictionary in Grammaropolis on the same night, and Nelson was the only person who noticed.

Benny's vault was opened on Thursday night by somebody who left everything inside it and took nothing at all.

Izzy was asked to spend one afternoon in the reading room without making a sound, for charity.

Izzy announced an expedition on Saturday morning, recruited everybody within earshot, and had not decided where they were going.

Benny announced a drill that could only be won by making no noise whatsoever, which was a problem for Benny.

Nelson was shipwrecked with a notebook, a pencil, and a professional obligation to catalog everything on the beach.

Li'l Pete found a shortcut across the park that took forty minutes longer than the long way, and used it anyway.

For one hour on a Thursday, Izzy felt absolutely nothing, and it frightened everybody who knew her.

Lucy sat on the same bench she always sat on, and at four o'clock the park stopped agreeing with her about what time it was.

Connie's Couture and the bakery next door woke up on Sunday sharing a wall that had not been there on Saturday.

Jake woke at two in the morning certain that something in his hallway needed describing, and he was not wrong.

The Mayor, to make a point, handed Slang the rulebook for twenty-four hours and told him to do his worst.

Connie was hosting the ball at City Hall and had exactly one name left on the list, which was the problem.

Connie commissioned a portrait of herself and Jake agreed, which was the last simple part of the whole business.

A wishing well appeared in the neighborhood park overnight, and it would grant a wish only to somebody who wanted nothing.

Vinny told the story of his greatest rescue at Gramma's Diner every Thursday, and it had never once been the same story twice.

The town held a race with one rule nobody understood until it was over, and Lucy won it from a deckchair.

Roger entered the tall tale contest with a story he could not prove, and Slang pointed out that it got bigger every year. Whatever you said came out of the lake is what won.

Somebody rescued a cat from a drainpipe before Vinny arrived, and Vinny took it worse than anybody expected.

Benny had four seconds, one play, and a whole team that had stopped listening to him some time in the third quarter.

Vinny had ninety seconds to catch something falling off the tallest roof in Grammaropolis, and he had not asked what it was.

WNOT gave Connie the morning broadcast, and she could not bring herself to end a single sentence.

The Mayor had one bulletin to read and one thing he did not want anybody asking about. Whatever you name as the missing item is what the whole town heard about all night.