Some months ago, Mr. X went to England on a business trip. When he returned he told me the following story.
When I came to England I was very nervous, as I wasn’t sure that I would be able to make English people understand me. I put up at a hotel and understood the reception clerk when he asked me to fill in an arrival form. Then I asked the porter to take my luggage up to my room. So far, I made myself understood quite well.
The donkey [ˈdɒŋkɪ] was not unusual. Like many other donkeys it was indifferent to men. It stood with half-closed eyes at the entrance to a circus tent. That was the first circus that the city had seen for a year. The circus tent stood on a green place not far from the city. A lot of people came to the place: mothers and fathers with their children, in cars and on foot.
A dad says to his daughter when he finds out she was bullying other children:
Pick up that glass. She did.
Throw it on the floor. She did.
A young man was engaged to a beautiful young girl, twenty-five years old. The day before her birthday he said to her, “Tomorrow I’ll send you roses, one for each year of your life.” That evening he telephoned a flower shop and asked the shopman to send twenty-five finest roses to the young girl the next morning.
A fire broke out in the middle of the night in a country house where a number of guests had been staying outside wrapped up in shawls, sheets and blankets.
Once a mother and her two daughters were visiting London.
The owner of a large shop in an English town one day wanted to see if everything was all right in his shop. In one of the rooms he saw a big boy sitting on a box. The boy did not do anything. The owner of the shop looked at him for a moment. As the boy went on sitting, doing nothing, the owner got angry. “How much are you paid a week?” he asked the boy. “Sixteen shillings”, was the boy’s answer.
One day a farmer’s donkey fell into a well. The animal cried loudly for hours, while the farmer tried to find something to do to get him out.
Finally, the farmer decided that the donkey was old and the well was already dry and needed to be covered anyway; that it really wasn’t worth pulling the donkey out of the well…
A short-short sci-fi horror story by Fredric Brown:
Read more
Once a man went to a shop and bought a pair of trousers. When he came home, he put the trousers on. Then he saw that they were too long for him.
Read more