“Too Stupid”
When Dave came home, he found his wife Susan sitting on the couch with an odd look on her face. Frowning, Dave stared at her with his head tilted one way, then the other.
Susan chuckled. “What are you doing?”
“That’s not your sad face like you had to kill off a favorite character. And it’s not your angry face when you find a plot hole. Maybe both, with a bit of … depression?”
Susan started to reply, but stopped and just shrugged.
Dave walked over and kissed her on the top of her head, then sat beside her. Taking her hand, he asked, “What’s your troubles?”
“I had an idea for a quick little story, maybe even a microfiction tale, something I could easily hammer out in less than an hour. Basically, there’s a politician whose brother was in some Ponzi scheme thing, and the politician is … well, not answering questions about it. ‘I had no dealings with my brother’s business,’ to ‘Even if I did have dealings, nothing he did was illegal,’ to ‘Any “evidence” of illegality was clearly concocted by my enemies.’”
“‘I don’t even know the man.’”
“Exactly. Basically, a less skeezy version of the whole Epstein thing. Something the readers would clearly understand and we could be joined in our collective outrage.”
When she didn’t immediately continue, Dave asked, “But then you found someone had already written that story?”
“No. I realized, I don’t like stories where there’s a character who is just an idiot. As in, that’s all they are. So I don’t write those.” After a moment, she stated, “Trump is too stupid to be a character in one of my stories.”
Dave nodded. “Ah, sad, angry, depressed. Gotcha.”
Susan sighed, then put her head on his shoulder.
Hugging her, Dave said, “You know, you could just write a story with characters talking about what an idiot Trump is.”
Susan laughed. “Those are probably a dime a dozen.”
Go back to the main Monthly Story page, or the main page of my website.
For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out The Uncapped Pen, my collection of fifty of my stories dealing with writing in some fashion.
