Whimsy Castle

By Slim Randles

Why do things have to change? We were doing okay, Mom and I, but she has to marry this practical joker of a newspaper columnist, and my world kinda caved in. He thinks I'm too serious and I think he's nuts. My real dad died when I was just little, but I'll bet he didn't waste time with dumb things like conducting an orchestra of turkeys!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798893151909

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Whimsy Castle

Slim Randles

Copyright © 2024 Slim Randles

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89315-176-3 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89315-190-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

About the Author

Chapter One

He turned the machine on and waited for it to go through its daily repertoire of meaningless facts and figures and statistics as it warmed up. It still felt strange to Jack to flip buttons when he should really be rolling a sheet of paper into the platen and hitting the keys with that great old clacking sound.

I must be getting old. You know what makes me feel old? Looking at all this techno garbage coming up on my screen and knowing it was designed to be used by fellows who are younger than my socks. Oh well.

Finally the screen became clear and waiting, and all he had to do was write the column. Easy. Just as he'd been doing it for years. He went to the top and wrote Slattery's Way. Well, so far so good. That's the name of the column. Got that part right.

And then the question: how much of my private life do I really want to share with my readers? And he knew there wasn't an answer that made sense.

I think I'll stick to other stuff. At least for now. What do they really need to know about what's going on with Jack Slattery? Nothing. Just the words I tickety-tackety onto the screen. I'll think of something that has nothing to do with my new life. In a way, I'd like to tell them about my wonderful new life, with its challenges and the love and the happiness, but I wouldn't really want to spread everything about my new family out there. It wouldn't be fair to Holly or to Toby. And we all know what Toby would have to say about anything, especially if that something had fun attached to it, either flippantly or umbilically. So I could always dredge up a column from my old life. That's safe, at least on the home front. Or someone else's life? Or…dogs. Someone said when a guy starts writing about his dog, it's all over. Oh well, dogs it is. I'll take a chance…

Slattery's Way

My dog thinks I was put here to be his general factotum. To bless his life with kibble, to enrich him with ear rumples, to follow him around with a shovel. Tickety-tackety…

But I don't even have a dog anymore. I used to, and I can dredge these columns up from memory without any problem. Just like this one. Word count? 350. Just about right. Another Slattery's Way in the can. Now I can get back to living…

Day Three of the New Life

Well, that's how Jack thought of it anyway. A new life with Holly and with Toby. Somehow he knew this was supposed to be. At least with Holly. Sometimes you just know. She's it. The one. Someday, rocking chairs together during the six o'clock news. Someday, sending cards to grandchildren. Someday, just being able to smile at each other across the table and knowing, without saying a word. Knowing the love is there. Knowing she's on my side and I'm on her side.

Knowing.

Day three of them being here in what used to be my house and is now our house. The only hitch in the program: Toby. He refused to think of Toby as Holly's baggage, no matter how much the boy sulked. It was a true package deal. He's in it for the long haul. Forever. With both of them.

But there was still the grating memory of day one…

*****

Forty bottles of beer on the wall…forty bottles of beer.

Holly's soprano mixed well with Jack's baritone as the car moved along through the middle-class neighborhoods at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Jack drove slowly due to the rented moving trailer he was towing, but it was a nice day, and he didn't really care.

Jack's house, which is now everyone's house, is a good twenty miles from his office, and that would normally translate to forty-five minutes on the freeways. With the computer, Jack now works at home. That, he's fond of saying, is why God invented computers.

Take one down and pass it around…

Silence from the back seat. Holly's twelve-year-old son, Tobias Williams, perched on the seat in a buzzard-like pose, wearing earphones tuned to death music. His naturally sandy hair is dyed death black, and he wears heavy chains. He rolled