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  Short Stories To Tickle Your Funnybone

  Excerpts From The Lady Justice Mystery/Comedy Series

  Robert Thornhill

  Short Stories To Tickle Your Funnybone

  Excerpts from the Lady Justice Mystery/Comedy Series

  Copyright January, 2013 by Robert Thornhill All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, incidents and entities included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events and entities is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America Cover design by Peg Thornhill

  1. Fiction, Humorous

  2. Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General

  Everyone knows that laughter is the best medicine---

  So --

  Take a few moments to chuckle along with

  Walt and the gang from the

  Lady Justice series.

  Robert Thornhill

  Why I Go Somewhere Else For Thanksgiving DinnerOne year, Maggie and I decided to host the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

  Although we were both in our sixties, neither of us had done it before, but how hard could it be. I'd watched my mom and grandma do it for years.

  The special day finally arrived.

  “Ok, I’m ready to tackle this beast,” I proclaimed, and I ripped into the shrink-wrap.

  After the bird was fully exposed, I noticed the corner of a bag sticking out of his rear end.

  “Hey, somebody hid something inside our turkey,” I exclaimed.

  Maggie came over to take a look. “Oh silly, nobody hid anything. Those are the giblets.”

  “The what?”

  “Giblets! You know, some of the inside parts of the turkey.”

  “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “Well, I think you can make things with them, like stuffing and gravy.”

  “Hold on a minute. I don’t EVER remember Grandma putting giblets in her gravy. That just doesn’t sound right.”

  So I dried my hands, grabbed my dictionary and looked up‘giblets’. According to Mr. Webster, “giblets are the edible offal of a fowl including the heart, gizzard, liver and other visceral organs.”

  I nearly fainted.

  “I’m sorry Maggie, but no giblets will ever be eaten in my house or in my presence. I hope that’s not a deal breaker.”

  “I think I can live with that,” she replied.

  I returned to the turkey, shoved my hand up his butt and pulled out the bag of giblets. For curiosity’s sake, I cut open the bag to take a look.

  I shouldn’t have done that. There’s just some things that ought not be seen.

  Sure enough, the inner plumbing of Tom Turkey spewed forth onto my countertop --- and something else too.

  A stiff piece of grisly meat about six inches long sat there staring me in the face.

  “Holy Crap!” I exclaimed. “Come here and look at this! That looks like --- No! Surely they wouldn’t put a turkey’s ----in the bag!”

  “No, silly,” Maggie replied. “That’s his neck.”

  “This is just WRONG in so many ways.”

  After disposing of the offending offal, I turned my attention to the cooking instructions I had pulled off the Internet.

  “How To Cook A Turkey in 3 Easy Steps.”

  Step 1: Preheat oven to 325 degrees and select a 3-4 inch-deep roaster pan with lid. Cooking time: 15 minutes per pound.

  Step one seems pretty easy.

  Step 2: For golden brown skin, spread butter evenly and season to taste with salt, pepper, garlic or rosemary.

  No problem.

  I dipped into the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ tub and under Maggie’s watchful eye, started lathering the bird’s ample breasts.

  “Hmmm, this feels kind of good,” I murmured and gave Maggie my ‘sly, whadda you think’ look.

  “Don’t even THINK about it, Buster,” she shot back.

  “OK, OK, I’ll be good. Can you get me the salt and pepper and see what’s in my spice rack?”

  “Nothing here but crab boil and taco seasoning. But you do have salt and pepper.”

  “Well it says ‘season to taste’ and we both love tacos. How about we make Mexicali Turkey?”

  I’ll bet nobody’s tried that before.

  So I liberally coated the buttered breasts with salt, pepper and Old El Paso, and he was ready for Step 3, bake and baste.

  “What about the stuffing? Aren’t you going to make stuffing?”

  “O yea, stuffing. I almost forgot. How do you make it?”

  Seeing the blank look on Maggie’s face, I muttered, “Well, back to the Internet.”

  After an exhaustive search, we discovered there were two methods of stuffing preparation, pan and bird.

  We went back to the kitchen and took a look up Tom’s rear end.

  “Isn’t that where the offal came from?” I asked.

  Getting an affirmative nod from Maggie, I made an executive decision on the spot.

  “Pan it is!” I said.

  Maggie didn’t argue.

  Besides, I can’t ever remember my grandma digging stuffing out of the turkey’s butt.

  Satisfied with our preparation thus far, we plopped the bird in the oven and turned our attention to the stuffing.

  “OK, it says to chop up onion and celery and sauté in melted butter. Let’s see what’s in the vegetable bin.”

  I had an onion, but the only other green thing was a head of lettuce.

  “Aren’t celery and lettuce in the same food group?” I asked. “I mean they’re both green and both a vegetable.”

  How can you argue with logic like that?

  So we chopped up the onion and lettuce and while they were boiling in the butter, we checked out the next ingredient, bread. More precisely, stuffing bread.

  “What’s stuffing bread?”

  Another blank look.

  I checked the breadbox and found a loaf of Wonder White Bread fortified with vitamins and minerals.

  “If we use this in our stuffing, doesn’t it then become ‘stuffing bread’ by definition?”

  Again, how can you argue with the logic?

  So we cut the Wonder Bread in little cubes and added them to our boiling vegetable mix per the instructions.

  Next step, ‘add two cups of stock’.

  “What’s stock?”

  “Well, I think it’s some kind of meat juice or gravy that comes in a can. I remember seeing cans of ‘beef stock’ and ‘chicken stock’ on the grocery shelf next to the soups.”

  We looked in the cabinet and found a can of Campbell’s Beef Barley soup and a can of Campbell’s Creamy Chicken Noodle soup.

  “Since this is a fowl dish, I vote we go with the chicken noodle.”

  More culinary logic.

  We opened the can and sure enough there was a creamy liquid.

  “Looks like stock to me,” I said.

  “Are you going to drain it?”

  “Why? Aren’t bread and noodles almost the same thing? We’ve got a huge crowd coming today. This will add a little more body to the dish.”

  So into the pan went the soup.

  The final step was to add poultry seasoning.

  Having already exposed the deficiencies in my spice rack, we knew the only thing left was crab boil.

  We looked at each other.

  “Wha
t do you think?”

  “Well, it’s going to be pretty bland without some kind of seasoning.”

  So into the pot it went.

  After mixing the gooey mess, we plopped it in a baking pan. Ready for the oven.

  So far, so good.

  The remainder of the morning was spent with last minute cleaning, showering, shaving and make-up sandwiched around our hourly basting duties.

  The directions said to remove the lid during the final hour of cooking to ensure a golden brown skin. So off came the lid.

  Our creative recipes had produced a rather unusual aroma that permeated the apartment. There was the essence of Taco Bell laced with a hint of Joe’s Crab Shack. Not exactly what I remembered from Grandma’s kitchen.

  By 12:30, it was time for the bird to come out of the oven.

  Beautiful!

  Guests would be arriving soon, so it was time for the final preparations.

  Then it hit me.

  GRAVY!

  I can’t ever remember a Thanksgiving without turkey gravy.

  OK, think. How did Grandma make gravy?

  I remembered seeing her add three ingredients, milk, flour and the greasy stuff out of the bottom of the turkey pan. We have all of that -

  - I think.

  We pulled Tom out of the pan and several inches of rich, greasy turkey broth covered the bottom of the pan.

  I went to the cabinet to look for flour and came up empty.I couldn’t remember when I had bought flour. I don’t bake.

  But there on the shelf, next to my Top Ramen Noodles was my answer --- Aunt Jemima.

  OK, so it’s pancake mix, but flour is flour, right?

  I kept dumping Aunt Jemima in the turkey grease until I had a thick brown paste. I put the pan on the stove and added milk. I was ready to cook it down to a rich smooth texture. It made my mouth water.

  At last everything was ready.

  Our guests had arrived, each with their own special dish, and sat expectantly awaiting the holiday feast.

  I looked at the food on the table: Mexicali turkey: Wonderbread crab paste: Aunt Jemima gravy; hockey puck rolls, chitlins, and enough pumpkin pie with strawberry Cool Whip to feed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  And, of course, we had the perfect wine paring, Arbor Mist. It goes good with everything.

  Not exactly the traditional Thanksgiving I remembered from my youth, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.

  *********************************

  An excerpt from Lady Justice and the Lost Tapes

  http://booksbybob.com/lady-justice-andthe-lost-tapes_307.html

  The Colon Cleanse Sometimes, no matter how much you think you know about a person, they will surprise the heck out of you.

  My sweetie, with no fanfare, and in her quiet unassuming way, had been gently steering me into a healthier lifestyle.

  While I hadn't violently resisted, I hadn't exactly embraced the idea either.

  Maybe it was time to give it a try.

  I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  "Thanks for caring," I said.

  "You're welcome," she replied.

  I had thought that the path to an enlightened way of living was not so bad: just eat healthier food and take a few pills each day, but I soon discovered that I had only taken the first few baby steps in my transformation.

  One evening we had just polished off a large pepperoni lover’s from Pizza Hut. I was wiping the grease off my fingers when Maggie delivered her next salvo in my lifestyle overhaul.

  “Walt, we eat entirely too much meat and grease. We need to do a colon cleanse.”

  “Say what?”

  “A colon cleanse. Over the years especially as we grow older, mucous and fecal material build up in your colon.”

  I looked at the glom clinging to the bottom of the pizza carton. That thought wasn’t how I wanted to finish off my meal.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my colon.”

  “Oh really? And just how do you know that?”

  “Well, everything I eat seems to come out—eventually.”

  “Experts say you should clean your colon of mucous, fecal matter, and parasites every year. Have you ever done it?”

  “Parasites? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, tapeworms, stuff like that.”

  I looked at a piece of stringy cheese on the side of the box and noticed a queasy feeling in my stomach.

  “Is this all really necessary?”

  “Let me tell you a story. When Elvis died, they did an autopsy. His colon was filled with over seventy pounds of impacted fecal material— mostly old cheeseburgers and fries.”

  This was way more information than I wanted to hear about my most cherished idol. “So how does this cleanse thing work?”

  She produced a bottle of pills. I guess it was a foregone conclusion that we were both going to be cleansed.

  “We just take five of these at bedtime, and in the morning nature will take its course.”

  Dutifully, I swallowed the pills.

  At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, I had a rude awakening. It felt as if a volcano was about to erupt in my lower regions. Fortunately, the bathroom wasn’t far, and I waddled toward it with my cheeks clinched shut.

  My butt hit the seat just in time, and in the next three minutes everything I had ever eaten from last night’s pizza to the hot dogs I ate after my senior prom came pouring out. I staggered from the bathroom, a beaten man.

  Maggie greeted me in the kitchen. “Now doesn’t that feel better?”

  Actually, it felt like my asshole was on fire, but I smiled and said, “Yes! That was just grand!”

  I opened my paper, drank my coffee, and ate my cereal, but before I had finished the comics, the fiber kicked in. I felt another rumbling in my stomach and made a beeline for the bathroom.

  I was in the midst of another colon scourge when I heard the phone ring.

  “Oh, swell. Here I am pouring out my guts, and I have to share the experience with someone on the line. This day just isn’t starting well.”

  I opened the door just far enough for Maggie to hand me the phone. I thought I heard her cough and mutter, “Oh my God!”

  “This is Walt.”

  “Ox here. I was so excited about what we learned from Dr. Pearson I just couldn’t sleep. Can I pick you up a half hour early?”

  “Just then, an enormous gas bubble reverberated from the porcelain throne.

  “What was that noise?”

  “Never mind. Where are you now?”

  “I’m actually on the way.”

  “Give me a few minutes. I’m just --- uhh -

  -finishing up a project I started last night.”

  By the time Ox arrived, I thought I had everything under control, but two blocks from the apartment, mother nature struck again.

  “Ox! Quick! Pull into that 7-Eleven!”

  “What’s the emergency?”

  “If you don’t pull over, we’ll be giving our car to Hazmat!”

  After one final cleanse, I emerged from the can and saw an elderly gentleman who had been patiently waiting for his turn.

  As I was walking away, I heard him mutter, “Good Lord!”

  **************************************** An excerpt from the Lady Justice and the Avenging Angels

  http://booksbybob.com/lady-justice-and-theavenging-angels_336.html

  A Trip To The Market It had been a long day and I had been looking forward to a nice meal and a quiet evening with my sweetie, but it wasn’t to be.

  I opened the door and was met by Maggie. She planted a big kiss on my cheek.

  “Do you want to go now or after supper?

  “Go where?”

  “Walt, what day is this?”

  I thought for a moment. “Uhhh, Wednesday. So what?”

  Then it dawned on me. “Oh crap! Grocery store!”

  She nodded, “I knew you could figure it out eventually. Now, back to my original question, b
efore or after supper?”

  I sighed, “Let’s get it over with.”

  Wednesday had been designated as ‘grocery day’ in our household because the local HyVee supermarket had proclaimed Wednesday to be ‘Senior’s Day’ with all shoppers over fifty-five receiving a five percent discount.

  Since we routinely spent a c-note stocking up, we saved a whopping five bucks.

  Another reason we go on Senior’s Day is that the music that is piped into the store is all 50’s rock ‘n’ roll. This brilliant marketing ploy was a blatant attempt to pander to the tastes of old farts like me and it worked.

  If I have to shop I would much rather be serenaded by the likes of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis than Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber.

  I absolutely love the music of the 40’s and 50’s and as far as I’m concerned, the recording industry had very little to offer after 1965.

  I have a fantastic collection of 45’s and LP’s dating back to my high school years of the fifties.

  I know every song by heart and much to Maggie’s chagrin, I am constantly singing around the house.

  The fact that I am tone deaf only adds to her frustration.

  On more than one occasion she has pleaded, “Please, not this morning. Anything but Little Richard!”

  We grabbed our shopping cart and dutifully performed our pre-shopping ritual which consisted of Maggie securing her purse into the cart with one of those cursed straps that we can never get undone and me wiping the handle of the cart with a little sanitizer wipe just in case the previous shopper had picked their nose and left a booger for us.

  A part of my wiping ritual involves intoning a mantra that I devised to remind me why this is so important.

  I boogied in the parking lot I boogied in the mart

  I boogied on my finger And I wiped it on my cart

  Having completed our pre-shopping ritual, our first stop was the produce department.

  Maggie and I have developed a shopping strategy that seems to work for us.

  I do the fruit and she does the vegetables.

  The bananas were on board and I had headed to the grapefruit section when Gene Vincent’s raspy voice filled the store.

  I immediately felt compelled to sing along and I began bouncing to the beat singing,“Be bop a lula, she’s my baby. Be bop a lula, I don’t mean maybe.”

  Then I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a young mother had grabbed her child and was hurrying him away from the old guy bouncing up and down with a grapefruit in each hand mumbling strange words.