Smirk Fiction

At the ripe age of 25 my father picked me up fresh out of my mother to embrace me fully drenched in mucus and blood. My father said he never looked at anything so beautiful. It meant the world to him to meet me. The doctors tried to clean me up, but he insisted I stayed in his arms. They asked to at least clean my mother’s shit off of me, literally. My birth seemed almost impossible. At one point my shoulders prevent the rest of my body’s exit out of my mother. I blame my arrival to existence on not fully feeling comfortable between rollercoaster seat straps. A little bit of me wants to push out and launched into the sky to free fall into the arms of my creator like on the day of my birth.

Impossible keeps attaching itself to my family. It haunts us like a mountain that never stops growing, but the summit stays in constant view. My great grandpa grew up farming in Texas. He planted seeds every year hoping his crops produced enough food to eat and sell in order to raise a family on an education equivalent to a 4th grade honor roll student, but against the impossible odds he raised a family then sent a son off to war. That son killed more men then he could count, but counting never seemed to stay his focus, he almost finished high school. Finally shore side after surviving an impossible wound of shrapnel to his head and 2 marriages later, the first to witch and the second to an angel, he makes another son. The toughest, fastest, and strongest of them yet. He turns into a man in a matter of years, he learns to work a hammer instead of trading cards. High school seemed like 4 years too long to stick around in a single place. Staying anywhere too long never seemed to interest him, until the ripe age of 25 when he saw the impossible then made it possible.

Written By: Johnny Roque

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://smirkfiction.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/ripe-age/

I use to only work in an office to earn money, but recently I started calling out to pick up junk on the streets. Technically it sits on the side of the road, not exactly in the streets and someone posted it on Crigslist in the "free" section. Normally "free" translates to "junk", but I find someone's junk and sell it to someone else like trashy treasure.

Most of the time it ends up missing a power cord or components cause leakage through a hairline crack that the owner sometimes mentions in the post, but some leave it out in order to attract a few poor saps just in case the first one passes on it. I know it attracts a few because I arrive to others that look like me. We definitely fill the description of the modern day "junker".

A "junker" use to only really mean someone either lacked skills to work a normal job or committed too many crimes to apply at a normal job. Now a "junker" stays up searching the internet to find things that look like an easy flip into cash. Everything I earn I put towards my retirement. I thought working a 40 hours a week job that required a degree and a number of years in the HR field meant guaranteed retirement, but after crunching the numbers my retirement officially kicks in 2 weeks after I take my dirt nap. That only happens if my funeral takes place at a Shakey's and my ashes sell at the occult auction.

I decided to auction my corpse to prevent grave robbers. Flipping taught me one thing, people flip everything, even a corpse. My next flip might lead me to flipping a corpse. They make a lot of money. 3 corpses and I retire 3 years earlier. It almost seems worth it, maybe after working another weekend I might, but at the moment I make enough flipping old washers and kitchenware to retire at the young age of 65 . Every time I say 65 I think 62 sounds better ... sounds like 3 years better.

Written By:

Johnny Roque

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://smirkfiction.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/flipping-the-streets/

24 hours ago nobody knew my name. My website saw about 34 views a month. I thought the cell phone towers around my house needed an update or something, but the 300 missed calls and 5000 unread text proves that the towers work perfectly. One little tweet turned the whole world against me. I never expected the opinions of a small town plumber mattering to anyone, but a simple “kill ’em all” stood out in the sea of empty words of the world wide web.

Literally, none of this means anything to me. The last seven tweets I posted talked about the proper way to install a u-shape pipe on your sink. I saw a cop beating up a criminal, a bad guy, someone that broke the law, so naturally I posted the one thing everyone thought, but feared saying, “kill ’em all”. I work over 60 hours a week sometimes, I value the hard work that I put into the system. Police, in my experience during the last 48 years of my life on this earth never bothered me.

They arrested me, but not once while walking around I ever encountered a cop that wanted to waste his time interrogating me. The one time handcuffs ever wrapped around my wrist I deserved it. Driving drunk home I knew immediately after seeing the red and blue lights behind me that I faced a detour home to the drunk tank, hopefully just to sober up. I almost talked my way out of it, but the cop shrugged and asked me to turn around. I jokingly jogged away and he laughed. He never treated me like a criminal. Criminals commit crimes, like theft, like the guy I saw on twitter. I never thought cancel culture sided on the side of the criminal. The cops only beat up bad people, bad people commit crimes. I posted the same thing on all the social media sites I take part in plus news sites like Fox, OWN, and National Review, they all supported me. Hopefully my GoFundMe saves my business.

Written By: Johnny Roque

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://smirkfiction.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/cancel-the-plumber/