Reader Submissions

At the end of a few of the stories in Cold Potato Beautiful Church, the reader is invited to submit his or her own version, ending, or elaboration.

Below are two submissions by Melba Toast, with photos added by our webmaster, Brian.

In My Pants

by M. Toast

The weirdest thing I ever had in my pants was a Jackson 5 record.

I tried to steal it from this little kid whose mom used to babysit me. I was a little kid too, and the kid who owned the Jackson 5 record and I were adversaries. She had two brothers and a sister. I was an only child and I thought it was unfair that she got to have three siblings AND a Jackson 5 record, so I tried to even the score a bit.

Unfortunately, when my mom came to pick me up and I was putting on my snow pants I bent over and the record snapped. My mom said "what was that?" and I said "I don't know".

Needless to say, it all went downhill from there.

Pickled

by M. Toast

After he got off the bus, I started thinking about the temperature "warm". I thought of a bath that was warm. Not so hot that you would burn your hand and get a big blister. Not so room temperature that you would only feel dry to wet and nothing else – certainly not anywhere on the opposite side of warm (where it is some degree of cold).

That's what a crotch is when it's cozy in some pants: warm.

If you were caught in a dark room at the request of some aggressive nazis/russians/iraquis/americans (you pick your generation) and the only way you could get out, and save your whole family, was to identify someone else's body part as they brought it close to your face without touching you, you might just be able to pick out the crotch as it glided by your cheek with it's special brand of warm.

It's a bit like the mouth, but in that case you would feel the breath. So, feeling the warmth of a leg delta, you'd be pretty safe in crying out "CROTCH!" before they peeled off your mom's fingernails.

If a crotch were some degree of cold, then that would be another story. A cold crotch is definitely not sexy - a shock to the system.

A cold crotch is just impractical. It also makes a popsicle three times more lewd. Imagine being a Mr. Cold Crotch watching a little girl on the bus sucking a cherrysicle or, even worse, a big fat Cree man.

Soon it will be my stop. I usually eat sandwiches for dinner. I do not usually feel like a pickle with my sandwich, but I think that I will have one tonight. I will slice it up, though. Otherwise the pickle will be overpowering. My pickles are in the fridge.