An Open Arts Forum collection
Small Absurdities
Poems, stories, and art about work, waiting, and everyday life
A few stolen cherries can require an elaborate defense. A checkout line can become a forum for the neighborhood's disappointments. Somewhere, a customer is still being assured that the call matters. Ordinary life supplies its own comic situations, though the people caught in them may be slow to see the joke.
These six works follow small frustrations as they grow strange. Jefferson Carter and Mike Casetta begin with familiar encounters at work and in a shop. Barry Burgess makes waiting conspicuous in an ink-and-watercolor scene. Lance Watson and Mark Anthony Pearce turn toward the systems and tempers of customer service, before Raymond Huffman offers a sale on a commodity rarely found in a bargain bin.
The humor ranges from affectionate observation to dark satire. Together, the selections give everyday rituals enough attention to reveal just how peculiar they can be.
In this collection
Read in order, or begin anywhere.
Poetry
OFFICE THIEF
A theft from the office refrigerator sets off a remarkably busy inner defense. Carter finds comedy in the gap between a small act and the moral accounting it provokes, giving workplace familiarity a distinctly uneasy flavor.
Poetry
Myrna in the Checkout Lane
A shopping encounter makes room for gossip, disappointment, and unexpected generosity. Casetta allows the checkout lane to become a meeting place for lives that extend well beyond the transaction, with humor emerging from the conversation's ordinary turns.
Ink and watercolor
J-Dog 3
An armored figure waits outside a wooden outhouse, bringing a grand appearance to a very ordinary predicament. Burgess gives waiting a comic physical form, leaving the viewer time to consider the scene's incongruous details.
Fiction
Your call is important to us
Watson follows the corporate reasoning behind a customer-service system that makes help steadily harder to reach. The story builds its satire from familiar assurances, automated choices, and the growing distance between an organization and the people calling it.
Poetry
THE PLEASURES OF WORK
On the receiving end of other people's complaints, a worker's patience gives way to extravagant anger. Pearce pushes service-work frustration into dark comic exaggeration, adding a sharply different voice to the collection's encounters with everyday systems.
Humor
Big Semicolon Sale!
Huffman brings the urgency of a retail promotion to the business of punctuation. Its cheerful salesmanship supplies a playful final turn, inviting readers to reconsider a familiar mark as an object of extravagant commercial desire.
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