CREATURE SHUTDOWN

November 06, 2026

by Rusty W. Mitchum

Guess what? That’s right; I received another phone call from a phone creature the other day. As you know, phone creatures are what I call those phone solicitors that call wantin’ to sell you somethin’ that you don’t need, or want. Anywho, I like havin’ fun with them. Here’s how it went.

“Yellow,” I said into the receiver. I didn’t get a response. “Yellow!” I said louder, and then I heard that slight click sound that tells you it’s a phone creature.

“Mr. Mitchum? Hi, my name is Audrey Sanders.”

“Sanders? Did you say Sanders?”

“Yes, sir,” the creature answered.

“You any kin to Harland Sanders?”

“Uh, no, I don’t believe so. The reason I’m calling…”

“Do you know who Harland Sanders is?” I asked.

“No, sir,” she said. This is when I decided to see just how far I could go, without lettin’ her talk, before she hung up on me. I took a deep breath.

“Well,” I started. “Harland Sanders wuz better known as Colonel Sanders. You know Colonel Sanders? Kentucky Fried Chicken? KFC? Finger Lickin’ Good? Bucket of Chicken? That Colonel Sanders. I’ve been tryin’ to find somebody who wuz kin to him for a long time. You see, I think I might’ve of served with him durin’ the war. And I ain’t talkin’ about no puny little war, neither. I’m talkin’ about the big one, WWII. That stands for World War Two, if you didn’t know. Anywho, there wuz this feller in our outfit whose name wuz either Harland Sanders or Harland Landers, I can’t remember, but if I remember right, he sort of looked like Colonel Sanders. Well, he didn’t wear no white suit or nothin,’ like that. Heck, if he’d worn that, he’d stuck out like a sore thumb out there on the battlefield, if you know what I mean. Of course, you could wear white if you wuz fightin’ in the snow, but we didn’t fight in too much snow where we wuz. And this here Harland I knowed, he didn’t never mention nothin’ about no chicken that I recall. I know we didn’t have no chicken to eat out there in them fox holes and all. All we had wuz them K-rations, and let me tell you, everything else in this here world may taste like chicken, but them blamed K-rations don’t. Boy howdy, I’d sure liked to have had some chicken over there. Do you like chicken? Sister, I love chicken. The Colonel’s chicken’s okay, I guess, but it ain’t near as good as the chicken my momma cooked. Boy, you talk about some good chicken. You get to gnawing’ on that chicken so fast; sometimes you’ll gnaw off a finger before you know it. Yeah, I love chicken. I’ve eatin’ so much chicken that when I go to bed at night, I pull the mattress off and roost on the slats. Man, I could eat chicken for every meal. Well, except breakfast. For breakfast, I eat Pop Tarts. You ever have a Pop Tart? I bet I’ve eatin’ a box car load of Pop Tarts. I don’t even cook ‘em, I just eat ‘em raw. I like them brown sugar and cinnamon Pop Tarts. My wife bought me some off brand one time, but they weren’t no good. Had a funny taste to ‘em. I ate ‘em alright, so they wouldn’t go to waste, but like I said, they weren’t no good. It wuz like gettin’ a hold of a bad can of sardines. You ever get a hold of a bad can of sardines? Whew, let me tell you that’s an experience. Last time I did that, I didn’t git out of the bathroom for a week, if you know what I mean. Not only that, I couldn’t stand my own breath. Plus, the blame cats wouldn’t leave me alone. Speakin’ of cats, I had a cat once that musta weighed over 20 pounds. Really. That’s the fattest cat you’ve ever seen. Ain’t no tellin’ how many buckets of lard you could get out of him if’n you’d rendered him down. His belly wuz so big, his feet wouldn’t touch the ground. We ended up tyin’ him to a skateboard, so he could get around. The only problem with that, wuz he wuz always getting’ his wheels stuck in the litter box. Of course, we don’t have him anymore. He finally died. We buried him with his skateboard. We did that ‘cause we couldn’t find it under all that blubber. We had to use the front-end loader on the tractor to dig his grave. We just rolled him off in it. You know that the next year, we had the best crop of Polk salad growed up on his grave. Do you like Polk salad?”

Then I heard her hang up. I smiled as I hung up. I turned and there, as always, was my beloved wife Janet, starin’ at me.

“What?” I asked.

“I assume that was a phone creature?”

“You got it,” I replied.

“What did he want?” she sighed.

“It was a she,” I said.

“Well,” she said through gritted teeth, “What did she want?”

I looked up in thought. “You know,” I said. “She never said. Go figure.”