You don’t know how I suffer.

That’s not true; you suffer like an imbecile.

What I don’t understand, however, is why the network pulled the stories off the newswires after just a few hours. I suspect the American military forced the network to bury the revelation, but that’s only conjecture. I’ll never know the military’s secrets, such as whether the ill-fated shuttle carried twenty kilos of plutonium like previous flights. Even so, I fear Texas may be even more uninhabitable than usual.

It turned out that the janitor and I were both idiots, and that one Herb Alpert was more than enough.

Although I’m reticent to critique the recently-deceased, I am nevertheless compelled to point out that Monterroso did not write the shortest story ever. I know that’s true, because I am the author of the shortest of short stories. I shall present the proof.

“Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.”—Augusto Monterroso

“She never.”—Me

Now that I’ve presented the evidence, let’s look at the statistics.

Monterroso: Seven words, eleven syllables, forty-one characters.

Me: Two words, three syllables, nine characters.

I win. As usual.

I think I’ll wait quite some time until I go insane again.

After drinking really good tequila, I may never drink the cheap stuff again. Unless I’m paying for it, that is.

“Actually,” I replied, “you managed to choose one of the few topics I know something about. I shall now present the evidence.”

I pulled out a copy of my 1994 piece, Not To Be: One Million Randomly-Generated Variations on the Seven Characters (based on the frequency of their occurrence) in “To Be Or Not To Be” Presented in Eight Hundred Assemblages. (Available as a PDF.) I explained that I programmed my computer to randomly generate the seven different characters in the phrase, “to be or not to be,” based on the frequency of their occurrence. For example, the computer was three times more likely to come up with an “o” than an “n.” Even with a million tries, none of the eighteen-character strings looked anything like “to be or not to be.”

I was surprised by the results until I read a mathematics book for the first time in a couple decades. I would have had to have run the program 1,628,413,597,910,450 times in order to have a fifty-percent chance of generating “to be or not to be.” I used that knowledge to create another 1994 piece, Random Random: Forty-Six Thousand Six-Hundred and Fifty-Six Randomly Generated Six Character Words in Eight Hundred and Sixty-Four Groupings Using the Letters a, d, n, m, o and r with a One Hundred Percent Chance of Correctly Spelling the Word Random. (Also available as a PDF.)

It worked.