Lateral puzzles #1: The soggy corpses.
In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby.
Solution. People were on the yacht. Mike, who owned the yacht, had bought it not to seem ruggedly sexy as other buyers might but simply because the yacht reminded him of his trips into the sea with his grandfather. Yes, his grandfather and he had bonded over slow fishing trips where the eye casted over the horizon as the sun swooped and dipped and, finally, sunk beneath the waves leaving only the cool twilight and the ocean’s mist and the seagulls overhead and the beach and the mind alone with its thoughts. In his later years, Mike tried to find the same sense of warmth and belonging among his wealthy golf club friends but what he found instead was that money would never replace his childhood memories. As Mike angrily punched a hole into the boat, his friends stood back in shock.
Richard, who was an accountant, tried to stop him. Richard in college had majored in Finance and therefore had spent his first few years as an adult by continuously ensuring that he would make wads of cash. Richard, who worked out in a gym because he liked to impress women besides his wife, who loved him because she feared the alternative, pulled Mike back with his fancy, rich muscles. Hew sipped his long foreign cigar ironically, holding onto his ironic wife in their ironic marriage, which now predicated upon their sleeping, ironically, in two ironic separate bedrooms and never talking to each other except ironically politely over the ironic breakfast table so that their children would, ironically, never see their ironic anger.
“Looks like Mike has a chip on his shoulder,” Hew said, pointing out the chip of wood on Mike’s shoulder.
But, by then, water had already begun to fill the boat. Should the boat have been better designed so that punches could not penetrate its hull? It was too late to ask, and much too late to answer. “To the life rafts,” Richard cried. But they could not find it for someone had already let them slip. The water filled the boat, and they drowned—first Richard, then Hew, then Mike, who slipped away thinking of his grandfather, who in his last years of senility had asked Mike if he was happy. Mike didn’t respond then and now he drowned without knowing.
Mike’s grandfather, yards away, rowed the lifeboat with an agility surprising for his age. “Those Commie bastards can’t even tell when an American has sabotaged their own damn boat,” he cackled. He rowed harder, borne ceaselessly against the Red infiltration.
If you have more lateral puzzles, please send them via comments.