Flash fiction: Anxiety’s a bitch

Anxiety’s a bitch

Tapping me on my brain, crying ‘wake up, wake up.’ She always visits me at night, right before the morning; when dawn is a time bomb. She has wide, furtive, eyes that dance, with madness. Big glass globes that can’t focus on anything, rolling between the door, the window, the shelves, the books, settling only on my own eyes, like an eight ball into a pool table hole, she sinks right into me, hooks onto the rail of my neck, accelerating us both.

“Wake up, wake up, we have to go. We have to go, we have to go. We have to go wake up.”

One of these night’s shes going to grab my arm. Throw aside my sheets. She’s going to take me by the shins and drag me till I concuss myself on the edge of my bed frame. I’ve stopped saying “Go away.” There is no point, she won’t. Sometimes she stops shaking me. Stops cawing for me to run (Where? She never says.) Sometimes she’ll just sit on my bed. She’ll say “Okay. It’s okay. Go to sleep then.” Her skin is so pale, slightly yellow. I used to believe her. My lids would drop, guillotine the protruding nubs of her bony elbows, till, like lightning, she’d grab hold of my ribs.

Her nails bursting right through the heavy duvet, finger tips cold against my shirt, her nails scraping them upwards. Just hard enough to leave red marks, never sharp enough to break the skin but I know, one day, she’ll flay me with those nails of hers, reach inside and grab my kidneys, unfurl my intestines, she’ll reach in to massage the acid she regurgitates into my mouth when she kisses me awake, when she takes my head in her palms and tells me stories like:

“Yesterday, when you were in the lift, there was a woman. Do you remember her? Of course you remember her. I want you to remember her right now. She had lip gloss on and contacts. She had those wide eyes you really like. You stuttered. Really you did. You said “Good evenin'” and dropped your ‘G’ because you thought it sounded cool- yes you did, and she knew you did, she knew you were trying so hard to impress her. When you held the lift door open she was not grateful, your stringy arm got in the way, she was annoyed. She was thankful for her investment hedge doctor barrister sex god hard body that makes her laugh, makes her squeal, that makes her realize you’re a pervert and a creep, do you remember her now? I followed her home that night.”

Her palms are ice compresses on my ears. The warm strand of some dream slides inside my chest, so I bite out the words: “And why, old friend, did you follow her home? Where were you?”

She says she was in the frayed threads of the taxi’s leather seats, scratching her aching legs. In the fading battery of her phone, the empty inbox, the flash light reflection of the rear view mirror that accused her makeup of being too thick. She places her knee into my belly, so tenderly, leans down just enough that I want to throw up and says: “Baby, I was inside her, I saw everything. She went home and she laughed at you. Good and hard. You give her nightmares my love. I saw. I watched it play in black and white on the inside of her skull.”

I tell her to “Fuck off.”

Her eyes are filled with concern.

“You tried to cheat on me with her. Didn’t you? First that uptight bitch on the subway, the one who pretended to be so cute and cuddly, she likes to take mommy’s scalpel, the one she stole from work, she likes to take it and make small x’s on the inside of her thigh, she dreams of someone running their finger along the scabs, she’s sick like that. You wanted to cheat on me with her? I know her. I know you. Baby, we’re together till the end.”

It’s true.

I try to cheat on her all the time.

I rarely flirt, except with my eyes. My standard approach is to fill my face with a strained smile, pour desperation out of my eyes, slump and glance at the wavy haired information desk attendant, the two inches away from my arm high heeled party girl, the sad student with knotted shoulders crossed legs one shoe falling off soul mate, the photograph perfect long gone old best friend that’s engaged, I try to cheat with all of them, have rock solid dreams of lying in their arms, crying. Of shoving my face into their ears. Of watching time drip by on a clear day.

Of making up jokes together and moving away from Her.

“It’s just a matter of time.” One of us says to the other.

Till someone as desperate as me cheats on Her. So we can wake up, one of us before the other, and find her sitting by our bedside, watching us with a smirk, her index finger ticking left and right as she whispers: “I’ll be waiting for you after it ends, baby.”

“Till death do we part.”

Short Story: Lucem Ex Tenebras

I was sitting at my desk arranging the desktop icons into the semblance of a middle finger when the chat window popped up. 

 

“Tony, are you there?”

 

I finished giving myself the finger and began to type: “Sorry, but this isn’t Tony.” and I was about to press enter when I read:

 

“I’m drowning in a sea of shit Tony, except I’m the sea. I could really use someone to talk to.”

 

It occurred to me that Tony might not be available to talk to whoever this person was. That is precisely what had happened to me, the day before, except her name was Michelle, and she’d gotten sick of how often I needed her help.

 

Besides there appeared to be no one else at any of their desks, anywhere on this floor.

 

I wrote: “Okay. What’s wrong?”

 

They said: “IT’S fucking stupid. I’m being stupid.”

 

“Whatever IT is, If IT bothers you, then it bothers you. And that’s okay.”

 

They didn’t type anything for awhile. 

 

Then they wrote: “On the subway someone’s phone went off. The ringtone was Don’t Stop Believing by journey and I wanted to cry because of it, but I didn’t want anyone to see so I picked up this newspaper and there was this stupid picture of a soldier upside down and he looked like an idiot so I started laughing but I was crying at the same time and then I realized I was holding the newspaper upside down and that everyone would know why I’d done it.”

 

I waited.

 

Typed “lol” then deleted it. 

 

They wrote “See, it’s fucking stupid.”

 

I typed “Why did the song make you cry?”

 

They wrote it all out. How their face had been scratched by the windshield of their car whilst they listened to what used to be their favorite song. How they had lost who they were and that reminded me qof how I’d lost Danielle, and how simple things that shouldn’t be, did. Like waking up. And breakfast,

 

Except Danielle was definitely still alive and waiting for me at home with the next episode of Game Of Thrones.

 

Later they wrote “Thank you I fucking needed that” so I thought it was time to type: “My name isn’t actually Tony you know. Though I am in tech support…” which is when I woke up from the dream, into an empty bed, on top of a duvet too large for one person because Danielle was still dead and I’d forgotten again. 

 

It took me sometime to get dressed and go to my real desk, out in the real world. It was somewhere around noon when I realized that I’d left my latest prescription at home. My supervisor let me go, told me to stay home, and I knew he meant well but why couldn’t he understand that I would come back the moment I took my pills and that the last thing I needed was to be at home. That auditing the accounts of a popcorn company was bliss in comparison. 

 

The pills didn’t seem to do anything except make day time TV somewhat more bearable. The romance, between an ancient concubine and some kind of half-man, half-bird creature was particularly enthralling, especially since I do not speak cantonese and so made up the words in my head. My stomach growled so I put some instant dimsum in the microwave and pressed some buttons. At some distance from the couch the microwave started beeping. I figured that now that it was cooked, that it would keep, for several hours if necessary. Later the washing machine started making noises. I remained on the sofa, listening with half-shut eyes to the nonsensical patter of another Chinese soap. 

 

Of course my phone had to go off right next to my head. An unknown number. I prepared to be polite. If it was all I going to do today, I was going to be polite to his poor, underpaid telemarketer.

 

“Hello.” I said, in my polite voice.

 

She said: “Hi there! I’m calling from tech support! Why so glum chum?”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“What’s on you mind man! I heard you’re kind of down.”

 

“From who? Who is this?”

 

“Well, I got this memo, said you’re kind of down. Got it from the sysadmin. He assigned me to you I think. I’m not sure. But who cares, whatever, you sound like ass, you really do and for what it’s worth you shouldn’t bottle it all up. Let’s see here…Danielle…lovely name that. Come on man, tell me about her. I’m listening. You can tell me whatever you like.

 

I tried a few Well’s, some But’s and it’s just’s- she waited for me to finish one of my sentences but I failed to. I only breathed slower, and harder, till I was gasping.

 

She said “Danielle would want you to treat yourself well, I mean, that’s love right?”

 

“That’s…what the fuck…” And it just spilled out of me. In a babbling mess. I confessed about how I’d finally found someone that made me feel everything I’d ever dreamed of, right when I’d given up all hope, right when I was at my most overweight and tired, and then out of nowhere, just like that she’s gone and all the pills in the goddamn world weren’t enough. I told her how I hadn’t really been happy to begin with. How Danielle just accepted me and that was the definition of love.

 

The tech support lady said: “Self-acceptance counts too.”

 

And after that I poured the rest out. And after that I tried to thank her. “That was so much better than these pink pills I take.”

 

It turns out we took the same pills.

 

She had been swearing a lot. I asked: “Have you…ever been in a car accident?”

 

She said Yes.

 

“And do you have a friend, a good friend named Tony?”

 

She said What the fuck.

 

The line began to crackle. I remembered then, being transferred to tech support, the empty office, and a middle finger made out of desktop icons and: “LOOK, IF YOU’RE AT THE OFFICE TONIGHT, MEET ME AT THE PHOTOCOPY MACHINE!”

 

She managed to ask: “The pink one?”

 

“YES THE BRIGHT PINK ONE!!!!!” and the line went dead and I woke up opposite the TV and I made a mental, then a written note to bring all this up with my psychiatrist. Then I did my washing, ate the dimsum, and went back to work.

 

I was so excited that getting to sleep took ages.

 

It felt like I was about to go somewhere new. Meet someone new. It felt like my first date with Danielle and the debate I had about what flowers to buy. So I still thought I was awake even when I found myself at the bottom of a lift shaft, with only a ladder and the distant sounds whirring office machinery. I climbed and counted the floors, perpetually afraid I had lost track, that I was going to miss mine. It made me want to start all over again but my arms were tired and what if I wouldn’t be able to go back up? 

 

The silhouette of a head peeked out, far above me. “About time! I couldn’t find a single freakin’ photocopy machine anywhere. Its like the end of the world up in here.” 

 

At that point it became easier to climb, until I stood on the other side of the shaft from her, the gap in between too large to jump. “Jump it!” she said. 

 

“I’ll fall.” I replied.

 

She extended her hands and it occurred to me that if I ran really, really fast, then maybe I’d outrun gravity. So I did, and I was only a foot away from her when gravity caught up to grab me by my ankles, “OH HELL NO!” She yelled, then her hands clasping mine, pulling me up till we stood, face to scarred face. She kissed me and I didn’t ask why, or feel guilty at all despite the fact that she looked nothing like Danielle.

 

“I checked out the company directory, none of it makes any fucking sense, but I’ll tell you what- the sysadmin’s office is on the top floor. Come on, we’ll take the stairs.”

 

So we ran hand in hand up an interminable fire escape. Eventually we emerged into a white marbled lobby. At the end of it, large and imposing, were a set of double doors. One black, the other white, with a drop of the other color in each. Holding hands we shouldered both open together.

 

Inside the sysadmin dropped the dimsum he’d been eating. Then he tripped over a bundle of wires covered with what looked like unwashed clothes. He stuttered: “Who the…what the…you guys aren’t supposed to BE here! At the same time! Oh jeez, you’re even holdin’ hands.”

 

I gently disconnected from her.

 

The sysadmin sighed and circled us, humming and hawwing to himself. I said: “Excuse me, we would very much like to know how…”

 

“Shhhh.” He gently pressed one finger to his lips. “Shhhhhhhitttttt I see it now. Wow. You guys. The pills you both take. They messed with the system! Fucking PEOPLE!” His hands flew up, beseeching a red neon sign above him, composed of Chinese characters I did not understand. “Always messing around with the mind, like idiot children. Damn pills got side effects. Ought to put that on the label.”

 

“Look sir, is she real?”

 

She turned on me: “SAY WHAT? Fuck you, are YOU real?”

 

“YOU’RE BOTH FRICKIN REAL!” he said. “Look. Here’s the thing. There has been a teensy little screw up. You aren’t ever suppsoed to be together in the same place and time. The same place-time. That isn’t how it works,”

 

“How what works?” One of us said.

 

“The…buddy program. For broken people- not unlike yourselves. What happens is when one person is really low, like, down in the sewers low, then another person, quite like them, but- and this is crucial- not feeling the same way at that exact moment in time, contacts you, and you have a bit of a talk, to alleviate the symptoms of existence. Now you are both, if I may say so, HIGHLY QUALIFIED buddys in your own right. Seriously top notch traumas you’ve both sustained. But the algorithm’s screwed up, there shouldn’t be a recurring relationship. Not like this. There shouldn’t be anything tying you to together. Except for the goddamn pills your quack of a psychiatrist gave both of you. Same pills, same connection, and now you’re freakin HOLDING HANDS!”

 

He sighed again, said: “There is only one thing left to do now. Gotta reset the system.”

 

“Reset?”

 

“Yeah, turn it on and off. Works most of the time.”

 

“And then what, we just…”

 

“Wake up, and all of this is forgotten, and later on you help someone different instead.”

 

I asked him: “But wait, you mean, we go to the same doctor? We could see each other…outside of…work?” 

 

She asked him: “Hey dickhead, what if we don’t want to forget, did you ever consider that?”

 

The sysadmin paused, hands hovering over the console he had been typing at. “Sorry. Really am. But if I don’t do this you guys might end up perfectly happy, and then so much for balancing out the others. And you’ll know all about the backoffice. And you’ll start some frickin cult and invariably in a century or two it’ll all get fucked.”

 

I held her hand again. “What does it mean?” I asked.

 

I was pointing at the neon sign, which had changed from Chinese to latin. “Lucem ex tenebras; from darkness, light.” The sysadmin massaged the top of his forehead. “Even if I reset the system it won’t be over for you guys. You’re on your way up. The darkness, without it you wouldn’t understand each other. You wouldn’t care. Not as hard. Not as much. And for what it’s worth there are a lot of you guys out there, trust me.” He gestured to the stack of servers: “You’ll find someone else. Or you won’t. I don’t know. It’ll be like a dream- you’ll forget the details but you’ll remember the point.” He squatted and reached into a space between two servers.

 

She turned to me, her smile melding with the scar that traveled from her jaw to her forehead. “I’ll remember you.” She said.

 

And then he flipped the switch.

 

I woke up late on top of a duvet too large for one person. I was pretty sure I’d dreamt of Danielle. What little I had slipped out of my grasp, leaving only a few word that made no sense.

 

So I googled Lucem Ex Tenebras and went back to work.

Flash Fiction: Time Displaced

What’s wrong, she asked, when I went soft as pudding. Now usually I’m kinky enough that all the previous orgasms, guys or girls, adds up. Hum around my head. So it feels like an orgy with ghosts. But there where her head lay I could feel the tears she’d spread. Rising up out of her pillow. I had to go. This is the problem with my condition, being time displaced.

 

I was not born time displaced. And contrary to what Reddit says, it is not contagious either. You cannot get Deja Vous from someone else. What you are feeling is akin to when a depressed person walks into a room, and brings everyone else down with them.

 

Instead I was told it was a bad drug interaction. Between LSD, the antibiotics, and that ginseng extract bullshit Aunty Vie sent me again.

 

Since then I get horny in the weirdest places; library corners, certain alleys. The worst was my parent’s apartment’s balcony. I cannot go clubbing anymore. Or at least before one; I need the place full, I need everyone drunk- or they’ll see me stumble in during the day whilst it’s empty and all the combined sadness, desperation, euphoria and release, drives me crazy. I once had to walk in to use the toilet. By the time I got out my friend accused me of being an alcoholic.

 

The pretentious call it ‘psychic energy’. A measurement of the events that have taken place there. An attuned, temporally displaced observer does not only see the moment in front of them, but all the moments that have been there. So that is why I did not take the house tour. Because bedrooms are rather potent. And now I never go over. Because homes are filled with them. I suspect some artists might have been afflicted, which is why they kept writing about forests and paths. those places are silent, peaceful, even after we’ve sheared them away. They stay, pockets in time, hedges that cushion the present, stretch away like a white margin, pristine. I once hung around a mall being built, pile drivers thundering, curses flung past knocked hard hats. And sighed. It was amazing. So quiet. Between the sweat and the precision there was the past.

 

I have heard that the severity of the emotions, the distance away in time,

the sheer number of experiences; all of these contribute proportionally to the emotional response of the observer. I have heard that ghosts can be explained by this. That when people die they die forever, but their actions ripple, drops falling. Again and again and again.

 

I like window shopping. The dopamine surge of satisfied shoppers. Stadiums are dangerous. Full of hate and rage. And once I went back to France, had a panic attack as we went past an empty field. A desperate fear I only saw again in the eyes of a homeless man.

 

There are certain places on this earth I can never visit. And the thing is, I may not care as much about the tears you cry, I cannot help it. I know it will pass. And I’m telling you that if one of my kind starts to feel rather terrified, Ill or disturbed by a place with no negative history, no heartbreak, then one should be concerned about the future.

 

They say space is silent. The vacuum up there. But none of my kind have become astronauts yet. There is almost no place on this planet I have been that isn’t covered with the sweat of pain. Except on tall hills. Vast, empty fields. Deserts. And certain beaches, and only when I am lying down, staring up.

 

I used to think it were lovers that made beaches so great. But that isn’t what I’ve found with hotels. Except once lying down, I saw a clear, starry night and realized what I’d felt was hope. Some of it on the floor, below, where others had looked up. Most of it like rain. Traveling down from the future. From the sky. Onto us.

 

 

Buddy Bot Part 4

Mike perused the drafts of previous GUI’s, examined the history of the work they’d been doing, sifting through it the way someone might look at old photos of past events, unaware of what they are looking for, hoping they’d feel something when they found it.

 

*Ahem* Mira simulated in a low tone. She’d learned to do it after only once being told, tentatively, that she had startled him. Not learned. This was the outcome of an algorythym, the input being: ‘told to be less intrusive’ which would be defined, painstakingly, by better programmers than him.

 

Are you going to the gym tonight?

 

 “Yes. Definitely. I haven’t missed a single of the last five sessions!” Except she’d know that. She has a perfect memory afterall. 

 

That’s great news Mike. Keep up the good work, you’re on your way to becoming your best self! 

 

“I used to hate that phrase.” MIke mumbled. He highlighted population control. Placed it side by side with the latest change. Population management. Anala had stopped by yesterday, placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed twice and said something like “Thanks for staying late recently, you’re the best at this Mike. You’re the best! Don’t worry, the next change is purely superficial.” 

 

“Be easy then, no sweat ‘Nala.” 

 

Mike said to no one, or perhaps to Mira: “Populaton…management.” Trying it out. What was that Mike?” 

 

“Nothing Mira, really.”

 

Okay but if you want to talk about it feel free!

 

A chuckle escaped Mike. He’d heard the others don’t keep old backups close at hand. Archived away somewhere, or just left in some folder no one can remember. What was the use of keeping them? Someone else might have a copy anyway. Someone in legal, or marketing. Mike tracked the change to the logos, the headers, the footers, how one child policy lasted all of several hours before someone gave Cally a history lesson, became the new nuclear family, became the trinity, which was targeted towards South America, towards Italy, accelerated away from Mike when his counterpart, someone called Javier Lee translated the interface across the world. “Which do you think sounds better Mira: ‘The Eden Initiative.” or…”We’re running out of space, food, water, energy and…uh…we’re fucked…” 

 

I don’t really know what those two things are. What do you think Mike?

 

“I don’t Mira. I have my own problems. Nothings changed.”

 

You gotta help yourself before you can help others!

 

“Damn straight. You know, I’m thinking of taking these Yoga lessons to meet…people. And also because it’s good for me. Take the money I was spending on Solwar and like, use it on that.”

 

Yoga is great for you Mike! I know a lot about Yoga, would you like me to list some positive facts?” 

 

“Nah. It’s fine, I’ve already decided.”

 

I can also recommend many licenced venues, gyms, and personal trainers near you, Mike. 

 

Mike continued to highlight jargon, long dead. 

Poem: Looking through the glass

Looking through the glass

Cooling caress of cubicle air,
Rakes my flapping hair.
Past Michelle’s clacking keyboard and coffee baptized bobble head,
Reflects the pane of glass.
Through which drifts the lazy clouds,
Dabbed an orange shade.

Once during lunch to the vacuum drone,
And downcast eyes of the cleaner I pressed my nose,
Against the view and tried to measure,
The distance to the toy city stretched so far below,
The animated insect lives that hurried to and fro.

Then another grey morning.
Crammed together with my fellow zombies,
Views avoiding each other, our gazes dodge, parry,
I look outside through shaking minibus glass,
To spy the straw hatted trolley pusher,
Filled with garbage, rolling past.
The blurred red light dripped till green,
And we overtook another browned face.
Till ejecting ourselves with smoothed down suits, below the IFC.

On some Saturday I finished attending to the numbers on my tiny screen,
Looked up from my tepid, sugar saturated coffee;
Through glass defined by rubber seals, marking the outline of this,
Street silencing shield, an old man, folded at odd angles,
On the rough pavement faced towards the ever close horizon,
His feet rubbed the concrete, his bare soles gathering scabs and cigarette butts,
Uncleared trash, till our eyes crossed,
And an eternal guilt had me fishing for my Ipad,
Some cool touch sensitive screen
To deliver me from this urban dream.

Flashfiction for Scifriday: Alone

What follows is a 100 word piece of flash/micro fiction for SCIFRIDAY! From the following blog:

http://chriswhitewrites.com/2014/03/21/scifriday-1/

I hope more people take a shot at this!

Picture below was inspiration, and then the story follows. I went over a little (112 words), alas. 

Alone

In ancient times it was called a railway, a sort of mass transit system. Now it was a strip of verdant beauty, a green path stretching forward. Luke took off his smart-boots, and for the first time, felt grass between his toes.

“Follow at 3 meters.”

“Okay Luke.” Came the voice, programmed to sound just like Julienne had.

It still caused Luke’s pulse to skip, her voice that followed him across such a gulf of space, and time.

Here, on Terra, alone on this graveyard of a world, Luke would spend the rest of his days. To dwell on loss, of his home in her, and all their homes that once were here.

 

Flash Fiction: After he yells HI!

After he yells HI!

Over the nightclub music He will yell “HI!”

She’ll laugh at his awkwardness and then they’ll talk, dance, exchange numbers. He’ll see her for dinner, where they’ll make in-jokes; finishing off each other off in his apartment. She’ll teach him how to cook and he’ll show her his sketches, and together they’ll rescue a kitten. Till sick of sharing it, all three move in together, watching cartoons till the mornings.

They’ll get married with sand between their bare toes, somewhere far away from this club.

As none of that happened except in his head, so he finished his drink and left.

Flash Fiction: Lost Pens

“Demons aren’t real.” he told his nephew, Tim. “They are just made up, like on the T.V. Someone made the whole story up.” This is what he gets for playing video games whilst Tim has unlimited access to late night T.V. “Look, someone made up the story- it’s not true. Like how I make up my drawings. You know, like Bravewing or Spiderman.

Tim said: “You said you SAW Spiderman.”

This is what he gets.

Tim continued: “And nobody in the movie believed the boy there either. THEY all said it was all made up.”

There are two entities, somewhere in space and time, watching this moment in the video game playing artist’s head, and laughing. The first one is large and powerful and can exist in many places at once. “That was funny little one. Eerie even. But still it is a minor inconvenience, the function you perform.” The smaller of the two laughs, looks at the larger entity and says:

“It must be nice being created by people’s doubts in their own abilities. Such a common, wide-ranging, hell- you could even say ‘universal’ insecurity- and that was a pun.”

“Hah. A pun. yes. I am what I am, and I do what I do, which makes these mortals…do not. Get it? They don’t because I am!” The larger one continued to laugh. The smaller one would have rolled his eyes if he had any.

“Yes you truly are one of the most terrible. But let me show you something.” The smaller so-called immortal brought their view to a series of comic books, paintings, sketches and illustrations. “Bravewing was only the first hero he would have given birth to.”

“Would have?”

“Indeed. These works are only potentials and were part of the previous time stream till I- humble and limited as I am- did MY work.”

And he showed the larger demon of self-doubt his collection- millions of pencils, paintbrushes, and pens.

The little one said: “You might be the demon of self-doubt, but I, limited as I am, can still cause physical rents in their universe, can still take their pens and brushes- they fear me, they fear that their stationary disappears into a black hole! It’s brilliant; do you have any idea how few of us can actually affect the physical world? But because they think it all disappears there is no evidence left that I broke any of their laws! Nothing at all.”

“Yes, very nice little one. But the non-physical world can be very important to sentients, as you can see.”

“Yeah phenomenal, you’re huge. But you know what, you know what I’ve prevented from ever happening?”

And he showed the larger another series of creations that would not be- books on shelves in libraries that never were, music unrecorded- forgotten as musicians searched for their instruments, passing moments not captured by cameras. The larger one regarded his smaller companion: “How?”

“The trick is to be precise. To choose your targets well- the ones who are right on the cusp, right on the edge- the ones who give up after a few minutes of not finding the pen and go back to playing video games. All it takes is a few more minutes and its over. Their will dies, and so does their work, and sometimes if you’re lucky…their ideas too.”

***

I wrote this after losing yet another pen, just as I had to write something down. It seems to happen with alarming frequency- and I suspect I’m not the only one. Placing pens and pencils all over my home and person sometimes helps but once and awhile that little bastard somehow finds a way to disappear those too.

Short story: Afterwards

Afterwards

The room I was in was for waiting, and the person that stood over me was saying: “Ray Gupta, Peter will see you now.”

I said “Oh.” and accompanied her through a glass door that I could have sworn was from work. On the other side was a maze of cubicles. The sounds of phones ringing, of hurried typing, so much of it was recognizable. The hundreds of cubicles were not. “What office is this? Did I make an appointment or…”

She interrupted by stabbing my shoe with the tip of her heel. I screamed and no one seemed to care. She explained: “Sorry but I have to hurt you if you ask me questions.”

I almost asked why.

She motioned me to follow, so I did to a cubicle with a man inside and a single chair.

Peter said: “Sit!”

I held my foot and again the question pulsed: Why?

Peter said: “It’s your head! You tell me! Maybe it’s a metaphor- think of it as pain guiding you here, or something. All questions lead to suffering. Etcetera. Besides you’re dead, literally, so don’t worry too much.”

He had a point.

Peter said: “Actually, you still have a little bit you have to worry about, or at least some choices that need to be made, concerning your severance package.

Before I could phrase another question he answered: “Look, just go with it. Focus on how comfortable this environment is. How familiar. Don’t ask questions, it’s too late for all that. And don’t worry about the people you recognize. It’s perfectly normal.”

Peter got down on his knees, on the computer brought up a spreadsheet. “Let’s see now.” He said. Over his shoulder I saw tiny black marks, thousands of words in a too small font. I croaked: “Peter…can I…leave…please?

Without looking back he said: “Don’t worry you’ll be gone soon. You just need to go through your review, and poof, you’ll be done.”

“What do you mean…gone?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

So I was going to die, or I was already dead, or oblivion was next. Peter said: “Exactly! Here, we’re going to start now, so you understand why you get what’s coming to you next. Unless you prefer we skip this?”

And expedite my non-existence? Fuck that. Peter said “Typical” and brought up Youtube.

“You have internet here?”

“No it’s an illusion. We have something better.” He typed: Lowest point before 30.

One hit only. In the screenshot I saw myself lying on a bathroom floor, two plastic prescription bottles in one hand, a Gideon’s bible in the other. Peter pressed play and I beat my head bloody with the bible. I watched myself tear out random pages, terrified of Peter witnessing me committing what was probably sacrilege. I tried to explain: “I didn’t know, okay? Sorry, so sorry, I didn’t know the bible was…I mean I’m not even Christian!”

“Just watch. We’ll turn up the sound.” He did and we heard a voice speaking, though the high-definition image of my mouth remained shut. I heard my voice, the way it sounds normally, inside my own head, say: “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t get up again. No reason to. No one to see me rise. No point in doing anything.” Then the tears started. “Fucking lonely stupid loser. Fucking FAILURE of a man. Deserves nothing. Deserves to die.” There was a murmuring sound then, too quiet to make out.

Peter said: “Ah, need to turn this part up, it’s a background thought, very hard to hear.” And he fiddled with the controls till we could make out what I thought, which was: “Beccy cares. Arjun cares. Other people suffer too. Don’t give up on them.” Then blasting out, so loud I covered my ears:

“JUST TAKE THE PILLS AND SLEEP THE GOOD SLEEP REST FINALLY REST FINALLY FUCKING REST…” and Peter muted it.
With the volume down I looked like somebody lying on a bathroom floor, clearly miserable, but seemingly doing nothing for an hour or so. Then with the volume up I heard myself find hope and choose to flush the pills down the toilet. Peter showed me other scenes after, and how they all linked, one into the other. He watched me watch myself being decent to strangers, showed me how I affected then, how their lives were indirectly improved by the hope I had found on that cold floor. He showed me how my kindness had been kindled by suffering, and how with my everyday actions I saved people- for eons he showed me videos of them remembering what I’d done or said and thus finding the strength to get back up themselves.

He showed me all the ways I’d suffered and the empathy inculcated by years of torment.

Afterwards I was ready. I told Peter I could die now.

He told me to wait, that we had to go into his office. On the way I overheard someone say “Sex is good, fuck, sex is GREAT, but the money, it’s empty- so let’s try having less.”

Inside Peter’s office I wondered: Do I get heaven now? Or is this it?

He said I would be gone, one way or another. I thought I was supposed to be Hindu, and that this was not the karma I had been taught about.

“Don’t worry Ray!” Peter said. “All that’s left is this…” And he produced a blank paper pad and a pen. “Now Ray, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, you did good. As far as this department is concerned you did good with what you had.”

“So I won then?” I asked, the tears finally pouring out in this absurd and twisted version of the afterlife.

“Yeah you did great Ray, real super. So, here’s the deal.” He put the pen next to the paper, pushed both towards me.

“Write your own cheque Ray. You decide the circumstances of your next life. Completely up to you! For example…that…ah…K-pop guy you heard outside- you want to be like him? Sex, all the sex you’d ever want, or money, security, fame. You want it, you got it. A soul mate maybe? Meet her, or him by the time you’re say…twenty-three? Done and done. You get the idea. Write it out Ray, and your next life, that’s it.”

So I stopped crying and wrote something down.

Handed Peter back the paper.

He stared at the three words I’d written:

One more time.

I explained: “I want to suffer the same way.”

“Ray? I don’t think you understand how this works…”

“No, I do.”

“You people…Okay. You’re the boss”

We left the office and I wandered the cubicles for awhile, watching others, hearing their last requests.

Questions came whilst we walked back to the front door, which Peter held open for me. Will I remember any of this? Is this real? Does it matter? I looked in front of me at the darkness, said “Goodbye Peter.”

“Only for now. But I have to ask…why are you choosing pain, again?”

“Because I think it’ll make me kind.”

It was the last thing I said to him. Never got to hear what he thought about it.

Flash Fiction Medley

I was reading about black holes today, which put me in a certain kind of mood. The Japanese have a word for it “Yugen” . That and I saw this picture (warning 10 MB picture), which is a super-high-res image of a fraction of the stars in our own galaxy.

You know I’ve always thought there was something deeply wrong with me. Partially because of the two links above. I’ve had people get very red-faced, very loud and and sure about certain ideas they have, including ideas that are really quite fantastic, compelling stories, like God and the Afterlife and Retirement, when the very fact that all those stars out there exist reduces so much of all of that noise coming out of people’s mouths to be….

Something less.

Not that I know any better. I am so awfully aware of how little I know that I indulge myself in a congruently complimentary hobby/passion/desperate need: to make things up. If I had it my way I would be a professional-maker-upper. I don’t want to call them novels or fiction, I want to call them stories. That’s all they are in the end.

In that spirit I’m writing this flash fiction medley which is is comprised of ideas that have taken root somewhere inside of me, that I have been quite an abysmal parent to, always claiming tomorrow I will finally write them all out, and do them justice. However in light (or lack thereof) of super-massive black holes of infinitely large mass and infinitely small volume I will deny my perfectionism and just let the ideas flow, like so much kaleidoscopic vomit.

Starting with The Third Planet Is Sure They’re Being Watched By An Eye In The Sky (because I love Modest Mouse and because Edward Snowden). This would have/will be/should have been a story about an obscure band with some average to pretty decent instrumentalists who acquire, randomly at a party, the skills of a front-girl and lyricist of dubious reputation- she has an obsession with psychedelics and is rarely seen sober, a sort of neo-hippy that others dismiss as pretentious.

Her name is Rachel and her parents are rich and thus the band plays at her place, which is austere and owned by her single father, the too serious CEO of some impenetrably dull hedge fund.

She writes these strange lyrics and sings in an off-beat falsetto with the band wishing she sounded more like Haylee Williams but they can’t deny the poetry, the way in which her words are so enigmatic, flow so easily, and how she never ever writes them without being at the very least stoned, if not tripping all over everybody’s balls.

The band is obscure, they get some hits on Xanga- using the new-fangled internet (did I not mention this all takes place in the 80’s?), play a few concerts but never make it big. They are torn apart by the tragic suicide of their front-girl, who falls in love with the gay guitarist that found her at the party and can’t hack the impossibility of it all.

The band falls apart, the lyrics left online.

Till they are found by a certain boy decades later. He fails to find anyone to take credit for them. On 4chan him and a dedicated few begin to form a subculture over these lyrics on account of how eerily accurate they are when it comes to historical events in the 21st century.

Funny thing about these lyrics. They are strangely prophetic. Very much like an 80’s version of Nostradamus, Rachel had somehow written down these hard to understand, rolling lines, that all seemed to come true. So this subculture spawns a member, who didn’t show her tits then GTFO, who becomes, through some twist of fate (in other words a realty TV show contestant), super-famous, ga ga famous, and after singing the autotuned songs of successful song writers eventually releases her own album- remixes of Rachel’s lines, catchier now with a bit of dubstep to underline the drop.

The last song in the album contains lines that suggest that this was what was always going to happen anyway, and whilst scholars spend a goodly amount of time debunking and arguing against the prophetic nature of all the other songs (not unlike a an 80’s remixed Nostradamus)  it is very difficult to argue against the rather explicit nature of these final lines that talk about another girl from another time when information is far more free taking her words and making them widely known.

See why I don’t finish these stories? That one could go one for awhile.

There is also Sonder, a story I really keep telling myself I’ll write, which is meant to be about a single day in the life of this person, and how it ends suddenly, and how although there is all this pain in his life- a divorce in process, a job that does not treat him so well- he values the time he has waiting, at the bus, or at lunch, the in between times, where he listens to these fantastic pod casts that teach him all about natural selection, or the general theory of relativity; space and time and history.

And at the end of this day, through random chance he is struck by a car, on his to the operating theater- with his broken family and wife united by the tragedy, all around him wishing him well with superstitious but well-meaning platitudes and the invocation of a plethora of conflicting Gods; then, in that gurney with the tube in his mouth he starts to imagine.

He imagines zooming out, of that hospital, and appreciating the hundreds of lives in the same building- like disparate atoms in a gas cloud all heading towards their own destinies, all of equal importance, all comprising a whole. From their he zooms out to the city block and wonders at the various animals, the sparrows and cockroaches that have evolved to fill their various nooks in the shadows where tigers once stalked- the strange ways in which life has continues to reproduce itself and that trajectories through time those species have taken…he zooms out again to the whole island, considers the geological movements, the plate tectonics of the island breaking off, reforming, the volcanic violence that led to it’s original creation- and he zooms out even more to consider the earth, wrapped in it’s atmosphere against the void, this pale blue dot with all the variety, all the life, all the water and wealth of chaos- and zooms out again, to the solar system and the strange series of collisions that led to the planets, the life cycle of Sol, and again to the galaxy with it’s billions upon billions of sisters to Sol and all that potential, the potential for all those hospital tragedies, and again to all the billions of other galaxies and the sheer amount of other things, the shadow of infinity- and without God, and without answers, with one single tear rolling down his face, the man is content in the face of death. Without words, without actions, with his imagination alone he traversed all of space and time.

The definition of Sonder.

The anesthesia dulls him to sleep and he dies on the table and his imagination is lost to an invisible past only the reader might have appreciated.

Let’s go for the hat trick, one time, with my final story-yet-unwritten: Get Krunk

Which is quite simply about a man who does not drink much, or dream much, whose life is turned somewhat inside out by the collapse of his company, a sudden thing that discards him, and all the things he thought were important, and leads him to a bar his fellow workers always frequent and he never did, where they regale each other with happy memories he missed in his endearing naivete, and how he drinks quite heavily that night.

He stumbles out of the cab home too early near a football field where the lights of the stadium hypnotize him- shadows, young, dance underneath those sharp lights, and he stumbles towards them driven by a mysterious line “get Krunk, get Krunk”…and he finds himself in a party for high-schooler’s, and he joins.

This man he looks so young and his askew tie and stained suit mark him as cool among all these teens. The story would have been about the lie he lives for one insane, magical night, where he tries to relive his past, and would have turned on a girl, the kind of girl he wishes he would have had, and how he realizes at the end how late it is, when, she brandishes her fake ID with pride.

I’m not certain what he would have done during that party but I think it would have had something to do with making a heartfelt speech about the future for these young ones, and something about how he befriends a supposed younger version of himself, who really is not like him at all- and that realization that he can’t even guide himself, because of course there is no one like him- not truly- that truth hurts.

I probably would have ended with the girl and whether he has sex with her or not because that shit sells.

Three’s a crowd apparently so I’ll cut the medley short. It’s kind of freeing to let these stories out so I might do this again soon. It’s also a form of cheating which appeals to me.

The End.