Terrible Analogies

An ongoing experiment where I give myself five minutes to write something.  Don’t think about anything.  Just write.  When done, walk away and come back later to correct any glaring errors.

Graduation

A soft summer sun shone down on the football field, warming the oaken lectern as it stood forlornly at center stage.  Rows of folding chairs had been laid out in a square grid on the football field, ready to accept this year’s class of graduates.  The cap and gown orders had finally arrived and were awaiting pickup by the senior class.  Yearbooks had been passed out and were even now busily being signed by friends and schoolmates, most of whom would never see each other after today’s ceremonies.

Similar activities such as these were playing out at schools across the nation today.

In the main office, teachers and staff were busy filling out year-end forms and filing away last minute paperwork.  The scene is busy with teachers anxious to wrap up yet another year, with everyone looking forward to summer vacation.  The absence of students and their dramatic lives.  Peace and quiet.

And in a far corner, away from the bustling flurry of activity, Mrs. Forrest stands idly in front of the wall-mounted inboxes, dumbly thumbing the corner of a small form made of thick card stock bearing the name of ‘Jeff Blauer’.

Through glassy eyes focused at a far off point, she remembers with a slight smile the essay from Jeff Blauer, the one required from all candidates applying for Class President.  It’s the only one she truly remembers reading this year.  In it, he detailed his difficult upbringing.  His divorced parents.  Their terrible financial situation.  And how, through it all, his mother made sure that education was a driving force in Jeff’s life.  How she showed nothing but love and compassion for her son, encouraging him to be a positive, outgoing person with empathy towards others and a strong will to overcome any obstacle placed before him.

And through sheer force of will and loving guidance from his mother, Jeff succeeded.  Through his junior and senior year of school, Jeff played wide receiver on the Varsity team, was a member of the debate team, served as the class Historian, and earned grades high enough to warrant not only the position of class valedictorian, but also the attention of Stanford University.

Staring down at the form between her fingers, now dog-eared and wrinkled, Mrs. Forrest silently reads the header for the tenth time: STUDENT WITHDRAWN: DECEASED.

She sighs, glides her fingertips lightly across the surface of the card one last time, and slides it gently into the ‘Administrative’ inbox.

An ongoing experiment where I give myself five minutes to write something.  Don’t think about anything.  Just write.  When done, walk away and come back later to correct any glaring errors.

Forgive the length of this week’s offering.  I was having too much fun on this one, and plan to expand on it in the future.  Perhaps I should have called this week’s story “Ten Minute Fiction”?

Enjoy?

Dead Man

Last year, I died.

At least that’s what the doctors tell me.

I remember waking up on a cold metallic table, buffered on either side by lifeless bodies.  A man wearing a bright flashlight on his forehead was hovering over me, clutching a scalpel.  It was the brightness of the light creating a hazy red curtain through my closed eyelids which startled me, waking me from a strangely peaceful sleep, forcing me to sit up with a start.

That poor fellow with the scalpel fell backwards to the floor with a meaty thump, looked up at me in terror, then scrambled clumsily to his feet and disappeared through a pair of swinging metal doors.  Minutes later I was surrounded by dozens of doctors, each taking my pulse, looking into my eyes, taking my temperature.  They huddled together in small, tight groups, exchanging fevered looks and wild, animated conjectures.

I demanded to know how a patient under their care could find himself in the morgue.

“That’s…something we’re trying to understand,” one of them said, nervously thumbing at his charts.

“What?” I asked incredulously.

“Sir, well, we’re not able to detect a pulse.  Your pulse.  Your core temperature is dropping.  Your pupils are unresponsive.  You, sir, are not technically ‘living’.  We’re damned if we understand how it is that you’re…conscious.”

I assured him that I was feeling fine.  Quite fit, actually.  And that I would like to leave this morbid room if only someone would fetch me my clothes.

And then I heard a commotion outside.  Someone shouting something over and over again.  The anguished cry increased in strength until finally it crashed through the doors, where I could see that it belonged to a beautiful woman with short black hair and eyes of brilliant, verdigris green, who was clutching something tightly to her chest.

She shouted again, speaking a name unfamiliar to me.

Rushing over, ignoring my nakedness, she wrapped her arms around me. “David,” she said through her tears, “David, I thought I lost you!”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered in her ear, “but…do I know you?”

Dropping a pile of neatly-folded clothes to the ground, she pulled away from me with a quizzical look.  Her drowning eyes locked on to mine, searching for recognition.  ”It’s me, David.  Sharon.  Your wife?”

Not remembering ever having married, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.  Luckily the doctors stepped in and quickly ushered her out of the room.  One of them picked up the clothes and nervously handed them to me.

I was surprised to find them a perfect fit.

I spent the next few days under close observation in a private room on the top floor of the hospital.  Nurses served me trays of bland food, but I found that I had no appetite.  With a nonfunctioning circulatory system large, unsightly purple bruises formed on my legs.  At one point my joints froze stiff, but slowly began loosening up once again.  My feet swelled, requiring somebody to purchase new shoes for me.  I slowly paced between my bed and the window, growing more and more anxious with each passing day.

The police eventually showed up, but didn’t know what to do.  “Being dead,” they said, “isn’t a crime.”

The doctors, unsure what more could be done, eventually relented and let me leave the hospital on my own accord.

You would think being dead could be the worst thing that could happen to a person.  Well, let me tell you, it’s only the beginning of a painful existence.

Like a turtle finding its way back to the shore on which it was born, I showed up for work the next morning but was told that I had been fired.  Nobody wanted to work with a corpse.

I tracked down the woman who claimed to be my wife, but according to a note tacked up on the front door, she didn’t want to see me.  She had moved out of our home.  Claimed I scared her.  That I wasn’t the man she married.  Given my current physical state, I couldn’t feign surprise at this bit of news.

The bank told me that Sharon withdrew my life savings and closed my accounts.  “She completed the appropriate paperwork, providing us with a copy of your death certificate,” the teller told me before averting her eyes upon realizing the absurdity of her statement.

The bastards even repossessed my home, claiming that because it was in my name, and given the fact that I was deceased voided the mortgage contract, that the bank now owned the house.

They told me this straight to my dead, disbelieving face.

About this time I had become a sort of cultural oddity.  A minor celebrity.  Television producers invited me to appear on talk shows.  Doctors begged to study me.  I was even asked to join one of those uptight French circuses where they wanted me to recite stories of my time in the afterlife while costumed performers in colorful tights tumbled around, reenacting some of the more salacious bits.

People all over the world wanted to see me.  Fervent believers claimed I was touched by the hand of God.  Others condemned me as a devil.  Some saw me as the harbinger of an encroaching Armageddon.

Some, naturally, were just curious.  They wanted to see me.  Touch me.  Talk with the world’s only living dead man.

But I wanted none of that.

Never hungry, I had no need of food.  Never tiring, I no longer required sleep.  Having little feeling in my body, I no longer suffered from ordinary discomforts.  And what good is money when you need nothing more than the clothes on your back for modesty’s sake?

I decided to drop out.   To disappear from prying eyes as best I could.  To begin walking.  To keep walking.  To never stop.  To turn my unexpected misfortune into an opportunity.

After all, when you’re already dead, what in this world is there to fear?

But on a cold mountain highway I soon discovered that there are things out there that even the dead should dread…

An ongoing experiment where I give myself five minutes to write something.  Don’t think about anything.  Just write.  When done, walk away and come back later to correct any glaring errors.

Enjoy?

The Man In The Moon

One cloudless summer night, my father asked me if I could see the man in the moon.

Never having looked for him before, I tilted my head back and squinted my eyes in the direction of that glowing orb above us. In the cratered, pockmarked surface of that ghostly sphere, between the radiating spokes of that large crater and the shore of the creeping shadow what looks like an ocean, I saw the profile of a leaping sharp-toothed jaguar, an adrift sailing vessel with tattered sails lost at sea, and a broken horse burdened down with too heavy of a load. In my eyes I saw a double axe head anxious to bite into the flesh of a proud tree, a panting dog begging for a kind pet from its master, and even a cat mewing at the blackness of an indifferent night sky.

But I couldn’t see the man in the moon.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “Plain as day, it is.”

“That a good boy, son,” my father replied, beaming with pride. “It’s the ones who don’t see ‘em that you have to keep a sharp eye on. They be the ones with no imagination. Dead inside they are, what can’t see the obvious, like that old man up there.”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed, convinced that my father would look down upon his bloodline in disgrace what don’t see that elusive man staring down at him from up high in the heavens. As sure as a damp round won’t fire did I see on that pale surface a wailing prehistoric sea serpent on hunt for slippery prey, a glorious cornucopia overflowing with a freshly harvested crop, and the lumbering footprints of long dead wandering giants traversing the dusty, ancient surface.

But that old man, he still eluded my sight.

“You know, son? These nights we spend together, they’re a-might pleasin’ to me.”

“Me too, pa. Me too,” I said, turning my head towards him ’til my eyes just cleared the ridge of my knee.

But my father, he ‘twern’t there. Where he sat ’twas just a granite gravestone where he asked to be rested.

I reached out and ran my fingers across its rough surface and over the chisled letters of his name, wiping away the wetness streaming down my cheeks as I stood up.

“I gotta go,” I said, turning towards my horse and brushing the desert dust from my chaps. “I miss you, pa. Will see you next month.”

And I slowly rode away, not wanting to upset a father with the ugly truth that his own son had no imagination what can’t see the man in the moon.

An ongoing experiment where I give myself five minutes to write something.  Don’t think about anything.  Just write.  When done, walk away and come back later to correct any glaring errors.

This week I wanted to write something more uplifting than my usual fare, but when I sat down this came out. My apologies.

The Attack

The sun was slowly settling into the Pacific, casting brilliant spikes of yellow and gold across the smooth, glassy surface of the still waters.

Walking slowly hand in hand, the two lovers matched step for step as they made their way along the railing, pausing occasionally to steal a kiss.  A treasured smile.  A knowing look.

Sharing a love so complete they viewed the world through glistening, shrink-wrapped eyes, oblivious to everything save for the warmth between their cupped and interlaced hands as they walked the length of the bridge.

Pausing again, smiling idiotically, they exchanged a kiss familiar to only connoisseurs of the art.  Pulling each other close they whispered, “I love you,” and slowly, like a sapling bending to a persistent wind, leaned against the cold railing, and toppled over into the void below.

Never letting go, they whispered tiny secrets into each other’s ear, sealing each with a kiss.

He: Lips brushing against the softness of her neck.

She: Wishing that this moment would last forever.

Rolling.  Listing.  Pirouetting.  They plunged ever downward, gripped in the unforgiving certainty of gravity.

One more breathless expression of love.  One more reaffirming grasp, entwined in each other’s arms.  One last kiss.

Locked in embrace, they struck the hard water and disappeared under its glistening surface forever.

Before the rippling of the water that marked their departure from this world could subside, erasing any evidence that two lovers had once been here, another heavy splash could be heard.

Then another.

And another.

From up above bodies fell, two by two, clasped together arm in arm.  The tide, at first a trickle, soon became a roaring cascade.  A crushing torrent of tumbling bodies too numerous to count.

And they continued to arrive.  Crossing the bridge in their hundreds, fated couples repeated identical scenes of love.  Devotion.  Sacrifice.

This was the day that signaled the beginning of what nearly destroyed us.

This was the day that we went to war.

This was the day we discovered that we were not, unfortunately, alone in the universe.

I’ve been hard at work on my book once again.  Can’t seem to be able to break away from this tale of strange people doing strange things.

Forgive the roughness of this offering.  It’s from an unedited section that I’ll be re-visiting sometime in the future on second/third re-write…

Donnie eyes the familiar forms and fills them out with the necessary lies: Birth date, weight, height, social security number, medical history, family history, emergency point of contact.  It’s the same required information at every location, only the name of the test is different.  This one reads “National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: Hemorrhagic Fever Vaccine Case Study 5.65a”.

Completing them, he hands them back to the emotionless nurse behind the counter who unclips the carbon forms and tosses them on a pile in a plastic bin on her desk.  Nobody bothers to double-check the information given.  “Please, follow me,” She tells Donnie, pointing him to the door to his left.

Turning towards the door and the nurse is already there, holding it open, motioning him with a slow tilt of her head towards the end of a long hall where a large bald man with rolls of skin running down the back of his neck stands.  This man, he doesn’t wear a nametag.  Opening the door he tells Donnie to take a seat.  That the doctor will be here in a minute.

Fast forward, and Donnie’s gripping the steering wheel of his beat up Chevy Caprice with one hand and swiping at the sweat from his face with his other like he’s swatting at an insistent insect.  An electrode still stuck to the side of his neck.  Crossing the bridge headed back for Galveston, his first instinct is to run home.  To get away from the noise.

Guiding the dented front end of his car into his assigned spot Donnie cuts the engine and sits in the darkness for a few minutes, squeezing the steering wheel with both hands, his head doubled over the back of his seat.  Eyes closed.  Sweat dripping from the edges of his ears, each drop pounding out a rhythm on the cracked pleather next to his neck.

The tests weren’t unusual, Donnie thinks.  The shots.  The examinations.  The questions.  The bad food.  All standard.

When the staff stopped showing up, calling in sick or going home early, when the doctors were concerned that the vaccine being tested was causing an adverse reaction in the subjects, that something unmentionable was happening to them, that’s when Donnie thought that this might finally be the one.

With the yelling and the screaming and the squeaking of shoes running up and down the halls, Donnie laid back in his bed, with arms at his side palms up.  Relaxed.  At peace.  Closing his eyes he willed himself open to the sickness.  In his mind’s eye Donnie could envision his veins enlarging, his heart pumping strong, giving the vaccine an open super highway though his circulatory system, allowing unfettered access to his soft insides, wishing for organ failure or internal hemorrhaging on a massive, incurable scale.

And Donnie smiled.  Soft and innocent.  Calm in the eye of the darkest storm.  Zen and the art of assisted suicide; his prayers were finally being answered.

But that’s when Abbey crashes through his door, locking it from the inside.  She’s telling him to get out of bed.  Put some fucking pants on.  That they’re coming for him next.

Donnie sees that in her hand Abbey holds a cell phone, and he can hear a familiar voice shouting from it.

It sounds oddly enough like his brother.