Tagged: fiction
I’ve Had More Fun – Part 2
Jim pounded more slowly now. The endorphins were wearing off, and his hands finally began to hurt.
He couldn’t stop watching her–watching them–lay there, likely dead. His tears ran dry and his wail fell silent as he let his forehead come to rest on the bloody glass. He shut his eyes and hoped to wake up from a nightmare. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to see the pink cloud rapidly ascending to towards the ceiling and then towards the two vents that were specifically designed to be used if there was a mishap. Not entirely the same as waking from a nightmare (though a close second), he saw the light over the door turn green and heard the familiar click of the door unlocking. Not waiting for anyone or anything to stop him, he opened the door and rushed to where Tara lay.
He reached for her suit and in touching it, he collapsed in immobilizing pain. The chemical agent was out of the air, but not out of the suit, it seemed. He kind of wished he hadn’t destroyed his hands as he stared up at the ceiling, becoming the sixth victim of the mishap. What can only be described as the friendliest looking firemen imaginable suddenly appeared. To Jim, who laid there in agonizing pain, they looked like a cross between his childhood mother and Kurt Russell from Backdraft, shaky cheeks and all. Jim counted at least fifteen of them as he was lifted onto a gurney and rolled from the room.
The last thing he saw as they wheeled him away from the danger was the glove-wearing rescuers cutting Tara and the others out of their protective suits.
I’ve Had More Fun
“I’ve had more fun in my life,” she said, attempting to rise from the prone position in her XB-2134 chem-warfare suit. She understood why it had to be so heavy, but at the moment, she couldn’t believe they never trained for this. She was on her back and knew she couldn’t sit up. That meant she needed to roll over. The trouble was that the arms of the suit were so heavy that the designers built into the suit a feature which took some of the weight off of the wearer’s shoulders. The feature prevented the arms from lowering past 45 degrees. In effect, they were sticking out, both to the side and front. Through her helmet’s face shield, she could only see a slight cloud of pink smoke thickening and the ceiling. “No more effing around, Tara, you have to get out of here,” she told herself.
Up until she found herself on her back, she had been working on a new chemical weapon and been payed very well to do so. Rocking back and forth, back and forth, she finally made it to her stomach. She was on her stomach, arms extended over her head. “I’m not sure this is any better,” she thought. For the first time since she was knocked off her feet she felt a pang of fear. And now on her stomach she couldn’t see anything but the floor. It was smooth cement. She had never really looked at the floor before. It reminded her of the skating rink where she used to play roller hockey with her brothers.
Deciding that perhaps her side was a better position to start from, she rocked and rocked some more, gaining more and more momentum. She did it. She made it to her right side and was able to use her extended right arm to keep her from rolling back on her stomach. It was then that she noticed no one had said anything over the suits comm system since she woke up. Scanning the room from her new vantage point, she saw her four co-workers struggling to stand back up just as she was. There was no noise beside her own breathing. And the pink cloud was not only thick now, but starting to attack the suit.
“Jim! Jim, do you read me?” she shouted, hoping that anyone listening could hear her distress. She realized what part of the room she was looking at, and quickly decided to at least turn towards the containing door, with its one small window. She had to rotate clockwise about her right shoulder or else she’d end up back on her stomach. Feeling as foolish as she imagined she looked, she began to make progress. But not faster than the pink cloud. As she began to make out the hinge to the door, the chemical came nearer and nearer to eating a hole in her suit.
“Help! Anybody!” she screamed, totally aware of what was coming. She kicked her feet harder and harder.
Outside the door, Jim’s hands bled. It wasn’t until they smashed against the program director’s teeth over and over again that he even became aware of the blood. But now that he heard the squishy sound of pummeled flesh smacking against an immovable object, he realized the deep red substance that obscured the window he watched her through was his own blood. He frantically tried to wipe the blood away with his fingers. Making little progress, he saw Tara and the others speed up their movements the way ants walk faster on a frying pan over a flame. Then, just like the ants, everyone stopped moving at the exact same time. Everyone except Jim.
Caught!
“Heyyyy!” said H-, her head rotating up in order to look him in the eyes. Slowly peering into his soul, she couldn’t stop her bottom lip from quivering. Her face flushed red, and she loosed a single, crippling tear. “Why did you do that? Why did you take off my band-aid?”
“H-, come on now. You saw that it was already starting to come off on its own. How long had it been on for anyhow? Two days? You didn’t even have a bleeding oww-ee,” he said, meeting her eye-contact and rubbing her shoulder. “Plus, I keep telling you that band-aids aren’t stickers-”
“Look! It’s red. Can I have a band-aid to put on it?” she asked, her tone revealing that she believed she had presented sound reasoning.
“No, H-, you cannot have a band-aid to cover the mark left by leaving the last band-aid on for too long,” he winced. “Can we stop talking about band-aids for the rest of the night at least? Please?” he asked, appealing to her well-developed sense of give-and-take.
“Okay. But tomorrow morning I want another adult band-aid,” she asserted, her persistence approaching a level generally reserved for the possessed children in career-making horror classics.
“We’ll see. For now, let’s get back to bed so we can continue reading about King Aaathuh,” he said.
****
“Daa-ddy! Daa-ddy!” sounded his own personal alarm clock exactly twenty minutes early.
Climbing out of his bed, he opened her door and let her know that it wasn’t quite time to get up yet.
“Can I play quietly for a little bit?” she offered.
“Sure. I just need twenty more minutes,” he said.
Only a minute passing until guilt overcame him, he reappeared in the living room, much to her surprise.
“I’m going to rest a little out here while you play,” he informed her.
“Rest a little?”
“Yeah, rest a little. Here on the couch. It’s not time to get up yet, but when my phone goes off, I will. You can play though.”
“Okay.”
No sooner than he had closed his eyes, he heard her walking towards the bathroom. Eyes still closed, he asked, “H-? Where are you going?”
The entire essence of her being still moving forward, her corporeal body came to a halt. He opened his eyes just in time to see an empty face betray that all available energy was being redirected into deciding how best to play this one out. No less sudden than when light vanquishes darkness, her widening eyes and resultant raised eyebrows signaled that she had made her decision. Turning towards him, she slowly nodded her head in the vertical plane, raised her index finger, and casually informed him, “I’m just going to get one band-aid.”
Winn the Great, Redux
“Of course he’s a doctor. Of course,” Pete thought to himself, the online search result’s reflection illuminating his glass’s lenses. As he thought back to first meeting Winn, now Dr. Winn, all those years ago, shame overwhelmed him. The poor kid had done nothing wrong, unless taking an elective math class two years earlier than normal was a sin.
He remembered seeing Winn sitting alone on the first day of statistics class. An elective, the class’s description and teacher only seduced enough students to fill just over half the seats. This made it all the more easy for the band of underachieving smart-ass seniors to gain the strength numbers offer so readily. More than in response to the layout of the room, though, these students acted in response to the primal fear of the unknown, a fear provoked by a spindly limbed, one-size-too-big-t-shirt wearing, buzz-cut sporting, wire-rimmed-glasses-at-the-time-of-contacts bearing pasty white kid who didn’t seem even remotely aware that he would always have the upper hand. He would always have the upper hand not because of his intelligence, though his brain always operated near-capacity notwithstanding it originated from a culture infatuated with lowering standards, no. It was because he was free. Free from posturing, free from politicking, free from maneuvering. While everyone around him struggled to fit in, he simply stayed the course. He embodied Mark Twain’s “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
Despite having to display his driver’s license to prove the spelling of his name to the groupthink, Winn never lowered himself to counter-attack. And his focus never faltered. Almost a machine, one day he was tasked by the seniors to further elucidate a particular problem’s solution. He approached the chalkboard as if unaware that public math was never good math, and proceeded to slowly draw a for-all-intents-and-purposes perfect circle with the chalk. The display silenced everyone, until the sound of two palms rapidly and repeatedly coming together overwhelmed the smack that accompanies jaws quickly dropping.
The highlight of that semester, however, came when Winn surprised everyone, including Mrs. Tietz, with a piece of mail. Antagonistic, he was not. Yet, when the opportunity came to prove that Nielsen ratings did not come from set families as she thought, but instead from invited and bribed self-reporting as Pete knew, Winn took the side of the truth. And in presenting the envelope, dollar bill still packaged within, he not only climbed the social ladder, but advanced hope. Long live Winn!
Winn the Great
A kid who could draw a perfect circle free-hand on a chalkboard deserved better. But we were bad and he was good, so he pulled it out for everyone to see.
Holding his driver’s license in his right hand, he said, “See. Told ya.”
Winn’s problem was not so much his weird first name, but talent. He had too much of it. As only a sophomore, there he sat in our senior level math class. This was high school. Applying oneself was never a good idea. I often wondered how many of us really saw how special Winn was. And I envied Winn for his patience with us, with the morons. But that didn’t stop me from seeing only a nerd.
The teacher, Mrs. Tietz, naturally defended him from any attacks. Little did she realize that rather than protecting him, her efforts only further marked the target.
This was a lady who publicly professed that using Rain-X eliminated the need to turn on windshield wipers while driving in the rain, a lady who believed the Nielsen ratings were gathered by specific families with special boxes hooked up to their TV sets which automatically recorded which stations were being watched.
How did we know these things about her? Because she didn’t like us any more than we liked her. And one day, for some appropriate reason I’m sure, I volunteered to the class that years earlier I had used the time my family got to submit our watching habits to help tilt the scales away from Rosie O’Donnell and towards Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series. After all, Nielsen would never know the difference. They just trusted that one dollar would acquire honest reporting.
Mrs. Tietz wouldn’t budge. Believing me to be a liar, she maintained that there really were specific “Nielsen Families”. To this day, I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe he didn’t like her, either. If push came to shove and I had to guess, I’d say that he did it because he was noble. He was righteous, in the purest sense of the word. So later that semester, when his family happened to be mailed the paperwork and accompanying one dollar bill, he brought it in to class the next day. And in doing so, he redeemed not only me, but hope. Long live Winn!
Still Timeless
Happy that she chose waffles over doughnuts, he found himself preparing the batter when she called to him from the couch.
“Daddy, come lay with me. Don’t you want a little rest before breakfast?”
“H-, you know I’m cooking. If you wanted to lay, you should’ve said something earlier.”
“You’re cooking?”
“Yep. It’s almost done though,” he responded.
“Why you keep saying almost?” she asked.
“Do you know what “almost” means, H-?” he asked, genuinely curious about her response.
“Not done yet?” she answered, her voice betraying a modest level of hope.
“Sure. It means not done yet. But so would lots of words. How close does “almost” mean?”
“Fifteen?” she guessed.
His smile grew as her answer reverberated in his head.
Proudly, then, he cooed to himself, “She’s learning.”
Mommies Are Not Alive
Her new nearly-florescent neon tennis shoes did little to distract him from feeling the sting of what she said next.
“Mommies are not alive,” she purported.
“Mommies are not alive? I don’t think that’s right H-,” he returned.
“They aren’t alive. Mommies are not alive,” she said.
“What is a mommy?” he asked, seeking context at the least.
“K- is my mommy,” she answered.
“Hmm. So you know K- is your mommy, and that she’s alive, but you still maintain that mommies are not alive?”
“Yep, they’re not,” she said.
“Well,” he took a breath, “I hate to break it to you kid, but mommies are very much alive. Your mommy is alive. My mommy is alive. They’re alive,” he lectured dryly.
“Mommies are not alive,” she continued, a perfect stubbornness showing through. “Skeletons aren’t alive either.”
“Skeletons, eh?” he said. “Oh! I get it. Not mommies, mummies! Muh-muh mummies are not alive. You’re trying to say that dead bodies wrapped in tape are not alive, right? They’re called mummies, muh-meez, not mah-meez.”
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes betraying her brain’s increase in activity. “Bodies wrapped in,” she paused, “in tape,” she finished, her nodding head and squinting eyes calling out his inaccuracy. “Mommies-”
“Muh H-,” he corrected, “muh-meez. Mummies are not alive.”
“Mah-”
“Muh-”
‘Mah-”
“Muh-meez H-,” he said, feeling his patience about to buckle. “Forget it. Can you say reanimated?”
“Re-ami-nated?” she asked.
“Re-ani-mated,” he repeated.
“Reanimated,” she said.
“Good. Now say ‘mummies are reanimated, but mommies are alive.'”
“Mommies are reanimated, but mommies are alive.”
“Perfect.”
The Last Transmission
“This is the last transmission we received sir,” General Moberly informed the President.
“Play it.”
Click
“I feel so immature, but if you must know, my last thoughts here are of the ending of the most recent War of the Worlds film. The one with TC. You know the part I’m talking about, right? The part when nature does what man couldn’t do. Yep, that’s what I’m thinking about right now. It’s kind of funny really. Three nine-month one-way trips to a distant planet. Three successful landings. And we’ve been here for six years, nearly thriving. All twelve of us. And now this.
“No, it’s not martians that are going to wipe us out. No, it’s not bacteria. No, it’s not a lack of supplies. What’s killing us is an asteroid that’s arriving in a few minutes. Of course, it’s not going to hit us directly. Instead of a nice clean death, we’re being told that we’ll see it, feel the Mars shake beneath our feet, and then within minutes the aftermath of debris and shock-wave will rip apart everything we’ve worked so hard to build. First, the dust will erode the domes, then our suits, then our skin, and finally our bones. Apparently the cosmos doesn’t like us humans squatting wherever we damn well please. Well, I say fuck the cosmos. Sorry ma. But whoever’s listening needs to know that everyone here knew the risks and is content with this end. Don’t stop exploring. You can’t let this change anything.
“Okay, this is it. Wow. It’s so bright. I didn’t expect it to be for another two-minutes. I’m sorry for everything! I don’t want to die!”
Click
“Is that it?” asked the President, “Everyone’s dead? The base is destroyed?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, then. It seems to me there’s only one thing to do,” the President continued.
“What’s that sir?”
“We’re going to honor their wishes. Get me NASA. And schedule a press conference. We’re going to Mars.”
“Yes sir!”
Mac ‘n’ Cheese’s Home Date
“How’s your mac’n’cheese H-?”
“It’s far away,” she responded matter of factly.
“Huh? How’s your mac’n’cheese?”
“It’s far away. It’s in Townsville,” she said, finally elaborating.
“Wait what?” he asked, shaking his head. More curious than ever to discover where this would lead he again asked, “How’s your mac’n’cheese?”
“I told you daddy. It’s far away. It’s in Townsville. On May 10th. That’s my birthday,” she said, nodding her head while staring at the dish. Searching eyes exposed her thoughts more than words ever could. “How can I be more clear? I think I’m being clear,” she thought.
“Your mac’n’cheese is far away, in Townsville, which is on May 10th?” he asked, attempting for clarification.
“Yep,” she answered, delighted by his demonstration of understanding.
“Oooookay then.”
High Class
“Do we have cauliflower?” she asked after he mentioned broccoli.
“Nope, just broccoli,” he answered.
“Why don’t we have cauliflower?” she persisted.
“Because I didn’t buy any,” he said, not giving in.
After finishing her broccoli, she watched as he slid the grilled chicken on to her plate. Together now, they began to eat.
“Oh,” he interrupted, “did you want barbecue sauce?”
“Yes,” she said, “the new sauce.”
“I know, I know. You didn’t like the hot stuff.”
“Hot stuff?”
“Nevermind. Here’s your sauce. And here’s my sauce.”
To the sound of silverware squishing into chicken, they returned to the task at hand. Suddenly, she let out a shriek.
“What?” he asked, fearful that even the new sauce was too hot.
Spitting out the chicken, she replied, “I don’t like the roasted ones. That one’s roasted.”
“Huh?”
“See daddy? Roasted,” she said, pointing at the grill marks on the chicken.
“Oh. You don’t like the burnt part. Excuse me, the roasted part. Okay, you don’t have to eat it,” he allowed. “High class H-, you’re high class,” he thought, pride swelling.
Captain’s Log 