Tag Archives: sudden fiction

67. Flooding in the Computer Lab

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The unexpected three-day downpour flooded the basement computer lab and drove the students up onto the mezzanine. From the mezzanine, it was only a few short steps to the second floor, where they encountered a large and mostly darkened room full of strange shelving. The shelving stood floor to ceiling and ran the length of the room, disappearing into the more shadowy recesses at back. Draped over every shelf was a sheet.

Taylor lifted one of these sheets to have a look underneath and turned back to the other students with nothing smart-alecky, for once, to say.

“What is it?” his girlfriend Jordan asked him.

“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “But whatever those things are, there sure are a lot of them.” He pointed down the length of one of the shelves. “And it kind of freaks me out.”

The other students, now curious, began pulling the sheets off of the shelves.

Haley said that each of the shelves seemed to contain several smaller units of strange paper-like things glued between two pieces of cardboard.

“No, duh,” Taylor said. “But what are they for?” He pulled down one of these cardboard units and was surprised at its denseness.

Just then, a man stepped out of the back room wearing a buttoned-down maroon-colored cardigan sweater with elbow patches. He rubbed his shaky fingers against the lids of his filmy eyeballs and sneezed.

 At the sight of him, a couple of girls—the twins, Denver and Dallas—began to quietly whimper from the back.

“Nothing to cry about, girls,” the man said. “You have come, finally, to the right place.” He introduced himself as the head lie-briar-an. “And this,” he continued, holding his arms out to the room, “is the Internet.”

“The Internet?” Taylor scoffed. “Impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” the lie-briar-an said. “Hard to believe, maybe, but not impossible. This is the Internet in its analog form.”

The lie-briar-an said that he had something to show them and motioned the students into a back room where he spent time looking for what he called an “overhead projector.”

He finally discovered it next to what he called a “slide projector,” brought it up front and flipped a switch. But nothing happened. He pushed a button on the wall and spoke into a round grill with black holes in it, asking for a technician. When the technician arrived, the lie-briar-an explained his problem.

“The light won’t come on.”

The technician nodded once, picked up the cord and plugged it in, and then the light from the overhead projector was thrown in front of the lie-briar-an on the wall as a square of whiteness, with triangular edges, that had tiny black squiggles running through it.

“Oh,” Haley said. “Old PowerPoint.”

His first slide was titled, “The History of the Internet.” It took him several seconds to get his long and yellowy fingernails under the staticky slide so as to lift it off the projector. On the second slide was a picture of Hitler.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” Taylor asked. “Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?”

“Neither,” the lie-briar-an said. “The Internet officially started with warfare, and with the advent of the computer.”

After his lecture, he cleared his throat to wake the students and said, “Let me finally show you something else.”

He took them to another closed-off section of the lie-briar-y. Several apes, standing in line behind the security tape, were taking turns hitting a paddle against a large and ancient timepiece of sorts suspended by ropes from the ceiling. Each paddling against the timepiece sent this vibrational quiver down two large cables. After every paddling, a man or woman at bottom somewhere said something like, “Hey, that hurts. Stop it. Knock it off. Ouch.”

“Not too many years back,” the lie-briar-an said, “your very own computer people came for a week straight until, finally, I showed up for work one day and here the apes were.”

“But what is it?” the students asked him.

“I’m not quite sure,” the lie-briar-an said. “But I think it might be dial-up.”

The students just looked at him.

“Dial-up, you know? Before wireless?”

But still the students just looked at him, not quite sure what to make of it until, saved by their various text tones, they turned at once, in unison, to their phones. The computer lab had been reopened, the messages read, which meant, thank God, that they all could go back to being normal again.

66. The Curious Case of the Frog Princess

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Dear Friend,

With due respect to your personhood and much sincerity of purpose I make this secret contacting you for as I believe you and I can be of mutual beneficiaries to a situation that is very curious for one week now.

It should not be strange I hope to say that this is top secret and only you thus far are been contacted.

My name is  Dr. Iskandar Hisham Iqbal from Ouagadougou Republic of Burnkina Faso West Africa. I am give out my location and name only for as to showing I am on the up-and-up and help you realizing how truthful this situation is of.

The strange matter happening seven days ago when incoming to my clinic where I work to saving lives torn apart by the civil war inflicting our land was a tribal group holding a royal carrying chair made of ebony wood and inlaid with gold. I as you can image did not knowing what to make of it and did not at first realizing that there was frog sitting on the velvet seat of carrying chair in bad condition.

You see my friend it is so silly this story but these are simple people and have not been told that fairytales is lies. If told they do not believe it. They believing only that frog princess need marry rich nobleman to turning back to her original form and save our country.

After a long operation and pinprick of morphine I was able to stabilizing the frog as her family gathering around her bed weeping for her little life. But as you are probably comprehending I need this bed for other more worthy victims of war and hunger of such that our country is much much. People come to my clinic carrying their decapitated limbs to give you one bad idea. I want to many nights crying myself to sleep. I have no time for silly stories is frogs.

But here is my plan. You may not be nobleman these people dream of coming but if you can please sending me your credit card information ; your 3 digit security code and full name as appearing on the card ; I will pay $100 to my nobleman friend for marrying the frog and helping these people realizing the truth. If frog becomes princess on the other hand then we will be making you famous as our first beneficiary. The extra money I will using for medicine. Also rice and Bibles.

If you do not care about anything I am say today then I also have magical potion for elongating your tool for hours to please her. This I provide for as little as $20 for 2 ounces that will lasting up to three years. Your tool will never be soften for all that time I can promising you that.*

Thank you for your kind and careful attention to this sensitive matter indeed.

Sincerely,

Dr. Iskandar Hisham Iqbal
Ouagadougou Republic of Burnkina Faso
West Africa

*I myself have fathering forty-eight children.

62. Holidays.

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The first action item on the agenda for the November meeting of the Holiday Committee on Political Correctness was the word “happy.”

In a sixty-four-slide PowerPoint, Neal pointed out that “happy” discriminated against those who were clinically depressed, which included most of the committee members themselves, ironically enough—a depression that was heightened, furthermore, in Neal’s somewhat circular reasoning, during the holidays.

After a heated discussion, the committee voted 6 to 3 to eliminate “happy” from holidays.

The next action item was more an issue of semantics than that of political correctness. It had to do with the exclamation point.

Was it still appropriate to yell out “Holidays!”? The problem was that without the accompanying “Happy,” what did this now mean? Was it meant as a warning, as in something to beware of, to be on the hyper-vigilant lookout for. Watch out! Holidays!

In a much more heated discussion, the committee voted 5 to 4 to eliminate the exclamation point from all holiday greetings, whether in written (print or digital), verbal, nonverbal or any other unforeseeable, future communicative formats. But the feeling was that the committee could not offer the world a naked Holidays. (It should be pointed out that the members did not use the word “naked.” They said, “clothing-challenged.”)

A Holidays without punctuation only left the door open for possible punctuation intruders, including that ever-inquisitive hook thing, and those three dots, whatever they were called, that could only lead to Santa knows where.

Thus, finally, “holidays” was given a full stop: Holidays.

The word itself still had to abide by other grammatical rules, of course, and could be used (the committee unequivocally agreed), whenever appropriate, in a sentence. For instance, and even if the verdict was out on “peace” (the first action item for the December meeting), for now, at least, it was still politically correct to say, “Peace and holidays to everyone.”

60. The Evolution of Religion

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Richard Wilkinson reminds us that about a thousand or so years ago, a Christian basilica was built in the first court to the Egyptian temple of Amun in modern-day Thebes, a basilica that was later replaced by an Islamic mosque.

What he doesn’t say is how the mosque was later converted into a bicycle rental and repair shop by day (and an after hours gay bar) when a lesbian couple, practicing Buddhists, moved to Thebes from Phoenix, Arizona, bought the old mosque and aptly named their new venture Dikes & Trikes.

What they cannot yet know is how, in a few years, Ginette, the more butch of the couple, will have an affair with the wife of a high-ranking government official and will be forced, under cover, to leave the country with a camel caravan heading towards what the ancients called the Red Land of the Sinai Peninsula.

She will never be heard from again.

Songs will be made up about her, legends told, ghosts occasionally seen.

The meaning of the name Ginette is “God is gracious.” In her case, we can only hope so.

Jenny, the other half of the couple, devastated, will return to Cleveland, Ohio, her hometown, where she will teach deaf children how to play the guitar.

After Dikes & Trikes, Starbucks will move in without much resistance, sharing the space with a sandwich shop—not Subway, not Quiznos, not Jersey Mike’s, but a Middle Eastern knockoff.

The falafel pita sandwiches will be its most popular menu item, followed closely by its soft-batch cinnamon sugar cookies, more commonly known as snickerdoodles.

Finally, years removed, a traveling shaman  from some unrecognizable jungle religion with a six-thousand-year-old history will step up to the counter at the sub shop wearing nothing but a leather loincloth and order pastrami on wheat with mustard, lettuce and cucumbers, extra oil and vinegar—no onions, no tomatoes, no olives.

He will decline the meal deal with an almost imperceptible shake of his head and step next door to order a mocha Frappuccino, afterwards sipping it meditatively in the sunlight of the courtyard while making strange notations with his flint knife into his walking stick.

56. The Man with the Metal Detector

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The man with the metal detector found a metal detector not a few inches beneath the sand. Part of it, though badly rusted, was visible—as they say—to the naked eye. He thought of this other man, his double from some other shore, an old alchemist stumbling on the rocks and getting swept up into the waves.

As he troweled down, he found a forearm still wedged into the stabilizer and a badly bloated hand wrapped around the handle above the control box. And then there it was, what he hadn’t known that he had been searching for until he found it: a gold band pinched around the bulbous finger of the bloated hand.

He thought of leaving it. There were other things to uncover, after all, to search for. He took five steps up the beach when he clearly heard in a voice much like his own, “Come back.” Obviously, it was only an auditory hallucination, but he took out his knife anyway, returned for the finger, cut it off below the ring and put them both into his coin pouch.

Later that night, unable to sleep, he rose by moonlight and returned to the shoreline to dig out the rest of the body. Although the man’s eyes had been eaten away, he was surprised to see under the glare of his flashlight how much the man resembled him.

And then he clearly heard this man, his double, say, “But why are you so surprised?”

He waited for him to go on when a crab crawled out of his mouth.

“What do you mean?” he asked the man. He slapped his face. “What are you telling me? Why shouldn’t I be surprised?”

But the man was silent.

He pulled him free and struggled with him up the beach. He took him home, along with his metal detector, and installed him in the corner of his bedroom. He nailed the man’s clothes to the wall in several places so as to help him stand, put his forearm into his stabilizer and duct-taped his hand around the handle above the control box.

He spent the rest of the next two days in bed with a fever. On the third day, delirious, he brought in several wheelbarrows of dirt and dumped them in the middle of the room. When finally satisfied that he had enough, he buried himself beneath the dirt, near the other man’s outstretched search coil, and died.

Later would come the mice and of course the maggots and the flies. For now, however, the man installed in the corner slowly pulled free of the nails attaching him to the wall and slumped to the floor, under the rising of a full moon, a blue one at that. This moon shone in on him for the near two hours it took his eyeless head to come to rest, at last, pressed face-first into the dirt of the burial mound.

54. Coffee Drink of the Day II

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I.

This happened on a Tuesday. The street as they say was empty (although it clearly wasn’t), when the barista called out what sounded like a Small Denise.

A large man with a limp and a neck brace and a purplish burn or bruise or birthmark across his face—Big Bruce, we called him—came to the counter to collect it when, strangely, a small woman at the last moment stepped in front of the man.

She told him that she was the drink’s namesake, and she wanted to know who was responsible for this. She complained that the coffee shop was stereotyping, profiling, making fun of her. Her voice was such a mousy whisper of a squeak that we could hardly hear her over the steaming milk and grinding beans.

“Look, Denise, if that’s even your name,” the manager said after being called from out of the back room where he had been in the middle of a texting war with his ex. “We built you a booth with a high chair and a parking spot for your tricycle. What, now, could be so possibly wrong with the drink?”

She said that she wanted to be a Mexican mocha, and the manager said, “But Denise, you’re white, probably white trash.”

She said in the very least that she wanted to be some sort of fancy Americano and he said, “Please, Denise, you just arrived from Bulgaria. You’ve been in the country what, a whole sixteen days? No offence, but you’ll probably be the first mail-ordered bride who gets returned to sender.”

She said that she deserved at least a little thing, and so the manager took a well-chewed, flesh-colored wad of gum out of his mouth, plopped it into the drink and poured in some hot water. He called the new drink a Small Denise with a Wad of Gum and Some Hot Water.

But nobody ordered that drink, not even Big Bruce.

II.

The coffee shop was seriously considering taking the Small Denise off the menu when Jesus, the modern miracle-worker with latte art, had the idea of building a fence around the drink, with barbed wire, guarded by miniature dogs (not real dogs, of course, but mechanized dogs) so that the customers had to work really hard at sneaking the drink out.

People everywhere, suddenly, couldn’t stop talking about the Small Denise and how important it was for them to have, to drink down first thing every morning, to pee out later. They were obsessed, if not dehydrated. Their lips were chapped.

Other coffee shops started making knock-offs, calling their drinks Midget Denise, for instance, which was offensive, we thought. They called them Little Person Denise and Munchkin Loser Bulgarian Woman-Child with Hairy Upper Lip.

Our manager finally suggested a round up. He thought we might collect all the drinks and send them back to Bulgaria, along with Denise, but that was stupid.

Although many drinks in cups that looked much like our own were eventually confiscated, there were too many drinks by now. There had been an absolute infiltration of the Denise drinks and their knock-offs. And besides, people these days had their own espresso machines. They could—and did, quite often, in fact, or so we heard—make their own.