Short Story

The Suicide Note

I used to just smell it.  But now…  well…

Let me back up.

Our reality is thin.  Bending and changing with the unseen pressures of the universe around us; bulging here, dropping there.  Like the ocean full of currents and waves, changes in pressure, density, and temperature… an ever moving and dynamic place.  You think the nature of dynamism is constrained to our oceans?  Nay, it is the Universe.  We see it spin.  We see the chaos of uncountable interactions occurring from the atomic level all the way to the galactic level.  However… we were steeped in it, created by it, we are an evolved creature pulled from the primordial soup by the forces put upon us.  So as creatures that are a result of such a system, constrained by the laws that made us, our experience is defined, limited, and set by that system.

We only see what we are evolved to see.

And what do we see? A narrow band of the spectrum.  A spectrum that covers a vast amount of visual and sensory information, and we don’t have it.  Because that is how we evolved.

Same goes for our other senses as well.  Sight is just the first.  But touch, smell, taste… all of them are affected.   Sometimes I pick up the smell of other things.

It started innocuously at first.  I think I was a kid.  I smelled something odd.  Like someone with synesthesia, who can smell colors, or feel numbers, I felt something entirely elsewhere.  My consciousness reacted violently at first, rejecting the horror of whatever was pressing onto it from outside our perceived reality.   It rocked me, and I ended up in a coma for a week.  23 people died. In a bus accident.

I tried to explain it.  The smell of rotten garbage and primrose, the blurring of atmosphere, the charging of everything like the buzz before the lightening strike… but that didn’t even come close.  Everyone told me my “break” was from witnessing the accident.  I didn’t want them to think I was lying or worse, crazy.  So I accepted it.  Every time I smelled it though, something bad happened near me.  People died.

The first time it was different was just two weeks ago,  I felt the pressure from high above.  The world was shifting under the pressure, whatever it was, it was huge.  Like a whale starting to break the surface of the water, the nearby surfer just holds on to his board for dear life.  I was the proverbial surfer watching the whale surface from underneath me.  I saw it.

The eye.  The eye. The eye was huge.  The size of a football stadium, an eye pressed against the glass of our world, the behemoth, the leviathan pressing their gaze onto our world.  Its pupil split in a myriad of different ways, filled with intelligence and lights that my mind could not understand.  But did people go running in the streets, screaming?  Did traffic stop and everyone stare upwardly in shock and fear?  Nope.  No one noticed.

The good news is that I didn’t faint.  And I didn’t go into a coma either, so I was able to watch the two planes collide overhead.  449 people died.  They say bodies rained down for hours after the explosion.

I wish I could say I thought it was God.  Or something understandable.  But it isn’t.  Its horror and death and pain.  All I see, and smell, and taste is things that I shouldn’t, and the world suffers whether I am here or not.  To whoever reads this… I am standing on the chair, the rope is tied firmly.  I hope I die quickly… but know that this was my choice. My computer should save this as the most recent document.

What?

Oh my god.  Not again.  NOT AGAIN!  Why are you here?  Now?  Why are you looking at me?  What… ah… ack… help? Help? I… I… aaaaaaaaaaaaassssssssssssssssssssss

 

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

Short Story

Magic sucks

The event changed all of our lives.  Not for the better nor for the worse.  But it definitely changed things for everyone.  What caused the event no one really knows, but their are plenty of theories out there.  One popular theory is that God died.  When God died, all the rules of our reality where flushed down the drain. Another popular theory is that one of those large super colliders opened a rift in reality, and all sorts of exotic matter escaped and/or was created.   My favorite theory is that the event was caused by too many people wanting something, desperately believing in one thing.   The world was so bad, that this one thing became the ultimate desire for a dominating majority of the quantum observers in our own little pocket of reality.

Let’s call it the Emerging Observation Theory.

Take a bunch of folks.  Idiots, every single one of them.  Take some more folks, who are smart, but just enjoy dumb things.  Then take some more folks, those that like to criticize the first two groups… you know, your common asshole.  If you were to chart these folks out on a line graph,  you may find that you have a bell shaped curve.  A honest to God standard distribution where 68.5% of the people fall within one standard deviation from the center.  Those 68.5% are all people that actually read books. Then take one author, whose writing is palatable to all those folks, and that author creates a story that everyone can identify with and have a personal and emotional connection with.  Say it was about a little kid who found out he was a wizard, and got to go to a magic boarding school and have all these crazy adventures, saving the world time and time again.  Yay for the little whiny fuckwit, he is so special.  I could be him!

Then some asshole says, hey, let’s turn this into a movie.  No.  Wait.  Seven movies.  And those movies, through another stroke of luck, are all wildly successful.   Those movies suck in another section of people that don’t read, but watch movies.  Now you have 95% of the populace.  95%!  (Including all the other countries and translations.) And all of them want magic to be real.  Desperately.  The world sucks.  This imaginary world is so attractive, so much better than reality, that everyone that can think, observe, and process information wants the fantasy to be the reality.

Boom.

It is.  The universe adjusts to a new shared and observed reality.

But, like anything, the lowest common denominator of the sample is what determines the functionable level of the result.    So instead of spells to make things fly, the spells make people half way across the world fart uncontrollably for a few hours.  Instead of spells to protect you from harm, the best spell out there turns all tangerines in the world blue for exactly twelve seconds.  You craft a potion to make you handsome, it makes your grandma’s nipples grow little afro’s.  Things like that.

Magic is real.  And it is terrible.

And the problem with all this?  Its so benign in nature, getting 95% of all observers to reverse it will be impossible.

We are stuck with it.

Short Story

Cassie

Hi, my name is Cassie.  You the new therapist?

Well that is good.  Therapists come and go, though.  So I won’t stick to the script.

Yeah, I guess I can tell you about myself. I would usually start off by telling you that I am older than I seem, younger than I feel, and just about sick of the world I live in, but I know already that you wouldn’t care in the least.  And that doesn’t bother me.

Why?  I don’t know.  It just doesn’t bother me.  I know the way things are.  And how they will be.  And how they have been.

Do I think I am crazy?  You should know the answer to that without me having to answer.  I am absolutely crazy. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, right? There is not a definition of crazy that is large enough to contain my own special kind of the stuff.  But it is not like I stand in corners asking the walls if they have seen my shoes or anything. I am not bag-lady crazy.

Pessimistic?  It is not my fault I can see the world for what it is.  I call that being a realist.  I can be positive.  I like your shirt by the way.  See?

Reminds me of a circus event. Elephants and lions and acrobats. Just crap flying everywhere.

Do I like circuses?  Who doesn’t?

Well I am sorry for you.  Scared of the clowns?

By the way, you should call home.  Your son is choking on a carrot and your wife is downstairs vacuuming.  She can’t hear him. If you call now you can save him.

Yeah. I told you I was crazy.  Of course you think I am kidding.  That is what has made me crazy.  “Sadness unto all those with deaf ears and blind eyes, for those that see and hear mourn you all and themselves as well, for you pay them no mind.”

Something I heard somewhere.  I am not sure from where.  But in my case it fits the bill.  Your wife is about to call you hysterically.  Your son has passed on.  But don’t worry.  You will get up, turn around, and forget everything that I said.

Oh yeah, go ahead, answer it.  No… no… I don’t mind the interruption.

Yeah you can come back and see me.  It sounds like an emergency.

Ok.  See you later.

Well, well, just me and the walls.   Again.

Have any of you seen my shoes?

Shit.

Short Story

A Little Slice of Heaven

“Isabella!”

Shut up.

“Isabella!!!”

That’s my father yelling again. Always yelling, my father.

“Isa – bella!”

Isabella is my mother. They have been fighting again, about…. My father has a problem. Well, not a problem, an epidemic. He likes the to play the field, even though he is supposed to be in the dugout. He cheats.

There I said it.

He cheats!

Why my parents stay together, is beyond me. Last weekend their fighting got really bad. My father had a date pick him up at our small house in lower Queens. At our house! Now, I know my father is smarter than that. I know it. And, well, having a date pick him up at our house didn’t make my mother too happy. She just cried.

“Isa – bella!”

Why can’t he shut the hell up?!?

Mother is not home, you drunken slob. Oh yeah, another great thing about my father, he can’t hold a job. My mother goes to work, comes home, goes to bed. My father then wakes up, takes the money and blows it all on the sauce. What a jerk-off.

I don’t love my father. And he hits me, he hits me HARD.

And screams. He always yells at me, “Vinnie you little shit! Why don’t you succeed, why don’t you try?!” And I cry. But I always think to myself, “why don’t you?”

“Why don’t you?!?!” I scream inside my head!

Because if that came out, he would probably put me in the hospital. And right now, he is sitting upstairs with a bottle of the cheap shit yelling for my mother.

“Vinnie!”

I look up at the house. I’m playing in our small cramped stoop with my baseball. I love baseball. The Yanks are my team.  Don’t talk to me about the Mets. Forget about it.  The Yanks, though.  What a team! Whenever I can, I sneak into the park to watch a game.

“Vin – nie!”

He’s really piss-ass drunk, now. And I know if I don’t go in, he’s probably going to lay into my little brother.

Time to face the damn music.

I walk slowly up the small brown stoop, aged by the incessant smog and sun. The pollution is baked right into the stone. Baked. First step, second step, third. I open the tattered screen door and look up into the darkened house. I hope he’s on the couch in front of the T.V. Slowly pushing the door, so it won’t creak, I put my foot inside.

There you are you little Shit!!!” he screams violently.

I am thirteen, not really a little shit anymore. My dad comes running at the screen door. I don’t move. He grabs the door and throws it open, as if he wants to rip it off of the hinges like a loon escaping from their institution.

I don’t move.

Little Shit! Where’s your MOTHER?!” And he slaps me.

I feel the quick shock of a thousand pin pricks spread slowly across my face. My vision blurs then clears. Then I hear my mother walk up behind me on the step. He grabs me by the hair and drags me into the living room.

“Stay here! And don’t peep,” He says as he turned back towards the door, “or I’ll rip your little faggot heart out.”

I hear my mother come in. I hear the door slam. I hear my father start to yell. I hear my mother start to scream, pleading for him to change his ways.

Change?!? You expect ME to … Don’t cry! Don’t cry! Or I’ll give you something to cry about!

I clench my fists. Here it comes, I know it.

SLAP!

No more! Something just rips itself inside of me. I feel a redness explode in my chest as I run to my room…

SLAP!

I grab my baseball bat…

SLAP!

I hear her cries for him to stop. I run back…

SLAP!

…out to the living room. I run into the kitchen grasping the bat in both of my hands, careful to not choke up. I see my mother trying to block his blows but failing. I see his hand start to turn into a fist….

I scream. “NO!” And I swing the bat.

I swing HARD.

I feel the bat make contact, the blow travels up the bat into my arm, through every part of my being. The first blow takes him at the back of the knees. He drops like a brick.

I pull up the bat to strike again. I see my mother astonished and crying.I see something in her eyes.  Shock?  Sadness?  Fear?

Of me?

No. No more hitting. He’s on the floor looking horribly pathetic.

“Get out.” I say as cold as my tears will permit. “I’ll take care of the family now. Never come back or I’ll put this bat through your fucking skull. We don’t need you. We don’t need you.”

He looked at me. Pushed himself up off the floor, dusting off his stained pants.  He stumbled out the door.  I heard the screen fall back and make its banging noise.

And we haven’t seen him since.