The wind rushing past his head woke him from his stupor.

The wind rushing past his head woke him from his stupor. The roar was deafening. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Looking out towards the horizon, he saw nothing but blue skies and towering clouds. “Am I dead?” he thought to himself. “Is this heaven?” Heaven would not feel like this. He was tumbling out of the sky towards earth, he assumed. He looked down, or at least the direction he was fairly sure was down. The intense stinging in his eyes and the fact that it was near impossible to keep his eyes open in the wind told him he was probably correct.

As the fog in his head lifted and cleared he started to think about why he was falling. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t remember why. Looking “down” again, he squinted but could see no ground, only clouds. There was something else below him. It wasn’t falling with him or at least not with the same speed. He was coming up on it fast. As he came level with the object it started to fall and soon matched his speed. It was a painting in a frame. A huge golden frame like one you would see in a museum holding priceless works of art. The people in the painting looked familiar. It was his mother and father with his two brothers from at least thirty years ago. His father still had all of his hair. His brothers were young; maybe five and six. They were sitting on a couch side-by-side. He recognized the couch and its surroundings as his parent’s old house, the house he grew up in.

As fast as he had approached the painting he had passed it and it disoriented him as it flew upwards away from him as if attached to a leash that had reached its end. He looked down again; this time he could make out the faint patchwork of a rural land but it was still a long ways off. Another painting came into sight below him. He recognized the subjects immediately, even before he had come to eye-level with the painting. It was his family; his wife holding their son and their daughter standing in front. This painting was from a decade ago. He could tell by the baby fat on his daughter’s cheeks and his wife’s dated haircut. They seemed to stare at him, almost as if they were physically sitting in that frame waiting to greet him. The frame was not the same golden ornate frame of the first painting. It was rough unfinished wood, nailed together at the corners. It would look out of place in a house, let alone a museum.

This picture flew upwards in the same disorientating fashion as the last. “My life flashing before my eyes,” he thought to himself. “So this is what it’s like.”

But this was real. He pinched his arm. It hurt. The wind rushing past him was burning his skin raw with its cold touch. This was not a vision or a dream. He looked down. The patchwork was a little more defined. He could start to make out rows of crops. He continued to pass several more paintings, all of them of family members or significant events from various stages of his life. The frames varied from wood, steel, plain, and ornate. He found himself with not enough time to look at each painting. Just as he was starting to notice the nuances of the brush strokes and the texture of the canvas, the painting would fly upwards away from him in some cruel cosmic joke.

It was another ten minutes before he started to worry about the ground rushing up to meet him. He was fully expecting to wake from this dream upon impact so he was not scared. It was a nagging worry, like one you get when you realize you’ve left the garage door open or a light on after leaving the house for a vacation.

He could see individual cars and trucks now, driving on the roads like ants scurrying towards a picnic. Rooftops with shingles and chimneys with plumes of smoke. People walking down the street to the market with children in tow. He was five hundred feet from the ground now, and was seconds away from hitting the ground when his descent started to slow. He could feel something pulling him back from above. He managed to turn over to look up and saw what looked like a giant vacuum cleaner hose, only on the cosmic level. As he tumbled back up into the black vortex he was surprised to find he was almost disappointed. He wanted to see what happened at the end of his fall. Everything went black.

The wind rushing past his head woke him from his stupor. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but blue skies and towering clouds. He was tumbling out of the sky towards earth and he couldn’t remember why.

Tagged with: Short

Behind the wheel

    Mr. Fink began to notice the unusual events almost immediately. If anyone would notice anything out of the ordinary, it would be him.

    Barton Fink wakes up every morning at 5:45 AM. He rubs the night’s sleep from his eyes. He lays out his suit, takes his shower, dresses himself, eats his bowl of nondescript bran cereal, and kisses his family goodbye. Barton is a nondescript worker at an accounting firm. He sits at his desk fumbling through papers for 9 hours a day. He doesn’t completely understand what he’s supposed to be doing but his paycheck every other week stops him from asking too many questions. Nobody complains. Almost everybody’s relatively happy. Barton is by no means happy, but that doesn’t bother him. He sees this as the way things are supposed to be.

    It all started when Barton found himself staring at a billboard while stuck in dead-stop traffic on his way to work. It was a travel agency billboard displaying the typical serene beaches and tropical wildlife of a generic far-off land. Barton could think of nothing else other than his intense desire to be in that far-off land. He caught himself with this thought and blinked. He shook his head the way a dog shakes to dry his damp fur. Looking back to the brake lights brought him completely back; he concentrated on keeping his schedule and getting to work on time.

    The first event was just a tap on the shoulder while he was sitting at his desk staring off into the distance. It was quick and just barely a tap. Barton almost didn’t notice it. However, no one had ever tapped on his shoulder, or at least as far back as he could remember. Barton didn’t have any friends that would tap on his shoulder. Strangers don’t come up behind strangers and tap them on the shoulder. Barton shook off this event as an anomaly in his normal day and soon forgot about it completely.

    The second event was a little harder to forget. Barton felt someone squeeze his shoulder while he was driving home from work. It certainly wasn’t a muscle twitch. It was a full fledged, five-finger squeeze. Barton quickly turned but saw no one else in the car. The near-accident immediately following distracted Barton from the event temporarily and it wasn’t until later that night while Barton was lying in bed staring at the ceiling that he remembered the event. By the next morning Barton had convinced himself that he was imagining things. He considered seeking professional help.

    A few weeks passed and he was experiencing these events daily now, sometimes three or four times a day. It wasn’t always a light tap either; once while eating his wife’s meatloaf at the dinner table he received a sharp jab in the kidneys. He yelped and his wife and kids looked up at him suspiciously. He looked back down at his meatloaf as if nothing had happened. During a meeting at work he felt a vicious pinch right on his spine. Barton acted quickly enough to stifle his cry but still visibly cringed. He could feel these events as if coming from external source but each time he swung around to catch the perpetrator in the act, there was no one to catch. Nobody was ever there.

    Barton attempted to ignore it. It did not work. The events increased in frequency and violence as time passed. He ended up with tufts of hair missing from the back of his perfectly groomed head. Bruises on his torso. Blood, Barton’s blood, staining his shirts. He did his best to conceal his wounds but people at work started asking questions. Barton started skipping breakfast, forgetting to shave, or even showing up late to work. His boss started to notice that Barton was not shuffling through papers as efficiently as he used to.

    It wasn’t long until Barton hadn’t laid out his suit, taken a shower, or done anything else in his routine in weeks. His wife had taken their children to her parent’s house after the first week. He was a pale shadow of his former self. There were dark circles under his eyes and he was battered and bruised almost beyond recognition or repair. He spent the majority of his hours gritting his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut trying to block out, or at the very least withstand the pain constantly being inflicted on his body.

    One night Barton found himself sitting on the edge of the bed unable to sleep for countless nights in a row. He stood slowly as if he had aged years in a matter of weeks, stumbled into the bathroom, and leaned on the cold counter while staring into the mirror on the wall. He did not recognize the person staring back at him. His eyes widened and shifted when he saw the fingers pulling themselves up over his shoulder. He grabbed the fingers and strained his neck to see their source. The wrist and forearm continued down his back. He turned to look at the appendage in the mirror, afraid of what he might find.

    The arm ended at the flesh on his back between his shoulder blades like some deformed wing fused flawlessly to his body by an expert plastic surgeon. Barton closed his eyes involuntarily and images of crashing waves and sunny beaches floated past on the backs of his eyelids. He opened his eyes to examine the arm again. The arm, he noticed, was much tanner than his own but otherwise was an exact copy. He then moved his eyes to the other side of his spine and noticed the outline of another five fingers and a palm, pushing, about to break through the surface.

Tagged with: Short

Round Peg

Day 16

    I’ve been in this room before. The scent of bleach fades with the passing days but the stark white walls do nothing to calm the chaos that runs circles in my brain. The table is in its usual position. The chair, ditto. Nothing changes from day to day except the increasing degree of unease I feel somewhere in my head.

    I sit at the chair and once again grasp the two objects that have been my tormentors for the past fifteen days. One is a cylindrical piece of foam rubber about two inches in diameter. Malleable enough to shape as I see fit, but stiff enough that it will always snap back to its original shape once I inevitably grow tired and throw it in disgust. The second object is a rectangular plexiglass box with a square hole in one side and three solid sides. It measures 4 inches by 4 inches looking down from the top into the square hole. There is nothing particularly intriguing about either object save the reason for their existence in the first place.

    The familiar voice crackles on the speaker mounted on the wall. “Harry Carl Nichols, three-hundred and sixty hours.” Yesterday they said three-hundred and thirty-six hours. Tomorrow they will say three-hundred and eighty-four. For all I know the passing of time for the remainder of my life may be measured in 24-hour increments, announced to me every morning by the tinny masculine voice. The daily ritual has become strangely reassuring even though I know the counting will eventually stop and it will mean the end of me.

    Harry Carl Nichols is not my name. Originally I considered this ordeal may just be a case of mistaken identity but after screaming just that and pounding on the perfect white walls for nearly a week I started considering that I was not a mistake. Either they know exactly who I am and they were looking for me all along, or they don’t care who I am.

    I’ve forgotten who I was. I don’t remember if they did this to me or if it is some post-traumatic induced amnesia. But I know my name is not Harry. I awoke standing in this room right inside the seamless door sixteen days ago. Since that day I have seen one person; a gentleman in a white scientific-looking garment and a gas mask. He arrives every day exactly sixteen hours after I wake up in this white room and shoots what I can only guess is a tranquilizer originally meant for a much larger animal than me directly into my neck. Naturally I struggled against this for the first few days. But I soon found that to be futile. Either I am not nearly as physically fit as I assume myself to be or the man in white is much stronger than the normal human.

    Back to the two objects. As the saying goes, it’s like putting a round peg in a square hole. I realize the saying is reverse of my current situation but that is neither here nor there. Given the foam rubber consistency of the round peg I could have solved this “puzzle” my first day here. The round peg can easily be pushed into the square hole by forcing the round peg to change shape. I have been close on more than one occasion to doing just that but something stops me. A brief thought that the people behind the gas mask and static-ridden speaker want me to do just that. Admit defeat.

Day 245

    The chair grows more uncomfortable with each hour. I have deep purple bruises from leaning my forearms on the unforgiving table. I’m reminded of the sense of vertigo while reaching the lowest point of an underwater tunnel. The earth stretches in front of you uphill but with no sense of having traveled downhill in the first place. This feeling now overwhelms me.

    I still pick up the peg every day but with no intention of completing the task. It only increases the vertigo and imbalance in my middle ear.

Day 401

    There have been good and bad days. The bad days I weep in the corner, pick up the plexiglass rectangular box and throw it against the perfect white walls. I rip at the foam rubber of the round peg until it lies in shreds and my fingers drip blood onto the white floor. The good days I sit quietly at the desk and study the peg and hole and imagine a solution I am somehow missing. Of course there never is. It is a peg and hole; there is only one solution.

    I’ve come to look forward to the man with the tranquilizer. The hours of dreamless unconsciousness are my only refuge. The white walls mock me endlessly.

Day 538

    But today… today will be different. I will wave the white flag.

    I hear the static say some number over ten thousand. I stopped paying attention long ago. I sit at the table and take the round peg. Without hesitating, I start malforming the foam rubber as I push it into the square hole. The peg is through the square hole, and I watch as it instantly snaps back to its normal shape once completely inside the plexiglass box. It touches the bottom of the box with the slightest thud and falls to lean against the side. I look up, expecting and hoping to see anything other than the white walls. There is nothing out of the ordinary. The speaker on the wall crackles for the last time.

    ”Harry Carl Nichols. Total time, twelve thousand eight hundred eighty eight point three six.” I hear the louvers move in the air duct above me.

    The smell of bitter almonds is briefly noticeable as the hydrogen cyanide is released into the room, triggered by the miniscule sensor at the bottom of the plexiglass box that I’ve somehow missed during my numerous studies of the box. My breathing quickens and as my eyes glaze over I can see the round peg, resting quietly in the clear box. I slump in the chair and my head falls back; I can see the square end of the air duct in the center of the ceiling above me. The square hole was the end of me after all.

Tagged with: Short

Facebook theory

    It was no mistake; right there under “Suggestions” he saw his own name and a picture of someone who looked an awful lot like him. He clicked on the picture to get a better look. It was certainly him. Or at least some version of himself. After surprise his second thought was that it was an elaborate hoax. With a limited knowledge of photo editing and a little homework it wouldn’t be hard for someone to create a virtual clone.

    With slight apprehention and nervousness he opened the “Send message to…” window and began typing. Trying not to sound too inquisitive or paranoid he started with “Hey, couldn’t help but notice we look alike.”

    A week went by with no response. The interaction had been nearly forgotten when the little red indicator appeared with one new message. The response:

“Yes, we do look alike. I am you and you are me, more or less. It’s confusing so I’ll put it simply. I am from an alternate universe where you still exist, you’re just slightly different. Thus, me. We’ve created a stable wormhole from our universe into your universe and have been experimenting with sending and pulling data through. With the number of open points of access the network of data you call the internet was the most obvious point of contact. It was only a matter of time before we perfected the transfer of data to give us a constant link to your universe: our alternate universe. More than likely you don’t believe me. You will eventually. Of course, by this very interaction and observation the wave collapses and we thus create an alternate universe consisting of our two universes where the wormhole was unsuccessful.”

    In retrospect, this was first contact. The alternate universe began cropping up all over the internet to the point where the possibility of a hoax was an impossibility. After coordinating the exact location of the wormhole we used calculations acquired from our alternate selves to begin transferring data through this rip in space-time. We were successful.

    The process continued until the number of joined universes reached into the millions. The process of joining universes was then packaged and sold; one could piggyback onto a connection to an alternate universe and see the effects of a decision or non-decision almost immediately. We could observe the cat both alive and dead.

    With each alternate universe the number of connections through the wormhole grew exponentially until it became saturated with data, then unstable, and eventually collapsed simultaneously cutting off every alternate universe’s connection to every other alternate universe.

    Thus we spend every waking hour nesting inside our social networks waiting for a glimpse of our alternate selves.

Tagged with: Short