by Jay DiNitto
broadcast. After six steps with his bowed head (the ground assisted in reception), the signal struck. He stopped on twin yellow lines and scribbled words to a terrible yet unheeded chorus of screeching tires and screaming pedestrians. He casually surveyed the accident scene and wrote a postscript.
“Misfortune, it seems, is very hoppable,” it read.
Mall Zombies
Mike and I carefully washed our hands in the bathroom.
“Lots of walking this year,” I said. “We did, what, forty laps?”
“Yeah. Something was missing this time. Not sure what.”
We gave ourselves the once over. Mike checked his bloody headshot, now crusted dry. My three-piece was torn and muddied in all the right places. I was pleased to see my tongue and teeth still flashing bile-black. Our paled, sallow faces were matchless and authentic.
We lumbered to the paper towel dispensers with stiff knees and wet hands held out in front. Even with those hands, the healthy remnant of our living selves at the end of our arms, we were finally the walking dead.
Undo
I picked the wrong cube before our move.
I signed for the wrong workstation.
I printed out some project requirement document on the wrong colored stock and on the wrong printer.
Minor flubs, surely, but it conglomerated into a larger monster of error that loomed above the humming fluorescent lights.
Mary-Louise dropped off the new floor directory. Positioned incorrectly was my cube, my workstation code, the printer supply closet, and the entire printer network.
I pinned the directory up anyway. It swayed and hung crookedly; instinctively my left-hand ring and index fingers mimed ctrl-z in the air in front of me.
Everything stayed the same.
Surprised by Wire
Jack rode alongside his brother Warnie, who was at the pedal. Jack admired him for allowing him the sidecar when they were both on break from studies. It gave Jack license to drain the eddying waters inside his head without having to concentrate on negotiating the Oxfordian traffic.
Then without warning, a metallic string strung across the road beheaded Jack. The world he thought so familiar and so settled and decided spun around and around: the sky, the horizon, the street fell over each other over and over in a tumult of reorganization.
When Warnie parked at the zoo, Jack grinned with enthusiasm and a faint tinge of apprehension.
The string was actually God and Jack’s head was his old way of thinking, now left behind on the side of the cobbled road.
Coffee with Rousseau
Tim searched for a way to continue the debate. The heady air in the coffee shop was archetypal for that kind of commemoration. Katie reprised her role of the Dostoyevskian idiot and opened her mouth first.
“I just don’t think humans are basically good,” Katie said.
“Neither do I.”
She fidgeted. Tim pictured her naked to pass the large tracts of time between her fumbling declarations.
“I, uh,..I – unless we’re in our natural state,” she said.
“What if our natural state is, say, in an unhindered free market?” he said with the over-affectation of one musing aloud. “It could be that man’s always bad but a capitalist system makes the most utility out of our badness.”
“Goddamnit!” She spilled coffee on her bare leg. Tim knew it was on purpose.
They left without paying.
The Philosophers’ Guild
Theoretical axioms, immutable propositions, and solipsistic proofs appeared at the back door after supper. Dr. Hathaway brought them inside and set them before the study’s fireplace, in the middle of our circle. We attacked our pipes with vigorous abandon while our anecdotes issued forth in whimsy.
Dusk to dark, and we attended to metaphysically unpacking our guests. The grounded lot of them was woefully impotent: pale, unmoving, timid. They broadcast signs of life and spectrum when we offered ourselves to one another in cautious discourse. They unfolded — blossoming — nearing the cobalt-blue midnight as we consorted with Reason and argued with mirth as our cloak, as friends often do.
Demolition
Chris gazed down at the streets below from his office window. The block a few streets over had been cordoned off for at least a month now. The barren gray building yawned higher into the low-floating dark clouds which threatened to unload with no warning.
He went back to his computer and started deleting the stripped-down directory structure on the abandoned app. When the last few files were being erased, there was a loud series of muffled booms outside and his screen turned blue.
He swore profusely and returned to his windows in frustration. The clouds over the debris had vanished.
Moses
With purpose she watched the ice cubes in her Manhattan, her fifth in the last half hour. They were made disgusting-sweet as nearly a quarter of it was maraschino juice, which the bartender dribbled into the glass with a laughable level of professional intent. If she didn’t know any better she would’ve thought it was badly-mixed Kool-Aid – a loose analogy for the reason for tonight’s plans.
She glanced over her shoulder. The stage was at the opposing end of the hall and there was unofficial lull in the awful renditions of drunken pop standards strung seamlessly end to end by the teeming hundreds of rehearsal dinner sycophants. They filled the floor in front of her like high tide. Three-fourths of them had no business being there despite being officially invited. Any other time it would be an irksome sign of Darrel’s chronic ostentation but tonight was the time to use it against him.
He was their good ol’ boy, a career collegiate of noble stock and respectable upbringing who held captive the virginal daughter of the wealthy small-town business owner with his shining valor. Suspicion of his reputation was automatically ruled out, but what she saw with her own eyes of his undergrad years – the drug-fueled parties, the womanizing, the payoffs to professors – went beyond suspicion and into established fact. It was knowledge that acted as devious social credit, credit that accumulated even up to the last minute the night before when she followed him to the strip club a few towns over.
Her glass trembled and she turned back around. A corner of one of the ice cubes, succumbing to room temperature and the warmth of her hand, dissipated and shifted the entire ecosystem of her drink. She smiled and regarded it as a welcome invitation.
Giddy, she wheeled around on her stool and raised her glass high and proud, staff-like. By some fortunate and theatrical freak of circumstance the glob of unaware people slowly split in two and provided a clear path to the stage, a black shiny road littered only with stray dining furniture, nutshells, and torn napkins. The mesh head of the distant microphone gleamed like fish scales in the light of the bloated, spinning disco ball.
With imbibed courage and her glass still above her head, she took the first shaky step off the stool and into the gauntlet, her past regrets and unspoken grievances following her like an unseen bridal train. She’d let everyone know exactly what kind of cheating, self-aggrandizing bastard Darrel really was.
Famous Last Words
The writer was thrown in prison on vague charges – charges born from reprehensible laws that were passed in questionable legislative circumstances, the kind that everyone had broken at some point and aren’t enforced until someone in power wanted an opponent discredited and removed.
In previous writings she had promised in explicit terms that in such circumstances she would take her own life. The jailers, cautiously familiar with her treasonous invectives, allowed her a small blade and wagered in low voices on her sincerity.
After an extended and unsupervised cigarette break, the guard on duty found her unmoving without drop of blood surrounding her on the grimy floor. Though all of her books were burned, the eulogistic words written in dark red on her prison’s walls were not forgotten by the guard, who kept a hidden journal of forbidden convictions.