26 Absurdities of Tragic Proportions

by Matthew C Woodruff

  It has been a long time since it has seen hope and joy, like on Maria’s face and now on Amy’s.

  “Oh Mom, it’s great,” Amy gushed, hugging Maria’s neck just before she launched herself up the stairs, marveling at the softness of the carpet and the feel of the smooth age-worn wood of the bannister.

  Amy didn’t notice the flaws, the cobwebs and dust, the cracking and peeling paint or the worn spots on the carpet. Amy only saw a new hope. She stopped and looked out every window, drinking in her and Maria’s new life. Just as the sun set for good beyond the western horizon, Amy stopped at the top of the great staircase and turned around maybe just a little bit too fast, to go back down, to hug her mother again, and to start their new adventure.

  Sadly, for Amy and Maria, this was the first time the staircase saw death as Amy tripped and tumbled down to the bottom floor. Destiny or fate once again smashing all of Maria’s hopes for her Grand Plan.

  The End.

  Basil

  Basil’s Mother is a scientist, not just any kind of scientist, but a quantum physicist. Basil doesn’t know what that means, but why should he when he’s only eight years old?

  Basil and his mother live in Russia. They are in fact Russian. Not everyone who lives in Russia is Russian, some are Georgian, some are Chechyan, some are French, like anywhere some people had come from other places.

  But not Basil’s family, they have always lived in Russia. Before Basil was born it was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and it had many different territories. All the people in the area were referred to as Russians or Soviets. Now it is known as Russia. And (in some minds) it is not as big or as great but all the people who are born there are Russians, and still proud.

  Back when it was the USSR, everyone worked for the government, more or less, especially the scientists and everything was paid for, more or less. Now Basil’s mother works at a University. Many of the older Russians long for the day the USSR is whole again, and is great once again, but not Basil’s mother. Though she is old (she had Basil when she was 61) and remembers the days of the communist USSR, she thinks the new Russia is better than the old. She doesn’t have to work on what she is told to work on now she can work on whatever she can get funding for.

  In her spare time Basil’s mother built a time machine. She couldn’t get funding for her time machine the normal way. Truth is she didn’t even try. Who would give some crazy, old Russian scientist money to build a time machine? That’s why Basil’s mother had to build it at home, in the garage. They do have garages in Russia, just like anywhere else. Apparently, they also have time machines, just like nowhere else.

  Another famous scientist named Albert Einstein, who was in fact not Russian, said time travel was not possible. Albert believed everything happened at once, so how could you travel to a time that is currently happening? Basil’s Mother didn’t believe Albert was correct, though.

  Basil’s mother had an idea of how time travel would be possible. She believed, unlike Albert, that time was a straight road, maybe a little bumpy at times but you could see behind you and in front of you and just like on a road you can stop and go backwards or go faster and go frontwards.

  To build her time machine, she just needed the parts. Even in Russia, you don’t just go to the corner store and buy a flux capacitor or whatever the thingy is that makes time travel possible. Basil’s mother had to build what she needed, and that costs money, lots of it. Some people call it funding, when you are trying to steal it though it is not usually referred to as funding. But how does an aging Russian quantum physicist acquire (i.e. steal) a large sum of money in a short time?

  By defrauding the government, of course.

  Now by its very nature, the government has access to a lot of money. And as one of the world’s leading quantum physicists Basil’s mother knew only a few of her peers could ever understand her work. She figured if she made her grant applications seem reasonable enough, while promising wonderful things, she could get all the money she needed.

  Stealth technology for battleships? Consider it done, Cha-Ching! Quantum powered spy satellites that move at high speed and last virtually forever? Consider it done, Cha-Ching! Better erectile dysfunction management? Consider it done, Cha-Ching! And etc. Cha-Ching!

  Basil’s mother was smart. She had a foolproof plan. She would defraud the money she needed in the now, then after her time machine was operational she would go to the past or the future and recoup all the money she would need to build her time machine and travel back to before now, give herself the money and use that money to build her time machine without having to defraud the government. She was only wondering why she hadn’t visited herself yet with the money. But maybe she has to do the whole thing the first time to start the loop off. Nobody understood time travel as well as Basil’s mother so that is to say, nobody understood time travel. Just because you or I can bake a soufflé (well, you may be able to, I certainly can’t) doesn’t mean we understand why the whole is better than the parts. It just is.

  Basil’s mother built a time machine in her garage by defrauding massive amounts of money from the government. Surprisingly or not, everything didn’t go exactly as planned.

  Even though Basil was only eight years old, being the son of one of the world’s leading quantum physicists, he was pretty smart. It shouldn’t be a big surprise to learn Basil knew how to operate his mother’s time machine. He was after all always watching her tinker. It was interesting. What poor Basil didn’t know was how to fend off hungry bears. So, when Basil got into his mother’s time machine and accidentally we’ll say, travelled 250 years into the past and stepped out of his mother’s time machine into the cold Russian woods, well let’s just say the bears were happy.

  Basil’s mother now lives in an asylum, after being arrested for defrauding massive amounts of money from the government. Her insistence that she used the money to build a time machine and that her eight year old son must have taken it somewhen, and was also missing seemed a bit too, let’s say, eccentric to the prosecutor, who believed only a crazy woman would defraud massive amounts of money from the government and kill, or sell (who really knew) her own son and claim to have built a time machine to cover it all up.

  Though she really seemed to believe it.

  Russia has asylums because Russia has crazy people who commit crimes and believe fantastical stories to account for the mundane, just like everywhere else.

  Russian stories always have a moral. Cinderella, another Russian story for example, had a moral. A moral of a story is the reason why you should or shouldn’t always do the thing the story talks about.

  Basil’s story has a moral. It should be obvious. Don’t travel back in time to the Russian woods in a time machine if you can’t fend off bears, or Cossacks too, probably. It might be good to note that travelling forward in time also may have hazards, even if you don’t run into bears or Cossacks.

  The End.

  Clara

  Part 1

  It was April 27th, in the year of our Lord 1828. A big event in the City of London, the greatest city in the world, was about to unfold. It was the opening of the London Zoo, the only one of its kind in the world. The London Zoo was primarily for scientific research but Clara’s Father, Henry, was the chief keeper, an important and respected working-class position.

  Henry wasn’t always chief keeper, it was a new position and title created for the zoo and for Henry, who through a judicious and perhaps a ridiculous amount of hard work, respectful subservience to his ‘betters’, a shrill and nagging wife, and a strange knack of caring for wild animals, merited a promotion. When Clara was born in 1818 as the first of Henry’s four living children, Henry was a mere clark in the Tower of London, where his father had secured a position for him when he announced he was to marry. He stayed a clark for many years, doing things of a clarkly nature and helping out with the animal menagerie, which was then housed at the Tower.

  That whole rainy and cold month of
April 1828, temporary workers, mostly from the docks, dressed in their wool pants and shabby collarless once white shirts under their dirty vests, (more often than not with missing buttons) and with their workmen’s caps skewed on their heads, were busy up and down London streets transporting animals in large and small wooden crates and iron cages, on horse drawn carts or hand pulled or pushed wagons from the Tower of London menagerie, or from one or two donated private collections. Under Henry’s direction and through workers strikes, sickness, mobs and bureaucratic entanglements, a job that would eventually take four years to finally complete.

  A Londoner of the time could easily see their routes by merely following the hay and animal droppings spread through-out the cities cobblestoned streets and alleys. Past Billingsgate, past St. Paul’s Cathedral, through neighborhoods like Holborn, Covent Garden, Fitrozia and onto Regent’s Park where the new zoo was to be located on donated land.

  Henry was ecstatic. Even his wife momentarily stopped complaining about Henry’s lack of upward mobility and income. Maybe now they could abandon their rented second floor flat in Paddington, that started to smell suspiciously and embarrassingly like curry, and finally move up in the world, maybe to Gloucester Street with others of a certain taste and income where Henry’s wife imagined they belonged. No matter it would be farther from Regent’s Park and closer to the Tower than where they resided now. (If only their accents and manners followed suit, but that is a different problem for a different day.)

  So, move they did, to Gloucester Street, or near enough that Henry’s wife could say she lived on Gloucester street anyway. There the ladies weren’t as welcoming to Henry’s wife and family as they might have wished. In fact, several of them looked down their noses at them, as it were. A phrase that may have originated with these particular ladies, judging from the size of their noses. But Henry’s wife’s old friends from the old neighbourhood of Paddington were suitably impressed and more importantly, jealous.

  Clara didn’t care one way or the other what neighbourhood they resided in. In fact, Clara disapproved of the whole class structure, a forward thinking and independent young lady if ever there was one.

  After the debacle of getting all the animals moved and housed, the scientific labs set-up, the researchers invited or appointed, the constant hay and food deliveries scheduled and maintained and a million other things Henry was suddenly responsible for, it was now 1832.

  Part 2

  Clara was fourteen. As a young pre-Victorian woman, Clara’s family hadn’t been in a position to get her any formal education, though her younger two brothers, Henry and Edward, twelve and eight respectively, went half a day three days a week to the priests for some writing and arithmetic and history now that Henry could afford it. Fourteen was a good marrying age. Henry’s wife had done her best to prepare Clara in household management though Clara remained unnaturally stubborn concerning some things, and Henry had his eye out for a respectable man of employment or of certain means for Clara. Certainly, Clara’s chances were for a much better match now that they lived near Gloucester Street than if they had stayed in Paddington. There was only one small issue. Clara didn’t want to get married.

  Clara wanted to make a difference. Clara insisted she wanted to help out those poor men at a workhouse near their old neighborhood, maybe by working in the soup kitchen. While Henry may have unwillingly obliged her, her mother said no in no uncertain terms, with foot down, hands on hips and a disturbing scowl on her face that after all these years Henry knew the ramifications of. Could you imagine? Our daughter around men of that type? What would the neighbors think? The conversation was short, the tears and recriminations were not.

  If Clara could have read or gone to school she might have heard of the Fabians, a group of like-minded free thinkers who wanted and advocated for social improvement. She might have had a specific cause, and not just been blown on the winds of her own radical (for the time) thinking and un-clarified desires for betterment, feeling lost and unfulfilled. Unfortunately, their own societal upbringing, trappings and lack of formal education prevented her parents from understanding what was happening inside of Clara.

  Henry’s wife was now in a hurry to get Clara married and settled. Suddenly, Sunday after church dinners sported young men of a certain type, slyly introduced to Clara as ‘a nephew of old Mrs. What’s-her-name, from the butcher’s shop’. Or simply, ‘John Somebody who works with your father’s friend’. Or ‘Mr. Respectable, his uncle is a barrister’. The parade of men, young and not so young, was full of handsome stumbling morons, and homely, engaging conversationalists and everything in between. Any one of them would have felt lucky to catch Clara’s interest, an attractive woman of strong conviction, from a respectable family. But Clara was having none of it.

  After a while, when the list of possible suitors was growing thin, Sunday evenings, after the selected guest of the week departed, was full of more tears and recriminations. Henry’s wife was becoming desperate. That is when Henry stumbled on to a great idea. Clara could come to work with him at the zoo a few days a week. Clara loved animals, a trait inherited from Henry himself, no doubt. After all, there were several suitable men working at the zoo. Some were researchers, some were clarks, and some of them were single. Clara may fall in love with one based on a mutual interest and even though Clara’s mother didn’t put much stock in falling in love, who knows?

  Though initially opposed to the idea, after all in pre-Victorian London respectable women didn’t work out of the home, except for the occasional spinster teacher or nurse, Henry’s wife haltingly agreed, not seeing any other way forward.

  Henry was right on one account, Clara was thrilled with the idea, not for the chance to meet a possible suitor, no, but the chance to be around the animals her father (in her young mind) lovingly cared for.

  From day one though, Clara was taken aback with revulsion. This was after all, a scientific study zoo. The animals were, well, studied. Their living conditions were barbaric. Here were monkeys from deepest, darkest Africa, intelligent and funny animals crammed together in cages too small, living in their own filth, dirty and smelly. There were big cats too, but these were mean and scared creatures, they were considered noble, loyal creatures in Clara’s mind and weren’t for study or cruel treatment. There were bears, which Clara had never seen before, but imagined as majestic wilderness rulers. These were snarling and mean, with matted fur and emaciated bodies. There was a grand lion, donated by some down on his luck explorer, who now lay listlessly throughout the day and night.

  The list goes on, much in the same way of unloved, mistreated animals, fed and watered yes, but generally uncared for and occasionally put to some gruesome test.

  Clara’s revulsion turned to anger. How dare her father, the man she imagined cared for these majestic animals, treat them so? She insisted, no, demanded her father improve their lot with bigger cages, better care, no more cruel study, even, dare she utter the word… freedom.

  Henry’s heart was broken, he could see the revulsion in his daughter’s eyes. Eventually Clara stopped going to the zoo. She couldn’t even look at her father the same way again. She became depressed and despondent over her inability to improve the lives of these poor animals. If she couldn’t even help a few poor dumb animals, how could she ever hope to help any needy people? She took her father’s unwillingness to help them as a personal repudiation, not understanding there was nothing poor Henry could do as he was merely a minor functionary in a massive bureaucracy.

  Clara stopped going to the zoo, stopped going outside completely. She stopped caring for her appearance and she stopped eating. Cajoling, demanding and pleading had no effect. Leeches and blistering gave no relief and resulted in nothing except to drain meager savings.

  Finally one day, either due to weakness or a total and abject despondency, Clara could no longer leave the bed. Eventually they moved her to the divan in the parlor for a change of scenery, but it didn’t matter, Clara was finished.

&nb
sp; The family was never the same after that. Henry’s job performance suffered greatly, as he now saw his animals through Clara’s eyes and himself as ineffectual. He started spending every evening in the local pub. One drunken night he even tried to return to the zoo to release all the animals, thankfully only falling over drunk in a ditch instead. It wasn’t long before a particularly industrious assistant took over Henry’s post and Henry was let go. It was a devastating blow in the 1830’s, with no social network to rely upon.

  Henry Jr. and Edward had to leave their schooling and take menial jobs to help support the family. The family moved back to Paddington, where Henry’s wife took in laundry and sewing to help make ends meet. The youngest contracted cholera and died. Their once upon time friends gazed upon them only with pity in their eyes now, no longer jealousy.

  Their lives had now become irreparably broken, with Clara’s demise.