Red Herring

by Damon L. Wakes

  “Gee, really!?” The horses snorted angrily. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Suddenly, a dinosaur’s head burst up through the floor. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” it said. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!”

  “Oh no.” Dave stared in horror. “What’s going on now? That dinosaur’s not supposed to be here!”

  “Look, it’s fine. Sometimes when you screw around with the narrative causality matrix, it drags in stuff from other stories. Just ignore it.”

  “Screw that,” huffed Dave. “I’m asking for directions. Excuse me!”

  “Yes?” The dinosaur turned to look at him.

  “Do you know the way to the crystalline elixir?”

  “Yeah, but it’s quite a way. Head down Middle of Nowhere Street, then take a left at the Orphanage of Fear. After that, just keep going until you see the Elaborate Underground Base.”

  Paul let out an impressed whistle. “Somebody’s spent a while on TVtropes.”

  “Yeah,” said the dinosaur. “Were you not here two days ago? That was actually a thing.”

  “I was kind of busy. As you can see, this is a buddy comedy. Dave and I are on a hilarious quest to find the crystalline elixir, but...” he waved the device complacently, “I’ve devised a way of avoiding all the hijinks.”

  Dave whinnied in annoyance.

  “Okay. Most of the hijinks.”

  “I don’t know...” the dinosaur balanced its massive head on a tiny little arm, its elbow resting on the concrete. “Don’t you think you’re being excessively Genre Savvy? That seems like the kind of thing that might cause hilarity to ensue, if you know what I mean.”

  “That’s basically what I said,” offered Dave.

  “No, it’s cool. Like I said, I’ve got this little device that lets me manipulate the narrative causality matrix. I can just skip right to the end.”

  “What? You can’t do that!”

  “Watch me.”

  BLIP!

  wobblewobblewobblewobble

  “I’m still two horses.”

  “You’re just not going to let me forget about that, are you?”

  “It’s really starting to bum me out.”

  “Quit complaining! We’re in the underground base thingy, and I’m pretty sure that’s the crystalline elixir right there.”

  “Good. Maybe one of its magic powers is to stop me being two horses.”

  “Oh, come on, Dave! Give it a rest!”

  “Just hurry up and get the thing, would you?”

  “Fine! I will.”

  Paul stomped over to the sci-fi looking pedestal in the middle of the room and lifted the cylindrical glass cover. A cloud of cold vapour tumbled to the floor. Reaching into the container, he took out a small white nugget.

  “Do you know what we’re actually supposed to do with this? I mean, normally you’d drink an elixir, but obviously that’s not an option here. It’s gotta be food, right?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “I mean, worst case scenario: something funny happens. It shouldn’t—the device should have eliminated pretty much all the hijinks—but if worst comes to worst, that’s it, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s not going to be anything really unpleasant.”

  “Unless that really unpleasant thing was, in fact, funny...” Paul eyed the crystalline elixir suspiciously.

  “Just do it already!”

  “Alright, alright!”

  Paul popped the nugget in his mouth and chewed once. Immediately, he spat it out again. “Peh,” he said,” frantically wiping fragments off his tongue with both hands.

  “What?” asked Dave. “What is it?”

  “It’s crack cocaine.”

  The horses gave each other a tired look. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

  “In retrospect, the device does seem to have caused as many hijinks as it prevented.”

  Suddenly, a dinosaur’s head burst up through the floor. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” it said. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!”

  “Alright,” said Paul, readying the device once more. “That’s it. We’re going home.”

  BLIP!

  wibblewibblewibblewibble

  “Eureka!” shouted Paul. “I’ve done it!”

  “Oh, great,” sighed Dave. “What crazy scheme have you come up with this time?”

  “It’s not a crazy scheme! It’s a device that’ll let us bypass all the regular hijinks that stop us from getting the crystalline elixir.”

  “I don’t know...that sounds like the sort of thing that might end up causing hilarity to ensue.”

  “No, it’s cool. See, it works by manipulating the narrative causality matrix itself. Rather than coming up with a specific crazy scheme, we’ll just insert ourselves into whatever storyline eventually leads to us obtaining the crystalline elixir.”

  “I just want to go on record as saying that I think this is a bad idea.”

  “Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen?”

  BLIP!

  30

  Aerosol

  It has been a day and a half since the crash, and I have found a cabin. In some ways, this is a relief. I don’t know if I could face another night on the mountain without shelter. Outside, a fire does no good: the heat simply travels upwards. However, this place also raises some difficult questions. I estimate that I’ve put eight miles between myself and the crash site. I don’t know if this will be enough. It occurs to me that I don’t really know anything.

  The survival manual recommends staying with the plane. It explains that this affords the best chance of rescue. It explains that the wreckage offers warmth and shade. It explains that seventy percent of pilots who stay are located within three days, while seventy percent of those who leave are never recovered. It does not explain what to do if the payload begins to leak.

  Jenkins shouted after me as I ran, said it was our duty to defend the aircraft. I tried to warn him about the spur of wood protruding from the fuselage—no way it had failed to pierce the tank. Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone back, dragged him with me. Too late now.

  ***

  The payload is colourless and odourless. Out of necessity, I have melted down some snow to drink. I can only hope that this is safe. The sky is silent. If they know where we are, they have not sent out a search.

  ***

  There are cracks in the cabin walls. I have spent days looking for somewhere else to go, but have found nothing so far. I wonder about the fluid leaking slowly from the plane. It was supposed to be released as an aerosol. I don’t know what it will do, trickling across the land. I saw a dead vole lying in the snow today, but it’s too soon to have been a result of the leak. I hope it’s too soon.

  ***

  The cracks in the walls seem to widen every day. Perhaps it’s because I have stayed so long. With no planes overhead, and the ever-present threat of the spreading leak, even the tiniest annoyance fills my mind and cannot be ignored. My small rations have run out, but there are cans of food in a cupboard by the window here. The labels are all foreign, and it’s strange to think that I’m behind enemy lines. I’ve forgotten everything that I was trained to do in this situation. It all seems pointless. There are no people to capture me here, though I almost wish there were. The only enemy is the one we brought, seeping through the hillside.

  Today I saw a bird at the window, batting at the glass.

  ***

  Many of the cans have rusted through and spoiled. The first one I opened spilled out something black and crumbly. The second and third were much the same. I am keeping the spoiled food outside, buried underneath the snow. While I have so little, I cannot throw anything away. I have a little snare wire in my survival tin, and could always use some bait.

  ***

  With nothing left to eat, I have begun to hunt, but hold little hope. Today, I spent all morning stalking an ibex that I saw up on the ridge. But when I finally had it in the sights of my service pistol, I realised that it was sick. A healthy anima
l wouldn’t have let me get that close. Besides that, there were little cysts all down one side of its face. A thick rope of drool dangled from its bottom lip.

  I should have walked farther. I should have put more distance between myself and the plane. Too late now.

  ***

  The cracks really are widening. There’s one by my bed that I can put my hand through. When I first noticed it, I could barely see daylight on the other side. I think it’s the fire, drying out the wooden walls, but I cannot do without it. I would stop up the gaps, but I am wearing all the cloth I have. There were no sheets or blankets left here by the owners. I don’t know if it’s still safe here, but it’s too late to risk another move. The payload is colourless and odourless.

  ***

  I shot Jenkins today. How he survived in the plane so long, nobody will ever know, but he wasn’t well. Whatever we were flying in, it did something to his brain. He was violent, incoherent, obviously contaminated. There was nothing else I could do. I’m aware I’ll be court martialled for this, if I’m ever found at all. I hope these notes will help my case. His body is in the stream—I couldn’t risk moving him.

  ***

  There is almost no wall left now. By day, the sun streams through the spaces in the wood. By night, the wind blows through. On more than one occasion, the bird I saw has flown straight through the building. It has tumours on the backs of its wings. Whatever was in the plane, it is in here now too.

  ***

  Someone is at the door.

  ***

  Today I managed to trap an alpine hare. It was obviously contaminated, but there’s nothing else to eat. Also, I’m past caring. We brought this thing to the mountain. I suppose it’s our duty to stay here with it. Down by the stream, all the trees have died.

  ***

  The cabin has exploded. It didn’t happen suddenly. The cracks just widened and widened until that was all there was. The walls are nothing but jagged splinters now, suspended in the air, and now I realise. I don’t need this place. The plane has taken everything—Jenkins, the cabin, the animals, the trees—and I can do without it. I am free.

  ***

  Matches. Glue. Airplane wings. My pen is running out of ink.

  ***

  Someone is at the door.

  31

  Musical Isotopes

  Challenge #14: Write a piece of absurdist fiction.

  Once upon a time, on a Tuesday, Hydrogen decided to quit its day job and become a country music star.

  “I have decided to quit my day job and become a country music star,” said Hydrogen.

  Hydrogen’s job was promptly outsourced to a sweatshop in China. Zhang Xiu Ying, an amateur musician and part-time waitress, was an employee of this sweatshop.

  Contrary to the extremely disparaging remarks Neodymium had made shortly before Hydrogen decided to begin its music career, Hydrogen immediately became extremely successful. This was because the televised talent contest Hydrogen used to pursue a record deal had been fixed by the Mafia in order to recover financial losses suffered due to a clerical error caused by a freak accident involving a pickled stoat. Hydrogen was not aware of this, as up until the contest win it had spent most of its time devising an elaborate sob-story about Plutonium. This story would later earn Hydrogen a book deal, plus a considerable fortune from the sale of the movie rights, though ultimately the director lost confidence in the project and the film was never made.

  Jealous of Hydrogen’s easy success, Zhang Xiu Ying started a mean-spirited blog—www.hydrogenlooksfatandugly.com—that initially went completely unread. However, almost a year later, a small-town reporter stumbled across it and used it in an article as an example of how the anonymity of online presence frees people from the established conventions of polite society and proves that ultimately, deep down, we are all petty and spiteful. That article immediately went viral, driving millions of views to www.hydrogenlooksfatandugly.com.

  This sudden influx of attention prompted Zhang Xiu Ying to change tack. Having begun as an outlet for various poorly-articulated rants about Hydrogen’s choice of clothes and the repetitive nature of its lyrics (which were largely ghost-written by its friend, Helium), the blog quickly morphed into a discourse on the lottery of birth and the superficiality of manufactured fame.

  You know this because the pickled stoat shared the link on Twitter.

  Statistical Analysis

  Why, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Possibly because this is a book, not a room, and there’s no way I could literally see you doing anything. That would be crazy. But regardless of how you got here, I should probably explain that last year’s anthology—OCR is Not the Only Font—included a section analysing the results of Flash Fiction Month, and that in this book I’ll be building on that. While last year’s analysis focused on the effect of Flash Fiction Month as a whole, this one will have more to do with how this year’s event went differently for me. If that doesn’t interest you, you might like to skip this section, but unfortunately you can’t because suddenly there’s a graph!

  Fig 1: “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” says Fig. 1. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!”

  If you’ve read the section with graphs and stuff from OCR is Not the Only Font, this might look familiar. I did the same thing last year, though obviously this graph uses this year’s word counts. The blue line (the one with diamond dots, for those of you reading in black and white) shows the word count for each day of the month, while the red line (square dots) is an average of five days: that day itself, and the two before and after. Essentially, the red line shows the same thing as the blue line—word count over time—but it evens out all the horrible spiky bits that make it impossible to tell what’s going on.

  “What is going on?” I hear you cry! Well, since you asked so enthusiastically...not much, really. On average, I was writing 500-900 words each day. It went up and down an awful lot on some individual days, but on the whole didn’t change much over the course of the month. In fact, almost all the points on the red line are in the 600-800 region, so that red line isn’t doing anything interesting whatsoever. It’s almost as though I was subconsciously trying to sabotage my own statistical analysis! Let’s see if I can save this with...Fig. 2!

  Fig. 2: “Zzzzzzzzzz...huh!? What? How did I get here?”

  Here’s the five day average for this year (2013: red line, square dots) compared with the one for last year (2012: green line, triangular dots). Notice how there’s actually something going on in this graph? Yeah, that’s right! Things are happening!

  More specifically, two things are happening. One is that this year’s line is much spikier than last year’s. I’m not certain why that’s the case, but I suspect it’s not terribly important. The other thing that’s happening is that, while my average word count per day dropped over the course of the month in 2012, this time around it stayed boringly consistent. The two lines also seem to share the same little jump in word count around Day 27, possibly because the end was in sight and I was motivated to write a little more on those days. The drop at the very end is likely down to the challenges: the final challenge of 2012 involved a very short word limit, and the final challenge this year didn’t really lend itself to a long story, so there you go.

  But to show you the most interesting difference between these two Flash Fiction Months, I’ll need a different graph entirely...

  Fig. 3: “I am a graph! Squeeze me!”

  This graph shows averages taken from across entire months. In 2012, my average word count per day for the whole month was 511. Considering that these stories have a minimum word count of 55, and a maximum word count of 1000 (also included in the graph for comparison), this doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary: it’s pretty much right in the middle of the two extremes. This year, however, my average was 703: that’s nearly two hundred words more every single day. I feel it’s particularly high given that, in order to actually hit that maximum possible average of 1000 words per day, you’d have to igno
re any challenges that required you to write less. Plus, some challenges (such as that Pilish one) really aren’t conducive to long stories, even if they don’t technically rule them out.

  To illustrate this increase in story length a different way: in 2012, five of my flash fiction stories had word counts of over 900; this year, that figure more than doubled to thirteen. In OCR is Not the Only Font, I raised the point that more words aren’t necessarily better, but this year I’ve clearly become better at churning out more words. In the eleven months between these two events, I’ve participated in a variety of other flash fiction challenges, and also participated in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. I’ve had more practice at coming up with stories on the spot, and I’ve learned to plan them out more carefully. All in all, I’m not certain that these things have made me a better writer, but they do seem to have allowed me to tackle a wider range of stories, including some longer ones. Have a look at this:

  Fig. 4: In case you were wondering about the flavour of this pie chart, it’s banoffee.

  In OCR is Not the Only Font, I acknowledged that this sort of event tends to prompt fun, silly stories over serious ones. And clearly that’s still the case. But this year has seen a very slight increase in the number of heavier stories. Not only that, but I feel as though some of the ones I’ve counted as “funny” for the purposes of this graph did have somewhat more substance than last year. Whisper Down the Lane, for example, should be laugh-worthy, but there was also a serious (possibly even kind of depressing) point behind it too. And I think that illustrates the big problem with statistics-based analyses of literature: you can’t boil genre down into a little pie chart. Ultimately, if you want to understand what makes a story tick, you’ve just got to read it and take it apart. Graphs and numbers won’t really help you. They are handy for some things, though. And if nothing else, I hope you’ve found them entertaining.