Are You There Margaret? It's Me, God: Flash Fiction

It's not that I'm lonely. I have millions of people talking to me everyday. But the conversation is just so one-sided. Yeah, yeah, I know people want me to talk to them, but that's not how it works. But I wish that people would talk to me about stuff that I was interested in, instead of just their own problems, you know.

But I really shouldn't complain, my twin brother Isaiah has it pretty rough over there. What with the 5,000 years of suffering and all. I think he gets a bad rap, anyways.

The other thing, is that everyone thinks that I've got all the time in the world to listen to their prayers. Do you know how hard it is to keep track of everything? Luckily I made a deal with Steve Jobs, and now I've got a nice incoming prayer podcast setup, but he still can't make a iPod that's big enough.

And it's not just listening to prayers--you wouldn't believe how long it takes to clean up the world. I've been meaning to dust the Sahara for a couple thousand years. And I really need to get around to vacuuming South America. The Amazon really isn't supposed to be there.

I'm so busy that I hardly get to enjoy my holidays. How ironic that I'm the one that has to work every Easter and Christmas. No one ever says, "Hey Joe, why don't you just call in sick today." Even Isaiah spends Hanukkah in Fiji. (He invented it, not to compete with Christmas, but to have a week that didn't mean anything just to have some time off.)

The only vacation I do get is at the end of August--the annual family reunion picnic. Everyone's there. Isaiah brings some Matza, my uncle Buddha brings his famous samosas, Grandpa Confucious has some egg rolls and fortune cookies, my uncle-in-law Mohammad brings some killer kabobs, and I make my traditional homemade bread and fried cod. We all get along but it can be really distracting. After Katrina, I decide to teleconference in 2006.

But we're all one big happy family. We just wish that sometimes you'd show an interest in our problems. Oh well, maybe next evolution.

1985: Flash Fiction

Big Brother was watching me. His name was Eric. He can be kind of a jerk sometimes. And he always has to win. Today Big Brother wanted to play hide and go seek.

I climbed into a sleeping bag in the attic. The zipper was pulled tight. This hiding space was perfect. I was sure no one would ever find me. I heard footsteps and I could see flashes of light dancing on the walls. I was winning. It became hard to breath, but I wouldn’t dare cough. I was perfectly silent.

For the first time, I was aware of it as it happened. I had the opportunity to do what I always wanted, but never had the chance. You can dream anything you want and make it real. I wanted to fly. Just the thought that I could, filled with me joy. I sprinted down an anonymous residential street, full of perfectly green lawns and paperboys throwing newspapers in sprinklers, to build up speed for takeoff. When I reached the fourth mailbox on the left, I leapt forward, high, higher into the air, receiving a sudden lift from the wind the moment before my face plunged into the concrete road, leaving cartilage and tissue behind as an unpleasant reminder that I will never fly.

I woke up.

The oxygen level was dropping below 20%. I was winning.

My little sister through a pack of 64 crayons against the wall. The blues, greens, purples fell harmlessly to the ground, casually grazing the white stucco walls and the beige Berber carpet. The oranges, reds, yellows, magentas, and pinks exploded into a volcano burst of color in the fireplace. I heard a silent gasp of gas pass through the air at a normal pace. People were screaming. Our house was on fire. I wanted to run through a car wash. I wanted to take a shower in milk. I wanted to sleep in the freezer. I wanted to take off my burning clothes. My visual angle zoomed out and tilted down. I was watching my family burn. I was on fire.

I woke up.

Eric was shaking me. I didn’t win.

Now I’m sitting at the typewriter in the den. Big Brother is watching me type. They’re fragile, innocent. They’re similar to molecules of firewood. I’ve got a million of them. These little atoms bouncing around. They’re so excited. They could catch a little help and start a great fire in our den to keep me warm. Or they could explode and burn down our house. But most likely nothing will happen. All these millions of ideas I have, they’ll just sit there, in our den, like chunks of wood. Eventually they’ll rot. But right now my ideas are as young as me, they’re fragile, and they’re just waiting. All the need is a little help. A spark.

A Clockwork Apple: Flash Ficton

Think about how the assembly line has changed the world. America wouldn't be what it is today. Think of every product you use. Every good you consume. Chances are, everything you touch has gone through an assembly line. And you don't think anything of it. Welcome to the Eastern Nebraska Regional Pickle Plant. Welcome to Omaha.

Every day I clock in by 9 and stay til '5. I don't have a job title, but if I did it would be pickle seasoner. I work on Bread & Butter Pickle Chips. And every 10 minutes I add the seasoning mixture to a new batch. That's about 50 batches a day, with hundreds of pickles in a batch. And that's all I ever do. I smell like vinegar and mustard seed 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. And I've been here for 17 years. That's a lot of pickles.

Here's the thing. After a while, this job isn't about the pickles. You just tune them out. This job is really about people. I've seen my fair share of guys who didn't have what it takes. I've seen people who are convinced they're only here for 6 months to pay some bills. But what I've never seen is a guy like Chip. He's only been here about 3 weeks, but every day he amazes me. He's an average worker but I can't stop watching him eat.

Every day, and I mean every single day he's worked here, he eats the same thing. At 9:00 he pulls out a red apple. And he eats it down to the core. And then at 12:00 noon, he does the same things. And now it's been about a month, and every day he pulls out the same red apple at 9 am and at 12 noon.

Well we all noticed it and we couldn't help but wonder, what does he eat for dinner? Could it be that all he eats at home is red apples? Is his kitchen nothing more than an apple container. We all started joking around and making bets. And by the 3rd week it went from a joke to a morbid curiosity.

And I was dying to find out.

So that's why I am, where I am. Crouching behind his house, kneeling under his kitchen window. Waiting for him to get home. I took a sick day and got here about 4pm--I couldn't risk having him see me follow him home. So now I'm waiting for this guy I don't even know to eat dinner. And I just heard the garage door.

The kitchen looks normal enough, and I can't see any food visible from here. Are those pantry cabinets empty? Is that fridge full of hundreds of red apples? I'm freezing my nuts off out here and I couldn't be happier.

I suppose I would be remiss in my storytelling duties if I left out the fact that I was completely naked and holding a pump-action shotgun. And I should probably come clean and admit that when I saw him getting out some ground beef out of the fridge, I became so enraged that I jumped through his window and shouted, "Why aren't you eating an apple?!"

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Chip was so terrified that he had to do something. I still thank him for shooting me in the leg, because really he had grounds to shoot me anywhere. I would also like to thank the staff at Saint Joseph's Hopsital for fixing me all up. I can't wait to get out of here and tell my buddies at work that Chip really does eat foods other than apples. Crazy Chip.

Poop for Algernon: Flash Fiction

Imagine a poster on the side of a building. One person looks at it and sees a red poster. The other, looking at the same poster, sees blue. How could they ever come together and agree on what color the poster actually is. Neither person is colorblind; they just have different names for the colors. It’s quite a problem.

I defecate flowers. I should say that I defecate what you consider to be flowers. I consider flowers poop. You see, I eat food like everyone else. My body digests the food. And then outcomes poop. Beautiful tulips, daffodils, and sometimes even roses. You know, poop.

I’m not stupid. I learned from a young age, that the kids called bowel movements “poop”. And I didn’t spend any time checking out the poop of my peers, so I just naturally assumed that the entire 4th grade class of St. Thomas Elementary were depositing lilacs into the toilets after lunch.

I heard the expression “everybody poops.” So I just assumed that everyone poops like me.

You’re probably assuming that if I thought that poop was flowers, that I must have called flowers, poop. That’s simply not the case. I knew that everyone called those flowers. And I just thought that “flowers” were the floral plants that are in the ground, and “poop” is a floral plant that comes after a big meal. Kind of how a sweater is a shirt, but we still call it a sweater.

In the 8th grade, Halloween night, a bunch of my friends put flaming bags of poop on some doorsteps. I got some weird looks when my paper bag had a sunflower sticking out of it, but I’ve come to reason that the kids just assumed I had decorated my poop bag.

But I wouldn’t live in the darkness forever. I was an invincible 16-year-old visiting my Uncle on the job. Whose job happened to be the Warden of the St. Thomas Penitentiary. He gave me the basic tour, and then I noticed the capital punishment wing. There was a lethal injection planned for that day, and my Uncle wanted no part of me seeing what happened. But, I was an arrogant fool and eventually he let me watch, presumably to teach me a lesson about who knows what is best for me.

I’ll spare you the details of the execution, and instead focus on one eye-opening post-mortem detail. The deceased defecated, leaving a stain on the table he was strapped to. That day I smelled something I had never smelled before. But the reality of poop didn’t instantly sink on. I just thought that once you died you didn’t poop flowers anymore, just soil.