Flash Fiction Inspired by Real Life

DOS and DONTS

by Matt Larsen

Taking CTRL of years of hoarding, DEL had asked his girlfriend Susan if he could RUN old manuals down to her basement cache. It should have been BASIC, but things got complicated after he asked to give their relationship a BREAK.

"Fine," she said, "Then I CMD you to pick them up or else I'll put them out for garbage collection."

"SU, come on! I need HELP. I thought you were a capacitor," he said, "Not a resistor."

"GOTO hell," she said.

But all that came back was an ECHO. He'd already ended the CALL.

Dreaming, May 26, 2010

Last night, I had a vivid dream of flooding. Constant rain drummed at the windows of the office where I worked, a combination of the drum-shaped Thompson Center and 200 S. Wacker where I work in my waking hours. I watched the large drops spatter and explode against the thick panes. You could feel the bass of their landing. A great shared space occupied the interior of the building, and if you looked up you could see sheets of it cascading against the multicolored glass rooftop. I went outside when the rain abated to a dull drizzle. The building sat at the water's edge, a Great Lake of one kind or another filling the horizon with blue under the gray, leaden sky, a sandy beach extending all the way down to the cresting waves. People played on the beach, enjoying the lull or perhaps unconscious of or uncaring about the earlier downpour. The scene reminded me of the photo I saw yesterday from the Boston Times' Big Picture, of children in Louisiana playing in a pair of plastic pools on the beach, the better to keep the Deepwater Horizon oil at bay. I trotted a little distance along the shore, climbing amid some whitewashed pontoons lashed together into temporary docks for small sailboats. Returning to the beach by my office building, I noticed the waves piling up.

As happens in many of my wave dreams, they began to grow larger, enveloping more of the beach with every curl. They reached my feet. I stepped back, up a stone embankment, wondering whether the storm might drive the water farther inland. The quickly-cresting waves answered that question, washing past my feet again to lap at the windows of my office building. At once a great wave came down, swamping me and crashing against the glass. I slogged inside to inform my officemates, and we drew up a plan to retreat to the higher ground of downtown Chicago--I did mention this was a dream, right?--and drove up the road to the taller skyscrapers there.

We made it just in time, too. Looking back, we watched massive waves crashing into the rounded curve of our now abandoned building. We knew it would not last very long against the onslaught of murkey gray water. Yet still the waves came.

We checked into a motel room at the highest ground we could find. There were several men in business casual attire, shirtsleeves plastered to our bodies by rain and not a small amount of panic. Suitcases and backpacks littered the corners. The rear balcony gave us a view of the city as it was swallowed by water. The skies had cleared, but the waves rolled in, less destructive but still inexorable, like the world was a bathtub filling up.i think we breathed a collective sigh of relief. We'd survived, for the moment. We even took a stab at normalcy, resuming a presentation, but our hearts weren't exactly in it.

Some of the lads left to contact families, take smoke breaks, or buy groceries, eventually leaving only me to witness as our room, through a miracle of architecture and rising water, detached from its foundation and began floating away from the remnants of the city's high ground. Watery devastation lay all around. Even the edges of the mythical tall Chicago downtown lay buried beneath the waves.

I floated on. The ceasing rainfall turned the maiden voyage of my motel room into a pleasant, drowsy journey, but, since I had no idea why we could float in the first place, I worried the integrity of what passed for a hull might be compromised. Sure enough, each trip I took outside, the balcony felt lower to the water. I ate some pretzel sticks and tried to nap, dreaming within the dream.

In time, I heard a noise, a booming voice hailing me from outside my window. I looked out to see a stubby pirate ship no larger than an average motorboat but clad in wooden planking and decorated in iron chains. Sails billowed above. Her captain stood on the railing, a dirty blonde beard erupting from his windburned face, under a hawkish nose and piercing blue eyes. He asked permission to come aboard. I accepted and he climbed up the balcony.

"Interesting choice of sailboat, lad," he said.

I tried to explain about the rain and the waves that swallowed the city. He waved me off. Maybe he'd seen the destruction firsthand, or his stubby pirate ship came from the same thing. In any case, he said, the thing to beware now was not waves, but vermin, and to demonstrate he lifted a couch cushion to reveal an insect in the rather disturbing cast of an earwig--pincer mouth, scuttling legs atop a bulky body more like a linebacker than the dainty tapered waists of your wasp or ant, nightmare rear claw like a funhouse reflection of the front of the insect--bright blue in the body and traffic cone orange in the legs and a little bit larger than your average squirrel.

What could I do? I screamed. I'm pretty sure he screamed. We both jumped back in a way not unlike the time in waking life when Brandi and I walked in on a pissed off rat stuck in a large glue trap in an old apartment. My instincts were the same: burn the place down.

At any rate, the captain agreed to take me on his mini ironclad, and I looked around for any valuables I couldn't bear to leave behind. Nope, nothing. I walked precariously over the ropes he had helpfully strung between our vessels, and he stayed behind to scuttle the motel boat. Returning to his own vessel, we watched as the last known bit of Chicago was claimed by the hungry ocean of rain.

At this point, I knew our adventures were effectively over or just begun, depending on your perspective, but my unconscious could not help getting in one last twist. As we settled in to trim the sails, my perspective shifted to the outside of the pirate ship, where the anchor line emerged from the water. One of the enormous earwigs swam through the water, scuttling up the chain of the anchor and into the ship, presumably to wreak the same havoc there.

Sheesh, unconscious, way to twist the knife.

Returning from the Void

Hi! Thanks for tuning in or reading back to this post.

It's been a while since updates and I owe you an apology. Unfortunately for me, it's got to be a bigger apology than just one blog post. This blog has been dark for quite a while. Some things changed, others stayed the same.

Most importantly, very shortly Brandi and I will welcome our daughter into the world, at which point this blog will likely be inundated with pictures and anecdotes about the cutest baby in the world. I don't really believe this. Most babies to me look like Winston Churchill, but they say all that changes when it's your baby. We'll see. Babies steal your brainwaves, so if there's an even longer gap (say, until she goes to college), well, at least I tried.

I've changed posts within the University and now work at just one office as an IT Support Specialist, a title made up just for me, which automatically makes me an expert in the field. Consider me the sniper of malfunctioning applications.

I've been published! (Online.) I will be posting links to stories as I find them. Some, I've microblogged over at Facebook and need to dig up once more, but if you're interested you will be able to find my fiction.

More to come!

GRR

From Acme Heart Maker.
Inspired by my work with Dell Tech Support.

The Holiday Lush Decorations Must Come Down!

I saw this yesterday on a walk through my neighborhood, an entire
wreath made of corks at the doorstep of a local charity resale.
Finally, the Christmas decorations for alcoholics are coming down.
(We've been busy, dammit! And sick!) Maybe it's time to start on a
brand new cork wreath, which means spending less on screw top bottles
and maybe dipping a little more into our dialysis money. I wonder if
they found a use for the bottle tree and the beerstletoe.

On a side note, Brandi and I bought a bunch of wine on our trip to New
Buffalo, MI, which apparently has winery tours where they drive you.
Wow. A frozen paradise, we stopped into the supermarket for snacks and
toothpaste and walked out with six bottles of wine and no toothpaste.
The only thing standing in the way of drinking, womanizing and writing
like Hemmingway is that I am no Hemmingway, since I never received the
requisite turtleneck. Some fantasies must remain forever that.

And some, like a wreath made of corks, are blessedly within reach.

Me and Tuxedo Cat

Patrick and I try a Photo Booth shot together. I think it turned out well, particularly because he's always so well dressed.

I deliberately cut off the top of my head because my hair has gotten too darn long. It's a protest against cold weather and snow. I don't think winter got the message.

Mammal

Brandi and I are on our writer's retreat at the southwest corner of Michigan. We came in last night, taking off from work early and braving the beginning of rush hour traffic and sub-zero temperatures that caused the windows of our car to not only fog but ice up. It's always particularly frustrating in winter to put on all of your layers, hop in the car, and then struggle to get the top layer off while you're sitting at a traffic light or, worse, driving on the highway. I've grown quite skilled at yanking my gloves off with my mouth.

Of course, even if you get down to just a t-shirt in front of vents pouring out heat like jet engines, you've still got the long underwear and pants, and, if you're like me, the pajama pants you added in between because, hey, it's not layering unless you're having trouble flexing your knees.

Oddly, I'm starting to get used to the weather. Today, it warmed up to ten degrees and on our trip to the grocery store, Brandi and I couldn't stop remarking about how warm it felt. Is it warm when a can of soda will freeze so hard it pops the top for you? Warm when you can't get the car washed but have to settle for brushing the salt off the windshield with your glove? Warm when the icicles on the house across the street stretch practically roof-to-ground? Compared to yesterday, my body somehow says "yes."

This is the crazy part of being a mammal.

I made the choice Thursday to walk from a train stop up to a Polish restaurant where Brandi and her work friends (but good work friends, Diane and Ryan) planned on tucking away the heaviest potato-and-veal-based foods Eastern Europe has to offer. It was about minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and I had the option of waiting for the bus, but Chicago bus drivers have the same "meh" attitude you saw in the Soviet Union.

"It's not as though they have to stand out in the open," they might say, and they would be right, because the CTA saw fit to provide shelters every mile or so with roofs and walls that only leave a two foot gap at the bottom, so the wind chills only your feet, ankles, knees and lower thighs. Most have advertisements that you can read over and over again while you curse your god and wait for the bus that never seems to arrive.

I walked about forty minutes and saw a bus come only once, when I was about a half a block away from the restaurant. True irony? or just the Alanis Morisette style of terrible events that nobody wants to happen to them? By that time, the cold had killed the battery in my iPod, which went from a 50% charge to 20% to dead in the span of about a minute after I took it out of my coat pocket. If you're like me, you never pay attention to the optimal operating temperatures of electronic devices when you buy them because you so rarely come close to them. Next time, I'll probably keep it on the inside.

Of course, I didn't realize that cold had killed the little music player at the time, so when I got to the restaurant--first, as the rest of our small party was running late--I pulled it out, trying to figure out how I could plug in my USB to charge it. It was so cold, the glass on the front began to acquire condensation, and then that condensation began to ice up. Remembering what water can do to electronics, I treated the player like a hypothermia victim and stashed it close to my belly. It worked. The little guy is still alive and kicking to this day.

This is the great part of being a mammal: saving electronics with your own belly warmth.

I look forward to the springtime, when my antlers begin to grow and I am forced to spar with my fellow males over the attentions of the females who will bear our young. Luckily, unlike some species I don't care to mention (spiders), they will not eat our heads when we mate.

This, too, is the great part of being a mammal.