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.