| Welcome to A Girl And Her Fed. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| The Machine; short story | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: Oct 22 2009, 01:48 PM (155 Views) | |
| Otter | Oct 22 2009, 01:48 PM Post #1 |
Administrator
|
There was a short story contest a few years ago for an anthology called "The Machine," which was based around the premise that a machine could tell you exactly how you'd die. The guidelines were to write a short story about someone's encounter with The Machine. I haven't edited this thing in at least two years so it's pretty rough and I no longer like the voice in it, but, hey, it's got ghosts. ___________________________________________________________________ Yeah, your opinion of me is gonna go right downhill when I tell you that I’m the guy who sleeps on the old, junky mattress you put out by the curb, but in my defense it’s a pretty damned nice mattress. I’d swear in court the thing was less than a month old when I picked it up, basically still smelled factory-fresh. Not even a bloodstain or nothing. Although to be honest, I’m getting fuckin’ sick of the ghost. He’s pushy, bitchy, whiney, and I think he used to be an accountant. At least that’s what he says when he’s not complaining, because this son of a bitch does not want to be dead and I’m a captive audience. I don’t make a lot of money - it’s the siren song of every asshole, but I don’t. I’m one of those guys you see who works down by the docks or unloading things off of a truck in an alley. Minimum wage, maybe an extra hundred as a bonus at the end of the shift, and I keep up on the rent by finding and selling things that went missing. So I see this nice – brand-new, remember – king-sized mattress and I figured some guy like me had made it go missing and had gone to get some friends to help him move it or something, and I might as well save him the effort of carrying it. Hell, I even bought new sheets especial for the thing, that’s how good it was. During the night – not the first night, probably a week or so after I cleared off enough floor space and knocked together some wood for a frame – this ghost shows up. He’s John somebody, and he’s completely weird about everything. And I’m sympathetic because he’s dead and all, but it’s damned hard to talk to him. I keep asking for his last name but he can’t seem to wrap his mind around it. “John,” he says, “I’m John,” and this doesn’t help me at all because I went back to the street where I found the mattress and nobody named John had died there in years, so it’s not as though the people cleaning out a dead guy’s apartment had gone and dumped his stuff right outside his house. So, as I said, John pops up after I’ve decided this mattress is one of the best things going in my life right now. No woman, no dog, and no money, but at the end of the day I sleep on a cloud, and I know for a fact I can get myself a dog any time I want and I have a pretty good shot at getting a woman, and when I do we’ve got this mattress. Then John comes along and ruins the bed for me, although I suppose I can still get myself a dog. But I’m not making love to a woman in a bed haunted by a dead guy. I mean, that shows a lack of respect. John tells me he died in my bed, back when it was his. He swears it, and part of me wants to believe him. He looks like an accountant – big, fat, bald. He keeps squinting and I think he used to wear glasses. He died in his pajamas, too, and I swear to God he’s wearing matching pajamas, shirt and pants, just like the kind you see in commercials around Christmas. I don’t know what color they were because he’s all washed out, like an old towel that’s been bleached too many times, but I think he died in navy blue pinstripe pajamas. The only things John seems to be able to focus on are money and how he died, and like I said, I don’t have much money so we shouldn’t have anything to talk about at all since I’m not dead. And yeah, the first few weeks were boring as hell. Then I make the godawful mistake of mentioning the Machine one day, how a few friends of mine got drunk, got tested, and got tattoos. I showed John mine. High up on my arm, the front of a car done up in blues and blacks. Looks just like polished chrome, a real piece of art. Ron’s tattoo is a big tiger with its mouth wide open and blood splattered across on white teeth, which is damned cool, but Elliot fought hard and tried to back out on our deal until the tattoo artist said he should get a black cross instead of a hospital bed. Cancer, man. It’s not the way you’d think a guy like Elliot would go out. Anyhow, like I said, I showed off this tattoo and told him why I had it and John lost it. Broke down completely, and honoring the dead goes only so far before you want to bitchslap the hell out of him just to get him to shut the fuck up. He keeps saying the Machine lied to him, totally screwed him over. So I asked him what the Machine told him, and he said it ran his blood and dropped a little slip of paper in the tray that read: “BULLFIGHT.” I hope I described John to you okay, because if I did then you know that he’s not the type of guy to go down in a bull fight. He’s not even the type of guy who’d wear red, and I sure as hell can’t see him anywhere near an animal. Yeah, I can see why he’s confused. And for a really long time, like six months, I listened to him bitch and moan about this and I was confused, too. See, he was so damned sure. He kept saying, over and over, that the Machine had made a mistake, that he had never been in a bullfight. Hell, he said he never even went to Texas just in case (In case of what, I don’t know. Maybe if every other person at the rodeo drops dead and they need to put a fat tourist in the ring?). And since he was so damned sure, I began to think, yeah, maybe the Machine makes mistakes? Not for everyone. Hell, not even for one person out of a million. But maybe my chrome fender with the headlights and the heavy grill isn’t such a beauty, you know? And maybe Elliot - a dude can’t go a week without breaking his nose in a bar fight - will take a solid baseball bat to the back of his head instead of rotting away from the inside out. This bothered the hell out of me. Really bothered me, to the point where John and I would sit and stare at the wall for hours. I liked my chrome grill. I liked knowing that there’s some silver monster out there with my name on it. I mean, Ron’s scared to hell of tigers these days but how can you be scared of a car? The things are everywhere. Now I’m thinking if John died in bed, alone, in the middle of Brooklyn and without a damned bull around for miles, then maybe my ticket would be punched by a kid with a gun, or some putz chucking an empty off of the roof… I never was a reader – books just weren’t my thing. But I got so wrapped up in this bullshit that I started blowing money on psychics. Seventy bucks later, I had five different women with messed-up faces tell me the Machine was never wrong. They had lots of suggestions to get rid of John, tho’, and I tried a bunch of them. Nothing they said worked: he stayed put and I still couldn’t understand most of what he said. Besides, there’s only so long you can stand in front of your bed and chant about heading towards the light before you realize you’ve pussied out. Which is why I headed to the library, which is free, and checked out this New Age store that’s been in my neighborhood for years. I didn’t have a lot of luck at the library, at first. Some girl behind the counter said they didn’t carry books like that, the ones that tell you how to get rid of ghosts. Not classy enough for a library, I guess, and maybe a few years ago I would have agreed with her but I can’t see why they’ve got a hundred books on George Washington and not one to tell you what to do with the fucker if he starts haunting your kitchen sink. Then another chick heard me talking and showed me how to use the Internet, and it turns out that nameless strangers are better at fixing this sort of thing than worthless psychics. There’re a lot of message boards and forums and shit out there that talk about the Machine. Comparing stories, like “I just found out how I’m gonna bite it” or “my dad died in a fire and the Machine said it would happen…” You know how it goes. Stupid, really, if you think about it, just guys talking to talk. Then there’re the nuts. These are the dudes who swear up and down that the Machine’s a load of crap, and they write these endless rants about how someone who knows someone died from choking on a chicken bone instead of when the toilet exploded. In there, though, if you look hard enough or long enough, there are things that stand out. Little things. They sound different, somehow, like the people who are writing are sad and worried instead of crazy, like they expected their mother or husband or sister to still be with them and they have this idea they’ve been betrayed or something. These don’t show up all the time – maybe you read a thousand rambling bullshit posts to find one – but they’re there if you look hard enough. And when you get lucky enough to find them, these stories are all about dudes who died in their beds. Maybe on mattresses as nice as mine, I dunno. I hope so. It wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. After reading all of this, I’m thinking John was a little messed up when he was alive. Real fat, like I said, probably never lifted anything heavy or even went to the gym, like most of the rich guys do. Then I figure since the library can’t help me get rid of a ghost, I’ll head on over to this New Age store. A guy like me never goes in places like that and I don’t know how much of their stuff is for real or if its trash, but I’ve got this ghost in my mattress and I’m not gonna start pointing fingers, you know? This store had books on ghosts - tons of them - and I almost left because they all said the same things the psychics told me. Then this woman comes out from behind the counter and asks if I need any help. She works there and she told me I stood out, lost, and whatever had brought me to her store was heavy. I usually can’t stand that kind of language because it’s what you say when you’re trying to sound smarter than you are. When she said it, tho’, you knew she meant it, even if she did want to sound smart, too. Next thing you know, she’s making me a cup of damned good coffee and I’m telling her everything. Almost everything – I’d be a fuckin’ idiot if I told a beautiful woman that I’ve got a ghost in a bed I picked up off of the street. I told her everything else. All about John, the Machine… hell, I even pushed up my sleeve and showed her my tattoo. For about a month, I went back to her store a few times a week. She didn’t have any advice, but she made me coffee and she listened. And when she talked, I listened. About ghosts and souls and what holds us here, or about the Machine and what cuts us off from the world when we die. Tonight, just ten minutes ago, she said something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. See, she tells me about things that are important to her, and tonight she wanted to talk about how people think. Our thoughts define us, she said, because all we are is what we think we are. When she says this, something comes together from what John’s said and what I’ve read and what she’s told me about ghosts. John’s confused, I know this, and I’ve finally figured out what happened to him. I’m hoping it’ll clear his mind of the fear and the chaos and jumpstart that miserable fucker out of my bed and into whatever comes after this life. So now I’m walking home with a cup of coffee in my hand, and I’m gonna go sit on my mattress until John shows up. I have one question for him - when he answers it, I think he’ll go away and I’ll be able to talk to my beautiful woman about something other than ghosts. Hey John, I’ll say, do you remember what you were dreaming when you died? |
|
- Never send a ferret to do a weasel's work. | |
 |
 
|
| HiFranc | Oct 24 2009, 04:49 PM Post #2 |
Super Member
|
I enjoyed that story. |
|
Francisco, Likes webcomics, current affairs, films, books and reviewing (on Amazon.co.uk). | |
|
|
|
| Minivet | Oct 25 2009, 04:22 AM Post #3 |
Advanced Member
|
Embarrassed to say I don't get it. Does the last sentence explicate the "Bullfight" prediction somehow? Good story, though. |
|
|
|
| HiFranc | Oct 25 2009, 06:28 AM Post #4 |
|
Super Member
|
What it's hinting at is that John dreamt he was in a bullfight and died. There is a theory, often used in fiction, that if you die in a dream you really die. |
|
Francisco, Likes webcomics, current affairs, films, books and reviewing (on Amazon.co.uk). | |
|
|
|
| Otter | Oct 26 2009, 02:22 PM Post #5 |
|
Administrator
|
Yeah, it's not a very good story.  Seriously. I just posted it because it has ghosts.
|
|
- Never send a ferret to do a weasel's work. | |
|
|
|
| « Previous Topic · Get Feedback on Your Art and Writing · Next Topic » |
2:45 PM Nov 25
