(no subject)
Please excuse any shitty grammar or punctuation mistakes, I literally finished this two minutes ago and have decided to fire it off without reading it. Hope it turned out okay for a first draft. *smooches*
Nobody looked up when the diner’s door opened, ringing the small bell that hung above it. Frank took a few cautious steps inside and began to kick the snow from his boots. The obscene amounts of alcohol in his bloodstream took umbrage with such a complex physical activity, however, and in return, buckled his knees and planted his face firmly on the linoleum floor. The waitress turned her head from the tiny black and white television set in the corner and the sole customer spun on his barstool, trying to figure out what he had missed. The cook, still unimpressed, continued to slide what had once been bacon across the surface of his grill in increasingly complex patterns.
“Mfffs,” Frank said, his lips still pressed to the floor, “whhv mlll pmmmd.”
The man on the barstool grinned.
“We’re having a hard time understanding you, Sir. Would you like some help?”
The head on the floor lolled about on its neck until its face was pointing towards the counter.
“This,” he repeated, “was well planned.” He tried hopelessly to keep his eyes from trying to roll back and look at his brain.
The waitress began wiping a filthy laminated menu across her apron, having exactly the opposite intended effect. She set it next to her only customer and looked impatiently down at Frank.
“Now is when you offer to help me,” Frank declared.
“He done did already!” Carol shouted.
“Ah…” muttered Frank, as though she’d just solved a particularly difficult math problem for him. “I think this is when I politely refuse and make my way to my feet on my own.”
“This promises to be good,” the customer said through his enormous smile.
Frank attempted to give him a withering look and discovered that his eyes appeared to be working independently of one another. He gave up and turned to the coat rack, pulling himself up it like a…well, like a drunk trying to stand up. He leaned his weight on it and motioned to take off his hat.
“It seems,” he proclaimed, “that I’ve either lost my hat or somebody has stolen it. Also a distinct possibility is that I’m only imagining that I even own a hat.”
“You din’t have no hat when you fell down,” Carol offered.
“An excellent capsule synopsis. Coffee, please,” he laughed and wobbled to the stool directly in front of him. “As well as a half-dozen grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles and mustard, two plates of chili fries, and the holy triumvirate of malteds, please.”
“I got all that but the triwhatchamacallit,” the waitress said, scribbling on her pad with a tiny nub of a pencil.
“I think,” the first customer offered, “he wants three milkshakes: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, each with malt.”
“Thanks, Billy. I loves that you can understand drunks, smart people, and drunk smart people.”
“Don’t mention it. You might want to get your money from this fellow up front, though. In the unlikely event that he even has any, he may well be dead of a massive coronary halfway through the meal he just ordered.”
“What he said,” Carol said, lowering her pencil for a moment.
With a touch of difficulty, Frank pulled a fat leather wallet from his pants pocket. He drew out a stack of twenties and put them on the counter. He then reached into his jacket pocket and set two stainless steel flasks next to the cash.
“It’s very late at night,” he began to explain, holding up a finger to shush Carol, “or very early in the morning, depending upon how you look at it. I’ve just ordered a lot of food and put a lot of money on your counter. I would like to enjoy both scotch,” he tapped one flask, “and sherry,” then the other, “with my meal. Every time you bother me about the fact that I’m drinking at your counter, or that I smell like a homeless man, or even angrily tell me that I’ve urinated myself, I’ll take another twenty from the pile. Whatever’s left at the end is yours.”
At his side, Billy was trying to stifle a smile and Carol was laughing, her tired frame shaking. Frank looked around, stunned that his small speech had not had more of an impact. Carol put a hand on the counter to steady herself and pointed at the grill, where the cook had finished his bacon grease sigil. He was staring at the smoke slowly wafting from it and simultaneously taking several rather large gulps from a bottle of cooking brandy.
Billy’s smile slipped from his control and he started giggling as he pointed in the opposite direction. Frank noticed for the first time a mound of clothes occupying a booth in the corner by the bathrooms. As he watched, the pile rose and fell gently and steadily, betraying the person beneath it all.
“Well, it seems I’m in good company, then. An excellent last night. Now, Carol, be a dear and have your monkey make my food, would you?”
“No problem, darlin’, you just make sure you gotta frow up,” she said, tapping a flask, “you frow up outside.”
“But of course,” he assured her as his forehead and the countertop raced towards each other like old friends. Instead of the wincing crack he expected, Frank got only a dull thump. Billy had quickly slid his hand over, interrupting the reunion.
“Fanks,” offered Frank, his large lips brushing the dirty menu that still lay in front of him.
“Don’t mention it,” his companion offered, using his hand to raise Frank’s head back into an upright, if not locked, position.
“So, you said this is an excellent last night. You taking all the sleeping pills in the cabinet when you get home?”
“No, no, no…oh…” Frank vigorously shook his head until he realized this made his already spinning world even less stable. “You see, I can say with grave accuracy that I will be dead by the time morning arrives.”
“Ah,” mused Billy, “perhaps a fatal condition and you’re having that feeling that old people in Hallmark movies get about an hour before they die?”
“Close. You see, ever since…well, it doesn’t matter what happened. You decide: car accident, brain tumor, bitten by a radioactive politician, whatever it was that did this to me. Ever since that time my dormant psychic powers have been awakened. Or perhaps they weren’t dormant, maybe completely non-existent, and this created them. Perhaps I’m also very drunk, and rambling.”
Billy just smiled and looked at his coffee as Carol brought Frank his coffee and first malt: vanilla.
“Oh, Christ, I needed these.” He gulped the coffee, his bloodshot eyes bulging as it scalded his tongue and quickly chased it with an enormous drink from the shake, inducing a blinding ice-cream headache. He gently lowered his head to the counter again.
“So what are these psychic powers you have?”
“If I touch somebody, I can see up to a day into their future. This can be quite fun, quite profitable, and quite disturbing. For every five people who give me a ten spot to see if they win the lottery the next morning, there’s a woman I have sex with that’s going to become violently ill within twenty-four hours. Let me tell you, nothing quite kills the mood like that does.”
“I am,” Billy said, “going to work off the presupposition that these powers of yours work, and ask you if my horrible boss is going to finally fire me tomorrow.” He touched the back of Frank’s neck with the tip of his right index finger.
“I have absolutely no fucking idea,” Frank mumbled.
“Well, that’s a bit of a let-down.”
“That I don’t seem to have powers?”
“That I don’t know if I’m going to be fired. But I was wondering about the powers, too.”
Carol tapped a plate on the back of Frank’s head and he lifted his face to see plate number one, mounded with chili fries and cheese sandwiches. She laughed as he snatched at the fries, burning his fingers. He grabbed a fork, killed ten of them, and blew on them until jamming them into his dry mouth.
“Mmmmm. Monkey makes good chili fries.”
“I’ll tell him that, darlin’”
“Good,” he barely answered, grabbing his first cheese sandwich.
“So,” Billy continued, “I think I’ve got it. Your powers aren’t working anymore because you can’t see past tonight, which means that you’ll be dead before the sun rises.”
“Yup,” came the answer, through a mouthful of mustard, pickles, cheese, and Wonder Bread.
“I’m really sorry about that. Have you considered that maybe being this drunk and eating this bad of food is what’s going to finish you off?”
“I have considered that,” Frank said, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his jacket. He lit and began to smoke four of them. “I have considered every possibility, and since my powers have never been wrong - not even a little bit - I know that I am going to die tonight, so if it happens, I want my lungs full of smoke, my blood full of grease, and my liver ready to leap out through my throat.”
“I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense.”
“Yumph,” said Frank, failing to smoke, eat, and drink at the same time.
“So what does it look like?”
“Whuzzat?”
“Your future. When you try to look past this morning.”
“Black. No, not black. Nothing. It’s like looking at the absence of anything. I’ve only been able to look at it for a few seconds before I can feel the edges of my brain crumbling,” he paused and took a long pull of his strawberry malt, followed by an equally long pull from the sherry flask. “It’s pretty fucked up to look at. I mean, it makes me realize all the things that I haven’t done with my life, y’know? And not ‘see the Grand Canyon,’ stuff, either. Nah, staring at this absence of…of even absence, you start thinking, I’ve never robbed a bank, I’ve never had sex with a man, I’ve never…” his voice drifted off to nothing.
“Can I ask a personal question?”
Frank just nodded slowly.
“Exactly when does this nothingness happen?”
When the bell rang this time, everybody looked at the doorway. The cook let his brandy bottle hang from his left hand, Carol looked up from pretending she couldn’t hear Frank and Billy, and the pile of garments in the corner grew a head.
Average height, average build, they would later tell the police. Blue jeans, didn’t catch the brand. White t-shirt. Black ski mask. Nothing to distinguish him at all. Only the perfectly polished pistol swaying from person to person.
“Money in a bag,” said the accentless voice. “Nobody move. Am not afraid to kill,” he said in that way that only those who really mean it can.
With the exception of his sweeping arm, he stood perfectly still. Carol was emptying the drawer into a white plastic THANK YOU carryout bag; Billy was helping by emptying his wallet into his hand. The cook pulled a few sweaty, crumpled bills from his pocket.
Frank slowly and carefully pushed his stack of twenties until they fluttered, so quietly, to the ground behind the counter, hidden from the thief’s view. Then he turned his stool to face the man and stood up.
“Stop.”
“Nah, man. These are good people. Go rob a McDonald’s.”
“Stop.”
Frank said nothing as he leapt, and not even a sigh escaped his lips as the butt of the pistol fell so very hard upon the back of his skull.
Inside his head, seventeen synapses stopped firing. Inside his belly, his appendix ceased to function.
The theft had long since ended by the time Frank woke up, laying in a booth with an ice pack on his head. He was seeing triple, and everything sounded like he was underwater. Sirens flashed through the plate glass windows. The maddening commotion, his pounding head, it all cleared for one brief moment as Billy leaned over him, a small piece of paper in his hand.
“You’re an interesting fellow, Frank. I’m glad I came here tonight. And, uh…well, I obviously won’t help you with robbing a bank, but in case you ever get the other urge…” he laughed as he dropped the scrap onto Frank’s chest, “here’s my number.”
The diner’s bell rang as he left.
---------
My hypershort fictions and non-fiction commentaries go to http://www.yahoogroups.com/groups/compositemolecules
and http://benchilada.livejournal.com
---------
Flickr photostream of my bizarre photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/benchilada/
benjamin sTone
CURRENT MUSIC: “Harry the Dog” - Black Grape
LAST BOOK I READ A PAGE OF: CAGES by Dave McKean
LAST MOVIE: HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
NEXT MOVIE: THE VILLAGE
Nobody looked up when the diner’s door opened, ringing the small bell that hung above it. Frank took a few cautious steps inside and began to kick the snow from his boots. The obscene amounts of alcohol in his bloodstream took umbrage with such a complex physical activity, however, and in return, buckled his knees and planted his face firmly on the linoleum floor. The waitress turned her head from the tiny black and white television set in the corner and the sole customer spun on his barstool, trying to figure out what he had missed. The cook, still unimpressed, continued to slide what had once been bacon across the surface of his grill in increasingly complex patterns.
“Mfffs,” Frank said, his lips still pressed to the floor, “whhv mlll pmmmd.”
The man on the barstool grinned.
“We’re having a hard time understanding you, Sir. Would you like some help?”
The head on the floor lolled about on its neck until its face was pointing towards the counter.
“This,” he repeated, “was well planned.” He tried hopelessly to keep his eyes from trying to roll back and look at his brain.
The waitress began wiping a filthy laminated menu across her apron, having exactly the opposite intended effect. She set it next to her only customer and looked impatiently down at Frank.
“Now is when you offer to help me,” Frank declared.
“He done did already!” Carol shouted.
“Ah…” muttered Frank, as though she’d just solved a particularly difficult math problem for him. “I think this is when I politely refuse and make my way to my feet on my own.”
“This promises to be good,” the customer said through his enormous smile.
Frank attempted to give him a withering look and discovered that his eyes appeared to be working independently of one another. He gave up and turned to the coat rack, pulling himself up it like a…well, like a drunk trying to stand up. He leaned his weight on it and motioned to take off his hat.
“It seems,” he proclaimed, “that I’ve either lost my hat or somebody has stolen it. Also a distinct possibility is that I’m only imagining that I even own a hat.”
“You din’t have no hat when you fell down,” Carol offered.
“An excellent capsule synopsis. Coffee, please,” he laughed and wobbled to the stool directly in front of him. “As well as a half-dozen grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles and mustard, two plates of chili fries, and the holy triumvirate of malteds, please.”
“I got all that but the triwhatchamacallit,” the waitress said, scribbling on her pad with a tiny nub of a pencil.
“I think,” the first customer offered, “he wants three milkshakes: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, each with malt.”
“Thanks, Billy. I loves that you can understand drunks, smart people, and drunk smart people.”
“Don’t mention it. You might want to get your money from this fellow up front, though. In the unlikely event that he even has any, he may well be dead of a massive coronary halfway through the meal he just ordered.”
“What he said,” Carol said, lowering her pencil for a moment.
With a touch of difficulty, Frank pulled a fat leather wallet from his pants pocket. He drew out a stack of twenties and put them on the counter. He then reached into his jacket pocket and set two stainless steel flasks next to the cash.
“It’s very late at night,” he began to explain, holding up a finger to shush Carol, “or very early in the morning, depending upon how you look at it. I’ve just ordered a lot of food and put a lot of money on your counter. I would like to enjoy both scotch,” he tapped one flask, “and sherry,” then the other, “with my meal. Every time you bother me about the fact that I’m drinking at your counter, or that I smell like a homeless man, or even angrily tell me that I’ve urinated myself, I’ll take another twenty from the pile. Whatever’s left at the end is yours.”
At his side, Billy was trying to stifle a smile and Carol was laughing, her tired frame shaking. Frank looked around, stunned that his small speech had not had more of an impact. Carol put a hand on the counter to steady herself and pointed at the grill, where the cook had finished his bacon grease sigil. He was staring at the smoke slowly wafting from it and simultaneously taking several rather large gulps from a bottle of cooking brandy.
Billy’s smile slipped from his control and he started giggling as he pointed in the opposite direction. Frank noticed for the first time a mound of clothes occupying a booth in the corner by the bathrooms. As he watched, the pile rose and fell gently and steadily, betraying the person beneath it all.
“Well, it seems I’m in good company, then. An excellent last night. Now, Carol, be a dear and have your monkey make my food, would you?”
“No problem, darlin’, you just make sure you gotta frow up,” she said, tapping a flask, “you frow up outside.”
“But of course,” he assured her as his forehead and the countertop raced towards each other like old friends. Instead of the wincing crack he expected, Frank got only a dull thump. Billy had quickly slid his hand over, interrupting the reunion.
“Fanks,” offered Frank, his large lips brushing the dirty menu that still lay in front of him.
“Don’t mention it,” his companion offered, using his hand to raise Frank’s head back into an upright, if not locked, position.
“So, you said this is an excellent last night. You taking all the sleeping pills in the cabinet when you get home?”
“No, no, no…oh…” Frank vigorously shook his head until he realized this made his already spinning world even less stable. “You see, I can say with grave accuracy that I will be dead by the time morning arrives.”
“Ah,” mused Billy, “perhaps a fatal condition and you’re having that feeling that old people in Hallmark movies get about an hour before they die?”
“Close. You see, ever since…well, it doesn’t matter what happened. You decide: car accident, brain tumor, bitten by a radioactive politician, whatever it was that did this to me. Ever since that time my dormant psychic powers have been awakened. Or perhaps they weren’t dormant, maybe completely non-existent, and this created them. Perhaps I’m also very drunk, and rambling.”
Billy just smiled and looked at his coffee as Carol brought Frank his coffee and first malt: vanilla.
“Oh, Christ, I needed these.” He gulped the coffee, his bloodshot eyes bulging as it scalded his tongue and quickly chased it with an enormous drink from the shake, inducing a blinding ice-cream headache. He gently lowered his head to the counter again.
“So what are these psychic powers you have?”
“If I touch somebody, I can see up to a day into their future. This can be quite fun, quite profitable, and quite disturbing. For every five people who give me a ten spot to see if they win the lottery the next morning, there’s a woman I have sex with that’s going to become violently ill within twenty-four hours. Let me tell you, nothing quite kills the mood like that does.”
“I am,” Billy said, “going to work off the presupposition that these powers of yours work, and ask you if my horrible boss is going to finally fire me tomorrow.” He touched the back of Frank’s neck with the tip of his right index finger.
“I have absolutely no fucking idea,” Frank mumbled.
“Well, that’s a bit of a let-down.”
“That I don’t seem to have powers?”
“That I don’t know if I’m going to be fired. But I was wondering about the powers, too.”
Carol tapped a plate on the back of Frank’s head and he lifted his face to see plate number one, mounded with chili fries and cheese sandwiches. She laughed as he snatched at the fries, burning his fingers. He grabbed a fork, killed ten of them, and blew on them until jamming them into his dry mouth.
“Mmmmm. Monkey makes good chili fries.”
“I’ll tell him that, darlin’”
“Good,” he barely answered, grabbing his first cheese sandwich.
“So,” Billy continued, “I think I’ve got it. Your powers aren’t working anymore because you can’t see past tonight, which means that you’ll be dead before the sun rises.”
“Yup,” came the answer, through a mouthful of mustard, pickles, cheese, and Wonder Bread.
“I’m really sorry about that. Have you considered that maybe being this drunk and eating this bad of food is what’s going to finish you off?”
“I have considered that,” Frank said, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his jacket. He lit and began to smoke four of them. “I have considered every possibility, and since my powers have never been wrong - not even a little bit - I know that I am going to die tonight, so if it happens, I want my lungs full of smoke, my blood full of grease, and my liver ready to leap out through my throat.”
“I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense.”
“Yumph,” said Frank, failing to smoke, eat, and drink at the same time.
“So what does it look like?”
“Whuzzat?”
“Your future. When you try to look past this morning.”
“Black. No, not black. Nothing. It’s like looking at the absence of anything. I’ve only been able to look at it for a few seconds before I can feel the edges of my brain crumbling,” he paused and took a long pull of his strawberry malt, followed by an equally long pull from the sherry flask. “It’s pretty fucked up to look at. I mean, it makes me realize all the things that I haven’t done with my life, y’know? And not ‘see the Grand Canyon,’ stuff, either. Nah, staring at this absence of…of even absence, you start thinking, I’ve never robbed a bank, I’ve never had sex with a man, I’ve never…” his voice drifted off to nothing.
“Can I ask a personal question?”
Frank just nodded slowly.
“Exactly when does this nothingness happen?”
When the bell rang this time, everybody looked at the doorway. The cook let his brandy bottle hang from his left hand, Carol looked up from pretending she couldn’t hear Frank and Billy, and the pile of garments in the corner grew a head.
Average height, average build, they would later tell the police. Blue jeans, didn’t catch the brand. White t-shirt. Black ski mask. Nothing to distinguish him at all. Only the perfectly polished pistol swaying from person to person.
“Money in a bag,” said the accentless voice. “Nobody move. Am not afraid to kill,” he said in that way that only those who really mean it can.
With the exception of his sweeping arm, he stood perfectly still. Carol was emptying the drawer into a white plastic THANK YOU carryout bag; Billy was helping by emptying his wallet into his hand. The cook pulled a few sweaty, crumpled bills from his pocket.
Frank slowly and carefully pushed his stack of twenties until they fluttered, so quietly, to the ground behind the counter, hidden from the thief’s view. Then he turned his stool to face the man and stood up.
“Stop.”
“Nah, man. These are good people. Go rob a McDonald’s.”
“Stop.”
Frank said nothing as he leapt, and not even a sigh escaped his lips as the butt of the pistol fell so very hard upon the back of his skull.
Inside his head, seventeen synapses stopped firing. Inside his belly, his appendix ceased to function.
The theft had long since ended by the time Frank woke up, laying in a booth with an ice pack on his head. He was seeing triple, and everything sounded like he was underwater. Sirens flashed through the plate glass windows. The maddening commotion, his pounding head, it all cleared for one brief moment as Billy leaned over him, a small piece of paper in his hand.
“You’re an interesting fellow, Frank. I’m glad I came here tonight. And, uh…well, I obviously won’t help you with robbing a bank, but in case you ever get the other urge…” he laughed as he dropped the scrap onto Frank’s chest, “here’s my number.”
The diner’s bell rang as he left.
---------
My hypershort fictions and non-fiction commentaries go to http://www.yahoogroups.com/groups/compositemolecules
and http://benchilada.livejournal.com
---------
Flickr photostream of my bizarre photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/benchilada/
benjamin sTone
CURRENT MUSIC: “Harry the Dog” - Black Grape
LAST BOOK I READ A PAGE OF: CAGES by Dave McKean
LAST MOVIE: HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
NEXT MOVIE: THE VILLAGE