Wednesday, February 21, 2007

what do you get for the man who has everything

[note: older story, working on a couple new ideas as well]

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so he always had a good one.
It was always different and always delicious.
He ate it and tried to make some sense out of the voices that moved to the kitchen from the bedroom.
They didn't make any sense.
He thought he heard sentences, but they weren't really.
He got showered and dressed for work. His skin felt perfect.
He tried to think about that when he went to work, but the voices playing in his car distracted him.
He tried to change the radio to something else.
There wasn't something else.
There was nothing else to think about, just his skin and the voices.
At his job he sat by himself in his office pretending to work.
The computer didn't even work, it just played the voices constantly.
He'd always hated the people who worked for him, but wondered if the alternative was any better.
From 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. he ate lunch out of a vending machine. The random voices were played over the PA.
It was good, even out of the microwave, and very good for him, whatever he ate.
He went back to work and tried to pretend the voices were his co-workers talking.
It didn't work.
At 5:00 p.m. he left and drove home.
There was no traffic, but the voices on the radio stopped his thinking about the people who worked for him.
He thought they were talking about him, but that was impossible.
He got home and ate a perfect dinner while listening to the voices and trying to pretend they were talking to him.
But they were just random voices, programmed to give him something to listen to.
Because he had to listen to something.
He went to his room.
Under his bed he found a box.
He opened the box and found a gun with one bullet and a typed note.
"I put this here if you want to escape. It's the only way out."
He put the gun in his mouth but didn't pull the trigger.
He wasn't sure if it'd work, he was afraid of what would happen if it did, and he didn't want to think about what he'd do if it didn't.
He went to sleep and told himself what had happened was a dream.
He woke up in his bed. Something had happened, but he'd forgotten.
The voices started playing out of the speakers in the walls.
He got dressed and got breakfast off the kitchen table.

2 comments:

RuKsaK said...

well written - makes me ask a lot of questions in trying to decipher what is his situation - just mad, some kind of asylum, someone trying to send him mad? but don't tell me - it should be as it is.

Maya said...

hey, not bad at all.