hi! i've been meaning to post all the "stories" i've written for this club we've been doing among several of us at work... basically we meet and share some short fiction we write, with an agreed-upon restriction each week (month?). this week's was that it has to have some reference to homosexuality. fine! usually i procrastinate and end up having to write these in like half an hour. this week was no exception. more to come!
...
His pants fell off.
He was less embarrassed than he expected, just pretty surprised. Debriefing the United Nations Disarmament Commission on the recent involvement of a certain communist nation with a certain radioactive isotope, much as it would seem vital in this milieu, suddenly took a trivial importance next to his fallen knickers.
Puzzled, he paused for a second, just long enough for his brain to cease its usual chatter (its neurological equivalent of standing mouth agape), and a flash came up from its depths. It was a single word, urgent in the same way his debriefing suddenly wasn’t.
“RUN!”
He stumbled, pulling his shoes through his pants legs almost by accident, but he paid that no mind – according to his brain, the fate of everything good in the world rested on his immediate flight from the scene. He ran. He ran fast.
He ran from the podium, down the stairs, through the hallway, down another series of corridors, appearing much like a rat in a maze. Not to himself, of course – his brain had a plan. In his befuddled state he wondered for a fraction of a second what the plan was. But there was no time.
Walls streaked by him, the whole world was horizontally blurred. Soon colors became meaningless, space was undifferentiated, lines and shapes took on no meaning other than the furthest abstractions. And then, just as it seemed everything was converging into boundless light, it wall went dark.
When he came to, he did not recognize his surroundings. He appeared to have been asleep on the ground, snug on a rug at a Moroccan street bazaar. Strangers around him went about their business as if he did not exist. He was still not wearing pants.
Rising, he moseyed through the crowd, entering a doorway beyond which he could not see. It was totally dark, and though such an action seemed to him contrary to his best interests, his brain seemed to be leading him. A couple steps inside the door, he stopped in the pitch blackness. Not a sound around him. Listening attentively, he heard what sounded like… a giggle?
Very suddenly everything was so bright his eyes hurt to see. Slowly he lowered his arm from over his face and saw that the room was indeed huge, and held a crowd of people, all staring at him, and as he began to recognize some of them, they all yelled, in unison:
“SURPRISE!”
“Oh, it’s my birthday!” he said, believing it for some reason. “There’s my parents, and my boyfriend with whom I’ve had sexual relations, and oh! Even my dog is here. And it looks like they’ve invited like, a hundred people! Gosh. I’m so lucky!”
And then he realized that made no sense.
The images faded. All was black again. He considered the idea that he was dead.
And he was RIGHT!!
...
i really crapped out on this one. feels like i could have done much better... ah well.
