An Afternoon by the Ocean
by
Jeff Combs
The glass pours you a mojito as you sit and watch the colors shift and bounce. Brains are melting on the shore. You sip your drink and taste a mix of mint and aluminum. You glance back at the bar and see the glass staring at his phone. There’s a woman with crab claw earrings and a turtle shell on her head waiting in line. In front of her, a man in ripped blue jeans clenches his fists. The squawks of seagulls fill the air. The man in ripped jeans turns red and his head explodes. The glass sets his phone on the counter, sweeps up the mess and walks down the stairs, tossing chunks of brain onto the sand. The man’s essence will be recycled, but you think it should have been buried in a landfill. Shouldn’t all that impatience and anger be kept away from the collective consciousness?
A bird lands in the middle of your table. You’ve never seen anything quite like it before, with its bright yellow feathers, bald purple head, and orange caruncle on its beak. You pull your phone out of your pocket to take a picture, but the bird snatches it from your hand and flies off.
The woman with the turtle-shell helmet asks if she can join you and you pull out a chair.
“I’m Tuesday,” she says.
Tuesday tells you she wants things to go back to the way they used to be. She wants to relax in the sand, swim in the ocean, eat real seafood. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. The water’s too acidic, the fish extinct or contaminated, and if you lie out on the beach, you’ll have maybe two minutes before your skin starts to peel.
You hear a thump and see your phone back on the table. A dent mars its surface.
The glass picks up his phone and ignores a stocky man in a yellow tank top asking for a rum and coke. The man throws a punch and the glass shatters. A bouncer grabs him by the throat and slams him to the ground. The bouncer taps on a keypad while the man lies motionless. A garbage drone swoops down, jabs a syringe right through the yellow of his tank top, and takes off, the man’s limp body dangling from its claws. Tuesday pulls a scute off her helmet and bites into it.
“Off to the landfill with this one,” she says in between crunching noises.
Advertisements for in-home fabricators, capsule hotels, self-aware coffee makers, and neural infodump blockers invade your consciousness. You push back against the intrusion, and images of rusted tricycles, dust covered VCRs, and yellowed newspaper clippings flash through your mind. The phone starts to vibrate and props itself up on the table. You try to grab it, only to be zapped with an electric shock. In bright green text against a black screen, the phone blares out, “You no longer belong.”
A bird lands in the middle of your table. You’ve never seen anything quite like it before, with its bright yellow feathers, bald purple head, and orange caruncle on its beak. You pull your phone out of your pocket to take a picture, but the bird snatches it from your hand and flies off.
The woman with the turtle-shell helmet asks if she can join you and you pull out a chair.
“I’m Tuesday,” she says.
Tuesday tells you she wants things to go back to the way they used to be. She wants to relax in the sand, swim in the ocean, eat real seafood. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. The water’s too acidic, the fish extinct or contaminated, and if you lie out on the beach, you’ll have maybe two minutes before your skin starts to peel.
You hear a thump and see your phone back on the table. A dent mars its surface.
The glass picks up his phone and ignores a stocky man in a yellow tank top asking for a rum and coke. The man throws a punch and the glass shatters. A bouncer grabs him by the throat and slams him to the ground. The bouncer taps on a keypad while the man lies motionless. A garbage drone swoops down, jabs a syringe right through the yellow of his tank top, and takes off, the man’s limp body dangling from its claws. Tuesday pulls a scute off her helmet and bites into it.
“Off to the landfill with this one,” she says in between crunching noises.
Advertisements for in-home fabricators, capsule hotels, self-aware coffee makers, and neural infodump blockers invade your consciousness. You push back against the intrusion, and images of rusted tricycles, dust covered VCRs, and yellowed newspaper clippings flash through your mind. The phone starts to vibrate and props itself up on the table. You try to grab it, only to be zapped with an electric shock. In bright green text against a black screen, the phone blares out, “You no longer belong.”
NUNUM
Blending Flash Fiction & Art
