3-MINUTE FICTION ENTRY: "THE CONDUCTOR"

The first time I got struck by lightning was on a beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was sixteen and had just spent a few uneventful minutes snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a pale blue afternoon when I entered the water, but by the time I resurfaced, cement-like clouds had coalesced over the emptying shoreline. My parents had already found refuge in a nearby gazebo and were waving me toward them. One second later, it felt as if every square inch of my skin was being pulled upward. Then a deafening crack. My flippers melted to my feet. The silver fillings evaporated out of my teeth. My ears rung for two days.

    In the twenty-three years since I have been hit four other times. Prior to the last occurrence, I noticed a squall line suspended out east. From inside the hardware store I could see my car parked at the far end of the lot, and, despite my fear, pushed myself outside with the pretense that if I just ran really fast I’d make it. I buttoned up my jacket and stepped out. But the moment my foot hit the asphalt, the storm, I swear, began to move, advancing over the highway right in my direction. It grumbled deeply, tumbling over itself to catch up to me. Cold breaths of air whispered all around as raindrops tapped my shoulders. Halfway to safety I felt the now familiar caress of gathering ions. This time the discharge lit my hair on fire.

    It's always been an embarrassing affliction this inadvertent electrical trick of mine. Not even my girlfriend knew about it. I met Audrey a few months after the hair-igniting incident on a kind of day that would hint at our future relationship: serene and temperate without any trace of looming tempestuousness. Dusk was our favorite time. We loved watching the sun as it set behind the city skyline. And although my wariness of swirling and darkening cumulonimbus formations sometimes drove us indoors, she seemed to find it a tolerable, if not an endearing, trait. It was actually on a stone bridge stained orange-pink by the retreating light of the day that I proposed to Audrey. Ours was definitely not a stormy relationship which is why it came as such a shock when she broke off our engagement.

    So today is the last day I'll see her. She has uprooted all of her possessions and put them in boxes by the door, ready to stuff in a truck and plant in another apartment on the other side of the country. I ask her if she wants to sit on the balcony and watch the sunset with me, not in a romantic way of course because the spark between us is gone. She agrees. The daylight is sparse, the red beams barely break through since the whole of the sky is filled with a billowing charcoal mass of heavy clouds flashing with intermittent bursts of blue luminescence.

    "Looks like there's a thunderstorm headed our way," she says. "Do you want to go inside?"

    "No, I'm okay," I tell her. I hold her close, closer than ever. "Let's stay here a little while longer."

3-MINUTE FICTION ENTRY: "POETRY IN COMMOTION"

She was a poet. A poet that had been the unfortunate victim of an assault and mugging on the 1500 block of Wilkes Avenue at approximately 11:30 in the evening. The assailant made off with the girl's vintage purse, seven dollars in cash and a worn copy of An Anthology of Rust Belt Verse, 1975-1994.

    In the fluorescent confines of the fourth precinct, a sketch artist sat before this delicate, button-eyed twenty-something and peered over the binding coils of his bright white pad of paper. His first question to the young girl was in regards to the shape of her attacker's face into which he'd start filling in features.

    "It was the shape of the universe," she said. "No edge. No beginning. All dark matter, nebulous hues and lost souls. Riddled with shrinking red giants and mountainous black holes. A face of infinite fright yet one I could not look away from. It was the shape of everything. Of nothing. The shape of things to come."

    The blank page mirrored the sketch artist's expression. Other questions only elicited similarly cryptic couplets. He attempted to trick the girl into clarifying herself by offering a few easily rhymeable adjectives she could use; asking whether the man's face was round or ovate, wide or long.

    The girl closed her eyes, thinking back to an hour ago on a dark street when a random crossing of paths turned into petty theft. "It wasn't long as much as it was longing. Longing for a ghostly kiss perhaps from a mother born remiss."

    This poor girl was still in shock from her recent traumatic experience, the sketch artist thought, and she couldn't string together a straight answer. So he decided to just start drawing, letting not the words, but the sounds of the words, guide his pencil.

   The poetess prattled on about eyes like coffee, liquid and lightless, keeping her awake in the waning brightness; an angular anvil chin reddened by a searing, steely grin. But despite her florid yet clumsily constructed verse, the composite drawing was turning out to be one of the best the artist had ever done—so captivating and lifelike. It just needed a final finishing touch. Was this man wearing anything distinctive, the sketch artist wondered. Perhaps a hat or some jewelry?  "Only a cheap and menacing veneer to hide his guilt, his fate, his fear," she said.

    A suspect was never apprehended.

3-MINUTE FICTION ENTRY: "RESTART"

They pushed the button and nothing happened. It was kind of a shame too, because the machine that should have switched on as result took decades of planning, building and ridiculous amounts of money. Its purpose was to recreate the particles present during the first few seconds of the universe and give scientists a peek into what was rather simplistically labeled "The Big Bang," but there was nothing; not even the slightest hum.

    Some scientists weren't surprised. Mainly because they had serious doubts about this long-standing hypothesis of the beginning of everything. After working through hundreds of equations, these antithetical theoreticians postulated that there actually was no beginning and that our universe was in fact made up of layers upon layers of other past universes. Like a Russian doll inside an onion inside a rubber band ball.

     Of course the Big-Bang-believers thought these contrary assertions were preposterous and that one would have to execute some pretty crazy mathematical gymnastics, if not outright chicanery, to reach such a cosmological conclusion. But those alleged number-fudging physicists figured that if The Big Bang never occurred then the Big Bang Machine had nothing to reveal and wouldn't do a damn thing. They were smug. They were chuckling at their Big-Bang-believing peers. But thirty seconds later, they were all instantaneously disintegrated by an enormous burst of energy.

    The blast was so powerful that it broke every law of physics. It was so hot and so massive that it created new laws of physics—that it then promptly broke just for good measure—destroying everything it engulfed.

    Eventually, the explosion dissipated and things began to cool down. The tiniest atoms began to find their niches in the grand scheme of things as the passing shock wave shaped gases into stars and stars into galaxies. Molten materials coalesced into perfect little spheres upon which liquids and lava collected. On some of those spheres, elemental molecular chains, which at first were merely detritus from the apocalyptic cataclysm, started linking together into bigger and bigger strands. They divided into twos and fours and sixteens and so on.

    Then they discovered sex and really started to multiply. And, oh, the things they became. Jelly-filled fish, hard-shelled crustaceans and multi-limbed bugs flying from plant to plant eating leaves and drinking nectar.

    Some of the offspring grew scales, some grew feathers, and some fur. After a while, the brain in the furry species' head got big enough to ponder its own existence. It created language and gods, numbers and science in an effort to find answers. It began to see all the strange shapes and signals in the sky as the leftovers of a violent expulsion of matter and perhaps a clue into the origins of everything.

     And finally, after thousands of generations had lived and died, these now mostly furless creatures and their somewhat more developed thinking organ built a machine that could recreate the very beginnings of space and time. Scientists came from all over to witness the moment this machine got switched on. They watched in wonder and with great anticipation.

They pushed the button and nothing happened...

3-MINUTE FICTION ENTRY: "BROKEN"

Martin looked at his watch. It read 3:27. The actual time was 10:53.

    Behind the dumpster of Streetcar Subs, it reeked of rotting cold cuts and moldy bread, and the damp morning air shivered with the pulsing hum of circling flies. Martin placed his leather satchel on top of the garbage bin. “Let’s do this,” he said.

    He slipped off his coat, loosened his tie and began unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a pea green Streetcar Subs t-shirt underneath. He folded everything up and placed it in the bag. Then he delicately swapped his pressed slacks for rumpled khakis and his polished loafers for black sneakers. With his employer-mandated uniform on he was ready to face the lunch rush.

    Behind the register, Martin thought how things could be worse. He could be working at Ruby’s Burgers where everyone has to wear those bright red tennis shoes.

    Martin looked at his watch. It read 3:27. The actual time was 1:05. He wondered what his wife was doing at that moment. Browsing a wall of $300 shoes probably, unaware of her husband’s termination and subsequent underemployment.

    “Martin? Is that you?”

    It was a voice he hadn’t heard since his days as an intern, the voice of Brad Borland. And there Brad stood, immaculately dressed in dark gray, a sophisticated anomaly amidst the primary-color decor of the franchised sandwich shop.

    “It’s me, Brad Borland.”

    “I know, Brad,” Martin said. “Can I... Can I take your order?”

    Brad ordered the foot-long roast beef before offering his unsolicited, unabridged oral autobiography starting with the day after their summer internships ended. He told an epic tale of boundless ambition, masterful corporate maneuvering and how an uncanny command of the market propelled him straight to the board of directors of some Fortune 500 capital investment firm. Martin didn’t catch the name of the company as humiliation had filled his head like a balloon.

    “And what are you doing with yourself these days?” Brad asked.

    “You know,” Martin said. “Not much.”

    A bell rang. Brad’s order was ready. With sandwich in hand, Brad mentioned that while he really wanted to stay and chat, he had just flown in town for the day to close a big deal before heading off to Europe for three weeks.

    Brad turned to walk out. When he reached the door, it became evident that he wasn’t wearing the expected black patent leather oxfords, but instead had on a pair of bright red tennis shoes.

    Martin looked at his watch. It read 3:27. The time was actually 3:23. He stood in the parking lot and called his wife. Martin could finally tell her the secret he'd kept for so long.

    “I need to tell you something,” he said.

    “What?” Her voice crackled under the poor reception.

    “I’ve been lying to you.”

    “I can’t hear you, Martin.” She said. “I’m at the airport. I’m leaving you. I know you got fired. I’ve known for a long time and I can’t deal with it anymore. They’re boarding now. I have to go.”

    Martin looked at his watch. It read 3:27. The time was actually 3:27 and everything felt right if only for a minute.

The Atavist

Grandpa was crazy, waking up at five o'clock every morning just to go jogging. At a time when the planet had barely summoned the energy to turn itself around and allow the sun to illuminate the mountaintops out west, this ursine old man had already put on his tan velour suit to do some deep knee bends on the front porch.

    He always ran the same route, even in the burgeoning heat of a midsummer morning: a circuitous six-and-a-half mile trip starting at his sprawling, flat-roofed, four-bedroom home all the way to the enormous Golden Lasso Buffet where a two-story cowgirl proclaimed via neon speech bubble that inside were Las Vegas's "sauciest ribs." Upon reaching the entrance of the restaurant's empty parking lot, Grandpa would turn around and jog all the way back without a break or a breather anyplace along the way. Then finally, barely winded, he bolted through the front door, accompanying the creak of the hinges with a baritone growl of his own, and headed straight into the kitchen to run a peculiar combination of fruits and vegetables through his juicer.

    This fondness for juicing developed almost overnight. His newest juicer, the third one he had purchased in as many months, was a massive stainless steel industrial model with the pulverizing power of a wood chipper. It whined like a jet engine as it liquefied the flesh of any unsuspecting produce forced down its feeding chute.

    Grandpa had seen the appliance on television. Not on some thirty-second spot sandwiched between acts of a courtroom drama, but featured in an entire half-hour-long production extolling the virtues of the wondrous contraption and the therapeutic powers of the fluids secreted forthwith.

    These juicer shows fascinated him. It didn't matter which juicer was being demonstrated, or if he had already seen it, or already owned it, Grandpa still sat there, fixated on the screen. Of course to most people, it's obvious that thirty minutes is an inordinate amount of airtime to dedicate to an invention which really has only one purpose, but Grandpa thought it was real entertainment—notwithstanding the fact that each episode consisted of nothing more than a hundred or so close-up shots of questionably talented actors sipping a viscous gray-green beverage before squeezing out a smile. The lack of content didn’t seem odd to Grandpa at all. He leaned close as the frantic announcer shouted the toll-free number that had to be dialed now (now!) before the limited supply of juicers disappeared. And like a boy watching his favorite cartoon, this sixty-something-year-old grandfather of one would sit enraptured until the false urgency coerced him to pick up the phone before the show was over.

    The last juicer arrived only a week after the one he had ordered earlier.

    “But, Dad, you have two of these things already,” his daughter said.

    He adjusted his thick-lensed glasses and stared for a moment at the package, a bright green box marked Juice Monster.

    “Karen, sweetheart, this one's a good one,” he said. “It's the only one I'll need.”

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