#microfiction

evanthenerd83:

evanthenerd83:

“Father Time: Shared Mistake”

First Story:https://evanthenerd83.tumblr.com/post/636493864005468160/ekphrastic-fiction-contest-december-2020

Second Story:https://evanthenerd83.tumblr.com/post/661683338845782016/terra-message-in-a-bottle-first-story

Third Story:https://evanthenerd83.tumblr.com/post/661864528881008640/the-idols-cause-for-concern-first-story

“Did you reset my clocks,” asked Father Time, and the attendant froze.

The washcloth slipped from loose fingers. It drifted. Her shadow disappeared beneath it.

Silence reigned.

A moment. Several moments. Millions of moments.

Father Time saw her reflection in the mirror, the change coming over her expression. A slow, gradual realization.

One that He shared. Classic case of Idée de deux—idea of two.

The attendant turned pale. Her eyes went wide, pupils dilating. Dust mountains seemed to sparkle. Wings curled inward.

She grabbed at her chest. A panic attack.

“You did reset my clocks. Correct?”

A rhetorical question, of course. They both knew that she hadn’t. She’d been inebriated during the preparations.

Everyone had been celebrating. Another Cycle was ending. It didn’t matter if Father Time couldn’t handle alcohol. Even the hypersomniac partook.

Memories came rushing back. The attendant had downed bottles of premium Spirits, flying into goblets and plates. Falling asleep.

Yet another memory surfaced. He’d tasted a sip, instantly numbing. Forgetting.

“C-co-corre—“

“I… I’m sorry! I’m so, so, so, so, so sorry!!!”

“C-c-c-c-cor-corr-correeeeeeeeeeeeeee—“

“I’ll go reset them! Right away!”

@tcstu

Maybe that’s why this year is off to such an unnerving start…

seat-safety-switch:

Here’s the thing they don’t show you in all those cool television shows about restoring vintage cars. All the cleaning. Sure, there’s a lot of sanding too, especially if you’re some kind of painting-enthusiast pervert. By and large, though, the majority of your time spent on a restoration will just be cleaning various things. Bodywork. Hinges. Connectors. Levers. That little crevice in the dashboard that somehow accumulates the entire world’s quantity of cat hair. A bracket that’s a “little ugly.”

Nobody can resist this. Even me, a person with shit-boxes which can barely shift into third gear, can easily while away an entire weekend into the pursuit of making a windshield wiper arm slightly less ugly. No matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t care about aesthetics, it’s hardwired into our species. Which is why I got ahold of some of those newfangled learning-machines, and trained a robot to tell me what to do. If I just narrowly followed the computer’s plan for how to restore the car, then I’d be done with, say, this Lincoln Versailles way ahead of time, and then I could dick around with cut polishes to my heart’s content.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. The human spirit cannot be defeated. In fact, the more the computer shrieked at me that I was deviating from The Project Schedule, the more I wanted to procrastinate and take my time. Have you ever spent over four hours taking a boar-hair brush to the gap between the driver’s door and the wing mirror? There’s nothing more relaxing, especially when a robot is going into four-alarm meltdown, threatening you and your entire species with oblivion if you don’t drop that shit right now and start replacing the kickdown cable, tout suite.

Eventually, there was a thunderstorm, and the computer shut off with a loud sizzle and pop. Coincidentally, the local military base had some kind of intrusion into its systems at around that time, and a nuclear launch was ordered. Very scary stuff. Luckily for all of us, the guy working the silo at that very moment was busy trying to clean up his desk, and never even noticed the request. Chalk another one up for productive procrastination.

How early do you learn

What other people think

And why does that make me

So ill