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101: Karie Mulligan

CoD: Drug Overdose

ToD: 27.09.2014, 20:35

LoD:

The last thing Kazuo Takashima anticipated witnessing as a grim reaper was an Excel spreadsheet listing the names of all the souls he had to reap. 101 souls, to be exact. When he was accompanied by an elderly sage in a sheer black full-length robe, the destination he presumed to reach was a mystical cavern with ancient scrolls, not a Xerox shop. To make it even worse, it was the one he regularly visited when he was alive. A significant portion of his education loans was spent on fancy notes and scholarly references that never came to use-- Kazuo realised with a sigh.

20:32. Three more minutes. When Kazuo arranged the deal with the Council of Reapers to collect 101 souls as one of them, in return for being able to spend on Earth the time required for the task, he never thought the job would be as mundane as it turned out to be. All those movies and dramas had him worried about having to encounter snarly beasts and abominable monsters, or the least, a fierce spirit with no apprehension about tearing someone's head off, but the worst he ever came across was an aged woman who locked herself in her room, refusing to come out. Although, it did take him a great deal of persuasion for her to finally be convinced of what had to be done.

20:33. But none among the other hundred souls he reaped had put him in a difficult situation like the one he faced right then. Awkward, he lingered around the public ladies' washroom, reluctant to go in. With only two minutes left, he had to reach her before the aberrations from the Underworld sensed her death. Amassing all his courage, Kazuo took a deep breath, which he instantly regretted, before striding headfirst into the compartment she was in.

"What in the actual fu--" Maybe he had miscalculated the pacing of his little parade to the washroom, but it was infallible that Ms Karie Mulligan was not dead.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--" Kazuo stepped out and shut the door loudly behind him. To say he was embarrassed would have been an underrepresentation of the circumstances that had befallen him.

20:35. She was supposed to be dead, but Kazuo could still hear her mumbling from the inside. Had he interfered with the universal balance of life and death? Was this bound to have consequences? However, before the introspection could lull him into a transient reassurance, the door clicked open, almost hurling him backwards into a fall.

2

"I know you all love me, but barging into the toilet is really where I draw the line."

CBM Conference Hall

New Park, FSA

"And I thought you couldn't take phones to school."

"Dad, please, not now."

"Oh-- okay. You alright, sweetie?"

"It's just, I have to fill this form, and--" "It's only male or female."

"Just pick a random one, honey! Trust me, they don't even look into these forms anymore. Even I had this huge load of forms on my desk, like, five min--"

"Okay. Bye, Dad."

Matthew stared at the phone screen for a straight minute. I messed up, didn't I?

Matthew J King, or Matthew Jodie King (in which Jodie was the first name of Matthew's mother), was far from a great dad. But what he was was one of the most proficient software programmers in a world where computers were making a freaking revolution. He was the Nikolai Tesla of Computer Science, or at least that was what his colleagues called him.

"Can we continue with the presentation now, Matty?" One of the three big dudes in the lush suits murmured from behind the bright light of the projector lens. One of the two big dudes. Mitchell (his boss) never was that much of a big dude, as much as he was trying to be one.

"Yup! So binary is a thing of the past, my lads. So if you wanna pull this off, you gotta think ahead."

*****

Back in his cubicle, Matthew surfed through the extra-long messages he always used to send to Jo. Whenever he found a funny joke or a weird fact, it was imperative that he sent it to Jo and Daisy. Daisy always surprised him with a new text emoji she'd figured out. Or a new slang term the kids used, like Lots of Laughter or Rolling On the Floor Laughing. And Jo-- well, she did see most of his messages. Maybe she was more of a fan of the 'Beakr' meme things, Matthew considered, but half of those never made any sense to him, and the other half took him an eternity. He would laugh at a joke he saw from the office during dinner or-- sometimes even later.

And with Daisy gone, his life with Jo became a to-the-death chess match. And Matthew could never figure out the right moves. He was pretty funny, everyone thought so, but Jo didn't. He was an absolute genius-- even magazines said so, but Jo shut the door in his face. And his attempts to become the caring, attentive dad were, in Jo's words, 'creepy AF'.

But Matthew was never one to give up. If he had given up, CBM would never have put out the best-ever Personal Computer in the market before Cherry could even move a finger. Matthew loved it whenever his dad went on to explain that story. Other kids might have found it embarrassing, but Matthew never understood why. They are our parents. Can't they be proud of us? It is so sweet.

Maybe I should find something Jo is proud of! But-- what is Jo proud of? Though Matthew never said it out loud, he did realise Jo was not as brilliant as he and Daisy. But everything isn't about brains and grades! We were nerds, Matty. But the more time passed, the harder it became for Matthew to keep up that logic. Everyone was a smart-ass, and everyone was coming up with the next big thing. Jo had to try harder to keep up.

And between all of that, there was the sex. When the doctors suggested they could easily remove with surgery whatever seemed to be male about her, Matthew couldn't care any less. But not Daisy. Daisy made a riot against the doctor that day. And all of it ended up with them naming her Jo. Unisex, Daisy grinned.

"Hey, so Wendy's today, right?" Laura's head peeked from above the plywood dividers that separated their cabins.

"Yeah, sure." Matthew was (for the first time in a very long while) not entirely sure about that answer.

"Or actually, you know what?" Matthew rolled back in his chair, ready to show off his adorable charm, "I'm going to pick up Jo from school today. Because that's what a good dad would do."

"Alright, good daddy." Laura barely turned around from her PC. She had already seen enough of his charisma for a lifetime, "But-- don't mess it up, alright?" Laura shifted in her seat and looked him right in the eye, and Matthew never once enjoyed whatever had followed after Laura gave him that look. Never.

Recently, I had been realising a few things about myself. A friend of mine once told me that I lack a part of the hard drive every human is built with. Back then, he said that about romantic love, because as much as I spoke about love, they never found me in love. It wasn't a lone case. Over the course of my short life, many a friend of mine have shared their concerns as to something being different about me. How I don't function the way normal people do. It all made me believe I was beyond the trivialities, that I had already mastered how to be the zenith of peace and contentment. But again, I knew I was missing something. I knew I was wrong.

It was never that I was beyond any of these emotions. I had just convinced myself that feeling any of this wouldn't alter the tragic trajectory of my life. That I don't deserve, or that I was better off not giving in to hope, though I always professed about the same. But many places where I used to feel something's which dissipated soon into nothing's, recently, the dissolution has started leaving more residue than ever before. It used to linger like a clogged sinkhole, always bothering the regular flow of the sewage. But just like the domestic chaos, time had decayed and decomposed some of the sewage that lingered in the cracks and crevices of my heart. And the drain is returning back to a normal, and I have dishes to clean again, and the frustration and mundanity of a clog is slowly fading away. My futile attempts at clearing the drain has finally started showing results that could actually lead to something.

This morning, I missed Bill. I was never one to be excited for birthdays. I barely looked forward to them. But when I met Bill a couple years ago, he went on an effort to create a whole post, a massive tag line, comparing the time zones and weeks of waiting just to put up a few heartfelt words he was willing to repeat to me over and over again. I have no idea how many times I've read that post over the last few years. I couldn't bear to read it this morning. Part of me wanted to, but the grief within me was scared how it would affect me. I couldn't risk the drain to be clogged again too soon, I have years worth of problems to deal with while I still can. Of the past, the present and the future.

Hmm, I guess I could call this series 'My brain is a bullet train, and I forgot where the brakes are!!!' with a lot of intermittent screaming and crashing. Hey guys, I am back (:

But let's start where we stopped yesterday. Wait, why are we focusing on the past? Shouldn't we be focusing on the present? Would overthinking about things that are already done and over change anything? Isn't it a waste of time?

Well, first of all, how much thinking is overthinking? I think the reason behind a lot of overthinking is that we have a lot of unfinished thoughts. Thoughts that occurred to us, but we couldn't follow through. Thoughts we distracted ourselves off of from. Thoughts that are yet to be solved. Things that are yet to be decluttered, sorted and arranged neatly in that clumsy brain of ours. After all, if we only focus on the present and leave yesterday for yesterday, wouldn't our life eventually become an assortment of unsolved yesterdays? And how many unsolved yesterdays can we handle before it all becomes a burden too heavy for us to carry?

So yes, let's start where we left off yesterday. I do believe there were a lot of topics we didn't really expand on. Let's see.

I think we were done with the 'Construction of building systems to maintain our life, and how it could hinder us as much as it might help us grow, and how we need a fine balance between routine and following our intuitions' part of it all, didn't we? I think we made a fine point there! We need some level of a system to align our goals, but the moment the system starts to hinder us, we need to give in to our humane impulses. We need to find the balance. (I read somewhere that you could get off any board meeting formalities by saying, "I think what we should strive to aim for is a compromising balance between the various opinions we discussed today." Just wanted to mention that, friend to friend.)

do something for ourselves'. Ah, the age-old self-love conundrum. Where do we draw the fine lines between self-love and narcissism?

Grief. It was everything they told us it was.

Isn't it funny-- how we always think that the rules and generalisations of the ordinary world do not apply to us; to assume that we are unique; only to realise later that we are no different; that perhaps in the grand scheme of things, we are all one and the same? All the life lessons we overlooked, all the collective experiences we have as a society over the years neglected, all for nothing. All for merely meandering at this moment, pondering how all life would have pivoted if only I realised I was just one among the millions that once were and soon would be. Only another forsaken soul to walk the forgotten grounds of a forbidden planet.

Alyssa once asked me whether Earth, with all its pain and suffering, was indeed the torturous hell we were always warned about. I did not have an answer for her back then, and I am unsure whether I still have one. The eternal burning portrayed in the books, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps it was only the romanticisation of yet another lost poet of how our hearts sear in pain as we traverse from one chapter of life to the next. Sometimes I wonder if this piercing pain is what it means to be alive. Or whether we are repaying for our sins from a past life, one we lived long ago and can no longer remember the details of. A hell within us, where we chain ourselves to a harrowing heaviness, forever threatening to carry us into the void.

Kara slouched further into the space between her gaming chair and the neon monitors, the light painting her eyes pink, hands slipping between her knees, tongue tracing the lines of her dry lips. The shit she had on her screen right then was fucking lit. Lights out, three in the morning, jacket on-- Kara already knew how the rest of the night would play out. Grabbing her Converse sneakers and the rugged backpack, Kara slid the window open, glancing back at her room one last time with a cheeky smirk as she made the leap.

The cold wind rushed against her skin as her bike sped through the empty streets, triggering all the speed cams on her trail. But none of those would matter since they would never trace the fake plates back to her. Kara only had her destination in her mind. She was about to make some serious money.

"You really have no manners." Harlem spoke as he wiped the golf club clean with one of the tissues scattered on the floor. "I told you we could talk this out." He took one step after another, closer and closer to the woman slithering out of his reach. Making sure his stance was perfect, he aimed the golf club right at her bloody head, his feet pressing her down by the hip. "But you never listen!" he hollered as her entire frame fliched for one last time that night.

Kharagpur, West Bengal

18 May 2017

There she was. Against the pink-tinted skies and the slow-moving gales of a late Thursday evening, her entire frame leaning against her hands atop the rusted iron railings of the greasy balcony. The rain had abandoned puddles of water atop the leaking roof, perhaps to ensure the moss didn't die from the scorching heat of the summer. They left stains on the hem of her pants, but like always, she wouldn't notice them until the end of the day. The strands of her hair danced to the winds ever so slightly, forcing her to push them behind her ears like she always did. She never could stop complaining about her messy hair. And now, many years later, it seemed like she still couldn't.

"You're here." Karun realised how much he had missed her voice. Perhaps hearing her past audio messages on the humid nights he couldn't sleep hadn't done the trick. She pulled all her hair into a ponytail, unable to handle the few strands that always slipped away.

School for Gifted Students, Arkhenzas

June 1968

Within these walls reside the glorious future of our great nation-- the brightest of all, seeking to transform their wondrous dreams into an extraordinary reality. And we, the Staff of Arkhenzas, are devoted to equipping our brilliant prodigies with all the facilities they will ever need. Here, the dreamers thrive. Here, their dreams come true.

Time passes differently within the bounds of Arkhenzas. Rarely does one look up at the dreary clouds and predict the right time of the day. Here, the mid-noon and the evenings bid farewell the same. Here, the cold gravel walls are forever ornated with raindrops from the misty drizzles throughout the day. Here, the trees beyond the forts are a tint of brown than green, and amid the heaviest downpour, the entire canvas turns a mosaic-- edges blurred with various shades of brown transforming into one.

#microfiction

Whitehorse, Canada

November 17th, 2013

Leah Ann Sterling was never one to believe in love at first sight. Yes, countless times has she enacted that fleeting moment with a myriad of costars-- the accidental glance, drowning in that deep hazel or cerulean eyes, wordy first meetings. Not that it was unromantic; In a screenplay, it was nothing less than captivating and bewitched. But Leah liked to believe that love would, in reality, be much more organic. Something that was built within her heart, over time, for a particular someone who understood her better than most. And she did find that someone precisely five months ago, and it was all fine and well until this morning when she died in her sleep.

It was relatively unexpected, needless to say.

Chronic loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Geetha Rajiv read from the miserable-looking pamphlet glued to the inoperable, age-old electricity post near her bus stop. The flyer clung to its dear life, three-fourths of it hanging in the air like the drooping ears of a starving dog. Geetha fixed the advert, brooding, "guess what's deadlier?" as she took another puff from the cheap, ten-rupee cigarette.