The Commute

The Interminably Long Queue.

My Dear Delilah,

Every road I take leads to you, every morning, evening and every summer.

But today something terrble happened. Something foul and very awful that will change everything about so many things.

You see there was this matter of the long queue at the bus station i had to contend with. I tell you my dearest Delilah, this queue was hellish. It spanned three abreast,and hundreds long. Strangely enough, it sequenced a member of every culture I can imagine. There was a man and his hijabi wife, followed by another couple with their toddler, all donning matching turbans, all the way down to a mysterious looking old woman with a twisted smile and a milk white scarf whose cult I couldnt quite place. And this sequence as it was repeated itself over and over ad nauseam.

The size of this crowd intrigued me so much that thought I foolishly, given to abandoning foresight, to ask the old man in front of me, ‘Which gate of Heaven do you think this bus pulls up to?’

For that, my dearest one, for my childish kidding ways, I was reprimanded in every tongue available and my parenting brought to question. Then I was banished by the crowd to the end of the queue, which was where I stood already, only now it had the coat of shame and guilt painted over it.

And thus began my commute Delilah. Yet not even this was the worst that happened to me today.

That comes soon after.

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photo courtesy: Africa News 24-7

Microfiction #20: Up Is Down

 

Is peanut a type of butter.
What about upside? Is it a type of down?

Stop it with the pointless questions. You won’t amount to much in life if you persist so.

But Kevin never listened. And he never ceased persisting so.

When he got his first job, he questioned why ties had to be so unyieldingly stiff.

He custom made his own ties, from soft material that flailed gleefully in the wind. It was horrible. He would spend the majority of the day pulling it off his face. He had trouble communicating with his colleagues.

But he persisted on, obviously, seeking solutions to his new formed problem.

One day, he finally got it, and like a small child learning to stand, shivering with fear of failure, fear for his life and worse his reputation, he did the unthinkable.

The next day he walked into the office, much to the horror of everyone he met, walking…on his two feet!

It was awkward at first, seeing things upside down. Reading people’s expressions was particularly hard. But over time he found his thoughts grew more lucid, he fainted less and less per day than his colleagues did on average. He soon conducted research to prove that walking upside down improved life expectancy vastly because of the new ease of ingesting food that came with it.

His new antics, originally a source of ridicule, soon earned the attention of the Council of Revered Upsiders who put out the word that he be captured immediately. He evaded capture effortlessly, because his pursuers couldn’t keep up, running on their hands as they were and passing out every few meters.

Legend has it that he outlived his rivals, spending the rest of his days in the woods, persisting in his research and silently inspiring a cadre of rebels like him, at a camp known to a few exclusive where an inscription in a cave wall of him with arms and legs outstretched in midair doubles as tribute as well as proof that he was the closest a man had ever come to flying.