Soliloquies
It was just another day. Just another day that would change his life in one of those irrevocable ways he had read about in all those books. That was everybody's problem, he thought to himself silently, trying to process the epiphany he experienced; they only seek out the wondrous and the glorious, never taking comfort or even seeing the inherent beauty of the smaller things, the everyday things. It started simple enough, like most contemporary stories did, with a phone call. "Good morning, we know it's your day off but for reasons necessary to make your life not uninteresting as dictated by the weaver of stories, we're going to need you to come in today." So he went to work, not caring for the phone caller's poor diction nor his cryptic breakage of the fourth wall. How could he? He was only a fictional being made into existence by a bored deity. "Sorry we had to call you in on such short notice. The doctor coming today couldn't make it, said something about how today wasn't meant for him. You know how it is." He nodded with a quizzical look that gave his face the proper distortion to confirm his role as a protagonist in the story. "What have we got?", he muttered with a perfect eloquence. "Well, it's not going to be easy. Bed 6... He's... Uhh.. Well.... Looks like he's going to expire today." He thought of expiry dates and how simpler his fictional life would've been if every person just came with an expiry date. "And his parents? Are they aware of his imminent detachment from our embryonic microverse?" "I'm afraid so." So he went over to the newly christened Bed 6, his real name lost in a vaporous ether a good while ago, like all the other good little boys. And there were his parents, a picturesque portrayal of life at it's bleakest. They were a kind of beautiful in that way only truly sad people can be. He paused and took a deep breath, he could sense the deity's mischief afoot. Bed 6 would die any minute now and he had to prepare for the Danse Macabre of resuscitation. 20 minutes later, it was announced and made real in his fictional world. Bed 6 was no longer a breathing life, but merely a sorrowful footnote. He soothed the parents much as he could with his generic religious speech full of contradictory mysticisms. They left him with a dead Bed 6 in an attempt to go process the immense amount of bureacratic paperwork that must be filled in order for the world to acknowledge a death fully and officially. He stared at its lifeless body, and held it's cold hand. He wrapped the baby's hand around his little finger, channeling in the baby's parents' empathy. He said a prayer in a tongue he wasn't sure he spoke. And just like that the story hit its stride as the deity decided that it was time for him to understand it all. "He got what everyone gets." A lifetime. --
By: Ahmed Al Mojadidi














