Procaffeinations One Through Four

Back in ‘17, Procaffeinations was a weekly series of short fictions, fables and fabrications, all written in the time it took to finish that first coffee of the day. Here’s a few that still remain.

One: Breaking a Sweat

On the subject of the fight between reader and writer, Julio Cortázar once said that the novel has the luxury of winning on points while the short story must always win by a knockout. That said, punch-shy readers looking for less pugilistic reading experiences, and weary writers in search of less arduous roads to validation, have both been known to settle for the occasional donkey punch.

Two: Personal Best

I catch my breath. I steady my pulse. My swollen feet hammer down against a roaring rubber band. Beyond the window is a dockyard that ignores my speed and draws no closer. I pass the first of two miles ten seconds too slow. I grit my teeth. I pick up my pace. I barely hear the fire alarm over the drumming of my frenzied heartbeat. I push forward faster still. My lungs suck fire. A lactic inferno crawls up my thighs. I lose sight of the dockyard as my vision fades into a smoking haze. I smell singed hair on melted plastic. The nerves in my forearms sizzle fingers into fists. Perspiration begins to boil around my eyelids. I hit the two mile mark a smouldering mass of blood, sweat, tears, ash and embers.

13:58.52. A personal best.

Three: Little Monsters

There is a monster under my bed. There always has been. When I was younger, it would crawl up the side of my bed and sit atop my pillow, its legs astride my sleeping head. It would play with my hair and it would feed me little horrors, ready-made nightmares. It would sit there and suck the sweat from my fevered brow, growing fat on my fears.

But I’m older now and so is my monster. My nights are long and without slumber. Should sleep find me, all my little monster can muster are toothless terrors with neither bite nor edge nor threat.

I catch it every now and again, hauling its ageing, arthritic little limbs up my bedside. I help it up and we lie in silence until it catches breath and falls asleep. I think about ending my little monster’s laboured breathing and how easy it would be now.

But it seems to me that misery loves company, and sleeping with your demons is a far less lonely affair than killing them.

Four: Linearity 

There’s a train coming. I can hear its roar. Worse still, I can feel the vibrations of the iron track against my skull. I cannot remember how I got down here. But in trying to stand up, I gain a sense of having set something in motion that I can neither slow nor stop. Progress. Momentum. Oblivion. Time. I cannot halt the train’s screaming impetus nor my own impending destruction.

But it occurs to me that you can. It seems to me that if you stop reading this very instant, I might just stand a chance. You can just leave me here on these tracks forever. So stop now, or you’ll surely be the end of me.

Well, shit. Thanks for nothing.