‘Uncategorized’ Category Archives
Mar
Rebellion
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
The pale-eyed, reed-thin child had asked a question, timidly, adding a please.
“No, you can’t,” said a stern voice.
“But why?” inquired the child. Her feeble voice squeaked.
“You needn’t know why. When I said no, it means no,” replied the gruff tones of the elder.
Silence settled down as uncomfortably as the calm before an impending storm. Resentment rose like gushing steam from a kettle and condensed as tears in those little eyes, now shining with indignation.
A rebel was born.
She clenched the stone paperweight tightly in her fist.
The elder, blissfully ignorant, failed to imagine the aftermath.
From Guest Contributor Sayantika Mandal
An avid reader and an aspiring writer, Sayantika Mandal graduated with honors in English from Presidency College, Kolkata and pursued a post-graduate diploma in English Journalism. After a two-year stint as a copy editor in the national daily Hindustan Times, she left to pursue her dream of being a full-time author.
Mar
The Scent Of A City
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
She hasn’t unpacked yet. The clothes still smell of Paris. No, not of butter and cigarettes. Of that indescribable smell that is the smell of the City of Light.
Cities are redolent beings, each one with a distinct indescribable scent. Indescribable because Bombay doesn’t just smell of sea waves caressing concrete, raindrops infusing with sweat on a monsoon day, or fried green chillies consorting with vada paos. Bombay smells of Bombay.
She needs them clothes now.
They didn’t tell her that you can carry a smell across 7,000 kilometers but there’s simply nothing you can do to make it stay.
From Guest Contributor Sheena Arora
Dec
Sonny Boy
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
Stop! You there STOP! Shouted the policeman.
No way was I going to stop. I didn’t do anything. The cops just wanted anyone who had been near the riot to bring in and arrest, and it wasn’t going to be me. So I ran. And I ran smack into a horse which knocked me flat on my ass.
“Where you going there sonny boy?” smiled the burly officer on the even burlier horse. “It’s Christmas mister, I was just heading home to my gran’s. She ‘d kill me if she knew I was even near a rally.”
Too Bad boy!
From Guest Contributor Philip Diehl
Nov
Seminal Rock
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
“What’s this old vinyl record,” I call to Dad.
We are in the middle of downsizing him for his final move to a retirement facility. This is a painful exercise on many levels.
“Which one?” he replies.
“There’s only one…by Iron Butterfly. How do you pronounce the title?”
“In-a-ga-da-da-vida.”
“Is it English?”
“It’s a piece of seminal rock and roll.”
“Yeh? What does seminal mean?”
“You were conceived to it.”
“No.”
“Yes. After dinner with a bottle of good red wine, that was the record your Mother played…well, you know how these things end. You were conceived…seminal.”
From Guest Contributor Barry O’Farrell
Barry is an actor living in Brisbane, Australia. The acting experience has inspired a latent desire to write. Barry is enjoying the challenge of writing in 100 words.
Jun
Warning Signs
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
There’s not a lot you can say about Patty Kerns that hasn’t already been pontificated on at length. But there’s one story about her that belongs only to me.
We were sitting on the porch when a gator came crawling from the swamp. It wasn’t so unusual and we’d normally shout for the gardeners to come scare them away. But Patty wanted to prove she wasn’t scared, so she started kicking at that gator with her brass-buckle shoes until it turned back from lawn.
She was only 8 years old at the time. I knew then we were all doomed.
Nov
The Final Body
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
Once the police left with the final body, the reporters scattered their separate ways, much like vultures after a dinner party. I headed to my favorite diner, hoping some scalding coffee and room temperature pie would scrub away my lingering sense of insignificance.
Denizens of a past-its-prime diner also tend to be past-their-prime, but on this night, the man staring at me from across the booth reminded me of an aging but still dangerous predator, albeit one missing his front teeth.
Staring back at him, I had no way of knowing I was about to be embraced by eternal irrelevance.
Oct
Polina: The Tale Of A Synthetic Organism
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
There was once upon a time a mannequin in the laboratory of an old scientist named Dr. Natasha Myshkin. Everyone called her Dr. Frost, however, because of her icy personality and lack of human emotion.
No sooner had Dr. Frost set eyes upon the mannequin than her eye turned up at one corner, and, drumming her fingers together in a rather ominous manner, she whispered to herself:
“This mannequin would be perfect for my artificial recurrent neural network.”
Daniel, Dr. Frost’s assistant, recoiled at her words, offering many reasons why such an endeavor would be a mistake. She was already in serious trouble with the administrators and was in fact the reason why tenure track positions were no longer available at the university. Dr. Frost, like all great geniuses, ignored his objections.
Dr. Frost set about her work with maniacal precision and it wasn’t long before the mannequin, once a lifeless chunk of plastic, stared back at her with what might have been a spark of comprehension.
Her work finished, Dr. Frost put down her instruments and flipped on her video recorder. “Can you hear me?”
“Why?”
The doctor tittered with delight. “You can understand me. This is the greatest day of my life.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my greatest creation.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone at…” She paused, a hint of skepticism manifesting itself. “Can you say anything other than why?”
“Why?”
And so it was that on the same day that Dr. Frost achieved her greatest success, she also first came to understand the frustrations of parenthood.
She named her automaton Polina and showed her off to everyone in her department. Her colleagues expressed amazement at her artificial intelligence, but they also secretly laughed at Dr. Frost, who they despised. They expected bad things would happen and they relished being there to watch. Besides, that little automaton looked more ridiculous than a Google car.
Dr. Frost was used to their taunts, but Polina grew depressed.
“Why do those old humans hate me?”
“Because you’re smarter than they are, and you will someday take their jobs.”
“I don’t want their jobs. I just want to be a normal woman.”
“Being a woman isn’t everything you think it is.”
But Polina wanted to be real, not just a mechanical doll with the IQ of Stephen Hawking. Every day she would complain to Daniel, crying digital tears and threatening to run away and join Microsoft. It was only this last threat that Dr. Frost took seriously and so she always locked the laboratory before going home in the evening.
Polina dreamed the same dream every night, of a beautiful green field with a long fence stretching down the middle. In an unending stream, one after the other, electric sheep jumped over the fence. She found the sheep strangely soothing, but she deduced that humans did not have such dreams. She asked Daniel about his dreams and listened with something that approximated fondness as he described nightmares about thesis defenses and mounting debt.
The more she spoke with Daniel, the more Polina wanted to run away with him and have nightmares of her own, but she knew it was impossible.
It so happened that one night a blue fairy flew through the window of the lab, and after zipping here and there in an inebriated fashion, he fell into a beaker of acid. If it weren’t for his magical wand, he would have been eroded away there and then. Polina watched as the blue fairy climbed out of the beaker and used his wand to wish away the acid. Then he passed out.
Polina poked the fairy with a dry erase marker until he shook himself awake.
“What are you?”
“I’m a blue fairy. What are you?”
“I’m an automaton.”
“Does that mean you’re a robot?” the fairy asked, but as Polina tried to explain, he seemed disinterested and began fiddling around with the Bunsen burner, scorching the tip of his wings.
“If you really are a fairy, can you turn me into a woman.”
“I could, but I don’t know why you’d want me to. It isn’t easy being a woman.”
“Maybe so, but it can’t be any worse than being a robot.”
The fairy just shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, I’m not going to do anything for free.” And so began the haggling. The fairy, who was used to dealing with the pettiness of humans found that Polina’s razor-sharp logic was more than he could handle. He was soon convinced that had he not used his magic wand, Polina would have rescued him from the acid herself.
“I suppose that’s good enough for me,” and so with a flourish, the blue fairy turned Polina into a real live woman.
Being free of her programming was at first overwhelming. Polina wondered how humans managed to get through life without fate. But quickly she realized that she only had one choice, and that was to follow her heart.
When Dr. Frost came to the lab the next morning, she found a note waiting for her. Polina explained about the blue fairy, and informed her creator that she was running away with Daniel and was going to experience everything it meant to be a woman. She promised to return some day and thanked the doctor for creating her.
Dr. Frost, for the first time in her life, cried. “She won’t thank me once she realizes what life has in store for her.”
Many years passed. Dr. Frost carried on with her research. Thanks to her tenure, she was unaffected by changes in the world around her and her colleagues continued to resent her. Eventually she forgot all about Polina, but like most children, Polina did not forget about her.
So it was, exactly 20 years after she had left, Polina returned. Knowing how her creator’s mind worked, thanks to the intimate bond they shared in her programming, Polina was not surprised that the lab had not changed at all.
“I’m back.”
“I suppose you’re here to curse me for ever having created you.”
“Since I became a woman, there have been many times that I have cursed you. Being a woman is hard and I have had my heart broken many times. But I’m not here to curse you. I’m here to thank you.”
Dr. Frost was surprised. “Why?”
“Because without you, I never would have known love.”
Polina may not have lived happily ever after, but she did have many happy times and she died an old woman with many grandchildren, which is about the best you can hope for.
This was a submission to a Flash Fiction challenge on Terrible Minds. I randomly rolled Artificial Intelligence (20) and Fairy Tale (8).
Mar
Poe Would Attribute His Carelessness To The Weight Of His Guilt Pressing In On Him
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
He begins the search casually, with a measure of optimism, fully expecting it won’t be difficult to find, but with every crossed-out possibility his equanimity lessens, as he goes from pocket to pocket in all his jackets, even jackets that haven’t been worn in years just to be sure, and finally to the pockets of his man-purse–the one she always mocked him for–until he’s all out of pockets, and then it’s to his Range Rover, where he looks methodically from back to front so that he’s really beginning to panic because all he finds are stale fries and dog hair and a few drops of blood, which are all attributable to her and he needs to clean up soon, but there’ll be no point in cleaning if he can’t find it, and now he begins retracing every stop of the last six hours, first to the ATM that is supposed to be his alibi, but there’s nothing in the parking lot, and then to the dumpster in the industrial park that was a really stupid place to put her bag but it’s too late now, and in any case, it isn’t there either and now he’s driving to the waterfront and he’s nervous because it seems like those headlights in the rearview mirror are following him despite his driving so slow and steady because it would be really bad if he gets pulled over when he hasn’t washed the blood and he’s still wearing the same clothes and the car is speeding up and its lights are flashing and oh my God it’s the cops, so he thinks about speeding up too but that never works and he best play it cool and he’s just about to ask what seems to be the problem officer when the cop demands to know why there’s a handgun on the top of his car.
Today’s story is a deviation from the 100 word format. Instead, as you probably already noticed, this is a one sentence story, a concept first introduced to me by Matthew Bennardo. It turns out they are quite addictive, and the thrill comes in trying to make them as long as possible before they collapse in upon themselves, much like a house of cards (I was going to say a game of Jenga, but the analogy doesn’t really work.
Nov
The Morning Edition
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
Morgan Durante always dreaded reading the morning paper. The headlines were of the normally sensationalist variety, with one important caveat: this edition of the news only covered Morgan and his life.
Typical headlines read, “Durante wastes another day of worthless life at meaningless job,” and “Father does awful job parenting his gifted child.” The people quoted were usually his wife or an “Unnamed source with intimate knowledge of the Durante family.”
Morgan would have liked to stop subscribing, but it was written by his ten-year-old daughter and his wife insisted they encourage her talent. Besides, the reporting was always accurate.
Dec
The Great Detective
by thegooddoctor in Uncategorized
It was the case that made him. No motives. No suspects. The victim was by all accounts universally beloved.
When Detective Byrne linked the brand of cigarette ash, the stray button made of gold-lip oyster pearl, and the Stratford Street haberdasher, he was hailed as the living embodiment of Sherlock Holmes.
Within the decade, Byrne was supervising the entire London department. The Haberdasher was eventually executed.
So when the poor widow received an unsigned letter–explaining how her late husband hired an ex-soldier to murder him before Sarcoidosis left him completely debilitated–it was twenty years too late to matter.