Why You Read Short Stories
Everywhere I go every-how rushes like spaghetti on a spindle whipping into spools that I assign every-who about this bar. Data streams like the mind plays music. Humming probability spills over like a full glass on an amped box, speaker thumping rhythmic madness unaware of the audience’s ability to keep up with the lyrical hysteria, yet they feel the anxiety and the knowledge seeds itself, unlabeled but felt.
The who on the right should have taken the door on the left. Too late. Every-other-who turns and laughs while every-how surges to life with a new outcome for every-who in every-when in the bar in which I spew facts a fraction less than my general madness.
I speak in the microphone hovering above my chin like the mustache I should have trimmed. “Every now and again while I wander who-knows-where the madness pauses by one how and one why, satiated to compute what every-how does not and what few ‘whos’ try computing. Life.” Silence.
“I live alone but every-when and again I look over every-who, everywhere. I look for the answer to life and then I’m through.” And then I’m booed.
“What sheer madness to overflow for pleasure, escaping life while fully having it while every-who elsewhere does so the same at the extent of the creases in their purse.”
The sticky stage darkens as shattered glass bounces from my forehead, glinting as it flies toward the front row. My knees ache as I fall on them and learn for the first time what it’s like to not feel and think about the every-how's of this room. My eye turns red, as does my vision. A pool fills me from forehead to eye socket.
How relaxing. I thank the man in the tie being dragged on his heels by a brute to the exit. I tell the man he can stay and I buy him a beer. So, this is normal. Then the music plays and my mind is arrows, equations and color coded strands spinning into place.
That was the night I started writing.
Pick your poison. A brick? A glass bottle? A baseball bat? Each one will buy me a minute, sometimes two. That’s why I only write short stories.
Copyright © 2021 by Matt Antis. Originally published in Short Story Society on February 10, 2021, by Ink Jot Kingdom.
