Once upon a time, there was a man who took a shit down his grandmother’s throat. Because he had earlier gorged himself not only with raisin bran but also cheese, the bowel movement he delivered was both voluminous and solid.
The grandmother was not on board with this. If she had been able, she might have reacted with some mild, grandmotherly admonishment like “Oh for heaven’s sake” or “In my day…” Alas, the girth and gravity of the bowel movement blocking her windpipe rendered her incapable of anything beyond making seal-like noises as she convulsed on the floor. Even the convulsing didn’t do her much good since he was standing on both her forearms while he squatted down over her.
Eventually, she died as elderly women with a trachea full of feces are wont to do. For the grandson, it would have been a perfect crime if he had bothered to close the blinds prior to committing the murder. As a result, everything start to finish was observed by the nextdoor neighbor. After it was all over, this neighbor pulled her hand from her pants, tasted herself, and called the police.
The cops arrived promptly because the people who lived in this neighborhood were not poor. When the two black and whites pulled up out front, the grandson walked out the door to face the music.
Because he was not a person of color, the grandson planned ahead and brought a toy gun to wave in front of the police officers. He had also planned to shout “Allahu akbar!” but that turned out to be unnecessary. The cops unloaded their guns into him and he was dead before he hit ground.
Upon writing this, I turned my attention away from my phone and stared out the bus window at the Peninsula bedroom communities passing me by. Suburbanites are stupid, I told myself. I had neither logic nor data to back up this claim, but I had said it often enough that no further justification was needed.
“Is that it?” said a voice next to me. I could have sworn I was sitting alone this time. When someone does sit next to me, I’m usually disliking their proximity enough for them to never be completely out of my thoughts.
When I turned and looked, it wasn’t a real person at all. It was the grandson from my little story. He was semi-transparent and gave off a bluish glow that made the blood from his bullet wounds appear magenta. I found him even more irritating than someone who was flesh and blood because they at least refrain from talking to me during the ride.
“I thought I killed you,” I said.
“If you bothered to pay attention,” he said. “You’d realize that I actually killed myself. Classic suicide by cop. Now why do you suppose I did that?”
“You tell me.”
“That’s the thing. I can’t. I have no idea why I wanted the cops to shoot me. That goes double for killing my grandmother. I had nothing against her. Then again, I might have, but you never supplied that detail. In fact, you never supplied any details that might some light on my motivation for doing what I did.”
“Not my problem,” I said. “You come here with your low-rent Pirandello shit and expect me to put in the work on rewrites until the piece is polished enough to bring you closure. That isn’t going to happen. You see, this is a blog and as such, it’s ephemeral as fuck. I write something. I post it. I forget about it. It’s what I do.”
“Then why do you even bother?” he said.
Good question, I thought. There were a lot of ideas that existed only existed either as hastily scribbled outlines in notebooks or solely inside my head. These ideas were worth the bother. They deserved better than the slapdash kind of writing that goes into blogging and so they never make any progress toward coming to fruition.
They did serve one purpose though. Just thinking of them managed to distract me from the vile grandson and his existential mewlings. After a few moments had passed, I looked back and he was gone, just a creature of the moment that had faded into the blur of others like him.