As a dandelion, you’re not and we can

(via stuffyoureyes)

Didn’t turn out too poorly for one of the first things I’ve written in two years.

The drone of the microwave saturated the air, making it seem almost alive.

                ‘But not really,’ Thought the man as his pseudo-thought turned into a full-fledged inner monologue, ‘It’s like the thoughts of a creature that belongs to a hive mind, or some sort of zombie.’ He smiled faintly, and then his brow deepened to mock a somber visage as he delivered his line.

                “The air is undead!”

                He managed to hold his thespian gaze for only a moment before his face cracked into a grin and he began to laugh. Abruptly, the humming stopped and transformed into a shrill, piercing scream. Normally, the man would have been waiting in front of his device, ready to pounce when the timer hit zero, but his theatrics had led him to the center of the kitchen. The alarm sounded twice before he managed to open the microwave door, which was quite enough to ruin his good mood.

                “All right, all right,” the man said as he ripped paper towels from their holder to serve as makeshift oven mitts, “You don’t have to get angry; I was just making a joke.” The paper towels were then cupped around the bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese and the whole collaborative noun moved quickly and carefully to the countertop to rest. “I think your voice is quite nice, if you ask me. Hypnotizing, even.”

                The man looked over his shoulder, face flushing slightly, before he remembered that nobody was in the house with him. Crumbs pressed through his socks, harassing the bottom of his feet as he shifted his weight uncomfortably. He stirred his macaroni, ‘Too soupy,’ and put it back in the microwave.

                As he pondered the geometry of his kitchen’s tiled floor, stepping a careful pilgrimage from blue tile to blue tile, the smell of mac and cheese yielded to another. His nose wrinkled, threatening to retreat into the space between his eyes in order to escape the odor which molested his senses. Immediately forsaking preference of tile, the man made a mad dash for the window and, after wrestling it open, jammed his head outside.

                The air was sweet, surprisingly so. It carried on it notes of pine and the clean smell of snow, floating them delicately to his senses. The man sucked in huge breaths, filling his lungs until he felt as though they were going to burst. It wasn’t long before the rancorous stench was availed of him and, he assumed, his home by the light breeze that passed over him, but he didn’t withdraw his head. There was something about the scene outside that he couldn’t quite turn his attention from.

                The ground was covered by a layer of snow that had fallen several days ago, through which he could make out by the light of the full moon the tracks of animals. Small, close tracks of squirrels scampered over the deep hoofprints of deer, weaving a pattern of depressions that invited him to continue tracing into the close comfort of the forest. Pine trees capped with crowns of snow towered high into the night sky, beckoning to him at the expense of showers of scintillating needles which drifted to their bed at the feet of those behemoths. But even their great heights failed to reach the great void against which this entire scene was set. The profound depth of the vaulted sky was barely breached by what few stars broke out from the cover of the moon, promising

                The microwave screamed.

                The man was scalded back to reality, sliding the window down and sprinting (as well as his cramped kitchen would allow) to the microwave. Four cycles this time. God damnit.

                “And of course it’s still fucking soup.” He turned his attention angrily on the microwave. “What the fuck, man?”

                The man slammed the door shut, turned around, and fixated on the television in the living room. “The Price is Right” assailed his eyes with too-bright lights. ‘Who even makes those damn colors?’ He wondered sourly, ‘What godless corner of this universe did they have to wring dry to get colors so obscenely vibrant?’

                A tendril of air, cold enough to numb his nose, crept into his scent from outside. He turned to the window, remembering what lay outside his one bedroom ranch. What had seemed so vast, so expansive these past weeks suddenly seemed suffocatingly close. The man took a step toward the window, then one more. Before he was halfway across the kitchen, however, he was hit again with that eldritch stench.

The tang seemed somehow even more insidious than before, yet this only compelled the man to find its source. Rooting around, he found that it seemed to be emanating from a cabinet beneath his sink. He put his hand on the knob, bracing himself to face whatever horror lay inside.

The microwave rent the air with its disapproval.

He ripped the door open. Inside was the corpse of some poor, long dead field mouse. Lesions crawling with maggots riddled its discolored skin. Tufts of fur were strewn beside it, stripped from its body by time and decay. Milk-white eyes stared out at the man, set in a bed of foul, necrotizing flesh. It had been caught in a trap.

                The man ran for the window, almost tripping on an irregular blue tile, and dove outside as the microwave screeched and the television roared after him with what seemed to be the grinding of some giant, hellish wheel.

“Fuck you Bob Barker.”

ps I fucking love science

(via khea7en)