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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The Will of Wonderful

Category: Issue 6, Short Story Winners

Will inherited a bomb.
He didn’t know what to do with it, so he set it on his dresser. It sat there tick-ticking-ticking, but it wasn’t a clock, so he stuffed it in a drawer with his mismatched socks and ran from the room.
He ran out onto the street and to the subway nearest his home as commuters emerged from the platform below.
“Excuse me, excuse me, sir-“ 
A suited man walked past him.
“Excuse me, please, madam–“ 
The young woman brushed by to hail her cab.
“Please, sir, a moment of your time, please!”
The young man drew his girlfriend closer to him, both breaking neither stride nor stare ahead.
Will sighed, growing dizzy by these men and women crisscrossing in every direction and on all sides of him. “Oh, this is more trouble than I suspected,” he thought. “Let me show them my dilemma, and they’ll understand.”
He returned to his apartment in great haste. He grabbed the bomb from his drawer along with several belts. He strapped the bomb to his chest so he couldn’t drop it. He ran back into the street, with its tick-tick-ticking against his breast. He ran back to the subway as more commuters emerged from the platform below, and he ran up to the first man to catch his eye, but before Will could speak, he exploded.
The wispy tales of drifting smoke carried away the last souls and left their shells of carnage. Debris and grit settled with the smells of burnt blood and residues. The men and women drawn together in this fusion of noise and flame were spread as a single body of many, many, parts and limbs set across the street and along the sidewalk of the subway’s immediate entrance.
Paul, on his way to class at the university, stood among those who had just stepped beyond death’s nimbus.
He snatched at his earpiece and snapped shut his cell phone in disgust. “What the hell! You mean someone can just walk up to me and blow up?”



*Utrum conjungimus necne vita conjungimus morte.
    Whether we are joined by life, we are joined by death.