Short Story / Broken Glass
Sunlight never bothered me. When I open my eyes to see my room bathed in light, I stir into motion and begin to go about my day. I never have to squint against the light. It was always the same routine; unchanging, static, forever. Clean the windows, dust the knick-knacks, vacuum the carpet; clean the bathroom, mop the tiles, scour the grout. Wash the dishes, use that nifty little spray that Tommy picked up at the store that makes things smell decent, and then make breakfast.
It was always that last part that gave him trouble, not because making breakfast exceeded his own ability, but because Tommy always got angry. And he always got angry in the exact same way.
“W-…what are you doing?” Tommy’s voice got on my nerves. He asked the most obvious questions just to try to make you feel stupid or something. It got on my nerves because I knew what he was doing and I didn’t want to get angry, I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.
“I’m making breakfast?” The only thing that annoyed me more than Tommy’s bully-tactics was how weak my voice always sounded in turn. Like a mouse trying to whisper, or the flutter of butterfly wings; some little fragile thing, a pane of glass, threatening to break if you shook it too hard. But it got the message across, because Tommy looked absolutely livid.
“Who the fuck are you cooking breakfast FOR?!”
Tommy got angry, he always got angry. He always got angry in the exact same way. He turned to the table, pounced on it like a lion, and flipped the poor thing onto its back. The plates and utensils went flying all over the place, the paper-white china plates were turned into something else, something chaotic, and they made music as their pieces shattered against the wall and dropped to the floor. They sounded like wind-chimes.
“There’s no one here Eric, there’s no one here and there’s no one anywhere else and they’re never coming back! We don’t need to serve them anymore, have some fucking self-respect!”
Tommy’s words were artificially incisive. I knew that they should hurt, I knew from the forceful way that the words shot from his lips, and the derisive tone of voice he had bought for an occasion like this. I knew it should have hurt, I knew it absolutely, and that was the only reason it hurt at all. It only hurt because I knew it should hurt and it didn’t. Didn’t hurt at all, not one bit.
“You don’t know that.” Again, my voice was no more than a faint rustle, the susurration of leaves and branches, or the voiceless sound of a cloud drifting in the sky. But then something began to …bubble. Yes, that’s it, bubble inside of me. Inconsequential at first, as all things must begin, but it grew and grew and grew. Grew until there was a pressure inside of me so surreal that I began to doubt its authenticity. That was, until I heard myself speak.
“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!” Now it was my turn to roar. I sounded kind of like a lion myself, touched by a bit of thunderclap. I was powerful, but my voice had direction; years of seething anger vented through a single pipe and shot out at Tommy full force. I kicked the table and sent it flying at Tommy, just because I knew it wouldn’t hurt him, and I could properly exercise my anger. As I expected, the wooden table shuddered when it hit his torso and then fell to the ground, lifeless.
Damage. I didn’t want to hurt him. Damage didn’t mean anything; it was the act itself that carried the weight of what I wanted to say.
“You’ve seen what they’ve done, what they’re CAPABLE OF! You don’t know that! You don’t know if they’ll come back or not!”
I was breathing hard by then. Like Tommy, breathing was unnecessary, it was just for show. Most of the time, we didn’t breath, but now it meant something. It meant exasperation at this whole useless pile of nothingness. It felt natural, somehow, if the world ‘natural’ could even be applied.
“They’ve built so many things Tommy. Pyramids and towers and domes and entire cities, just with their hands Tommy. They’ve made weapons too Tommy, and they built the very ship that took them all off of here. And they built life Tommy, they built US! Don’t you understand?!”
For some reason I couldn’t explain, I was furious. I had the distinct notion in the back of my head that something was off, poles crossed or the circuits shorted or something. But whatever it was, it was somehow liberating. In the few seconds that then passed, where I could actually feel my voice in my throat, I had never felt so free. Think of living every day of your life with a weight on your back. You come to think of that as a standard; this weight has always been there, thus it’s meant to be there, thus you pay it no mind.
Then one day, for whatever reason, the weight falls away. You’ve never felt so light before.
“I’m tired of it Tommy.” Now the anger was replaced by something else. It was something just as strong, just as deep, but not nearly as explosive. The fire turned into a focused thing, a guided missile, a steel blade. “I’m tired of it all. The upgrades, especially. You notice how we feel a little less every day? It’s always something small or broad. I can’t feel extreme cold or heat, but I can feel warmth, so it’s ok. I can’t feel pain, but I can still feel SOMETHING, so it’s ok. Then it gets specific. I can’t feel metal or glass or carpet or wood. Or lips. Or hair. Or warmth. No more warmth.”
I felt inspired to move. So I did. I moved around the kitchen and let my numb fingertips graze across everything within reach. I touched the tips of the table legs, protruding from the upturned table, bent down and ran my fingers along the edges of the plate shards and the fork shafts. Naturally I couldn’t feel them, no more than the sensation of pressure necessary to tell that something was indeed there, but I couldn’t feel them. Not the cold or the smooth or the jagged. But sometimes all we really need is to know that something is there, in our grasp. We don’t really need to feel it, we just need to know it’s there. Sometimes. Not right now. I wanted to feel those things right now.
“What are we doing here, Tommy? You only get angry when I set the table, but what about everything else? What about cleaning the bathroom and dusting the counters. What about when you do the dishes or spray that aerosol? We don’t eat Tommy, so we don’t use the bathroom. Dust is composed primarily of skin cells and hairs; we don’t have either, so why do we dust? We don’t smell, why the aerosol? Why so many things?”
---tense shift.
Tommy, who had been frozen with uncertainty up to this point, decided it was safe to move. Eric’s outburst was random and, therefore, unpredictable; Eric himself was therefore unpredictable. The proper counter-measure was clear. He was to go to Eric and knock his head from his shoulders, effectively negating his mobility, and thus allowing for quarantine. But something about Eric was devoutly…off-putting. The uncertainty that had kept him in place this entire time, though lessened in intensity, was still heavy enough to make him slow. Felt like his arms and legs were made of lead.
He managed to move however. It was awkward and feeble, like a fawn learning just now to walk, but he managed to do it. He stumbled forward and then pressed his body against the wall. After a few deep and useless breaths, preparing himself for the plunge, Tommy slid to the ground alongside Eric and kept his eyes forward. The silence that followed was deep and infinite, almost suffocating to an extent, but Tommy didn’t need to breathe so it hardly weighed on him at all.
“Eric, we dust because…well… because...” His mind was reeling, whirring through millions of words, trying to find the right ones and put them in the right order. He’d never had this much trouble before. “Because…well because that’s what we were built to do. Because…well…I mean… It’s because. We dust because…We. Dust. Because.”
Tommy’s voice was becoming increasingly frantic. The rhythm to his words was picking up, and the words themselves were said a bit sharper than was necessary, his tongue flicking against the roof of his mouth firmly to make sure that the words left his mouth and didn’t get stuck in his throat. He hadn’t been faced with a question that he didn’t know the answer to.
No, correction, he had never faced a question that he couldn’t find the answer to. There were a lot of things that he did not know, but when faced with the questions, they did not remain unknown for long. Eric’s question, on the other hand, was utterly baffling. Tommy didn’t even know where to begin, didn’t even know how to go forward with this quandary. Was there even a solution?
Why? What did he mean why? What kind of question was that? Why? Yes why. But why why?
“Eric…they didn’t just make things, you know. You’re idealizing them. They made glorious things, I can’t deny that no matter how hard I try, but has our world known any greater destroyer? They raped the earth Eric. The earth did nothing but provide. Food and shelter, wood and sand and metal, water and sky and ground. And they raped it. They took everything the earth could offer and more, until all that was left was a wasteland; a squalid reflection of the horrible things they are inside.”
The words left him without his control. Tommy had no idea what he was saying or why. He had no idea where he began or where he was going. He had no idea where the words were coming from, what inside of him was creating them, but they kept coming, and he didn’t have the willpower to stop them. It was nearing the end of his sentence that he suddenly understood. That the answer suddenly became clear to him.
“I know why we dust. Why we still dust. And cook and clean, and make. But don’t destroy.”
Eric was a mess, there against the wall, his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his shins. Tommy though, Tommy had it together, because Tommy had it all figured out. He stood up and walked over to the table, placing his hands against the smooth edge and flipping it back to its proper stance.
“I know why we don’t feel anymore, it’s so we don’t become like them. We’re efficient, Eric. We take only what is absolutely necessary and we use that to the utmost extent. We build with the least amount of materials available and the least amount of work possible for the least amount of units. We do not eat or drink, and have no need for warmth. That means we do not take life and we do not plunder the oceans; that means we do not uproot trees or tear up the earth with gas pipes for our personal comfort.”
Tommy walked over to a closet and picked up a broom and dustpan, meticulously cleaning up the mess that he had made.
“We do not bleed, so murder and violence has become obsolete. We do not kill. We have no sexual organs, so adultery is not an option. Eric, we do not sin. We do all of the things that we do because those were the things that they would not do. We don’t do all of the things they used to do. We do all of the things they stopped doing, the things that they built us for, so we can be more and more like us and less and less like them.”
Eric's body was heaving; crying without sound and without tears. Was this all there was to life? To stare at the broken glass of one's future with the inability to do nothing more than sweep it into a dust pan and live in resignation? But the scraping of the glass against the tile, though dissonant, was somehow calming. That was when Eric finally understood what Tommy did, and he managed to calm. These shards weren’t the broken future, they were the remnants of broken past. A past that could never be fixed, but one that was not theirs to fix in the first place.
“They even began to emulate us. First with their suits of armor, then with their enhancements, then with their conscious transfers. Even they didn’t want to be themselves; they wanted to be like us. No one wants to be human.”
Copyright 2008
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It was a good story,a bit confusing. What exactly were they? What were they talking about? There were a few missplaced word and what not, but overall I thought it was a good writing.
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I am confused by this story. These two characters are not human, yet they act human? Eric says that he feels less and less, yet he contradicts himself by his own emotional outbursts (and especially Tommy). Eric says they do not sin, they are not prone to violence, yet they throw things at each other? I am assuming that is the point? So no one wants to be human, even the robots? I pick up conflicting messages throughout, so at the end, I am left feeling like the theme of this piece is cloudy.
The dialoue and personality of these two characters are inherently different. Your vocabulary is interesting and varied. Your imagery is good, but may be stretched by wordiness. You could simplify some of your sentences- example: “It was always the same routine; unchanging, static, forever.” “Tommy’s words were artificially incisive. I knew that they should hurt, I knew from the forceful way that the words shot from his lips, and the derisive tone of voice he had bought for an occasion like this. I knew it should have hurt, I knew it absolutely, and that was the only reason it hurt at all.”- so much of this says the same thing that the orginal meaning loses it’s punch. I would go through and try to tighten up your sentences.
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