Their Days Are Numbered is a new year-long project authored by the collective Entropy community. It is a collaborative online novel written by the Entropy community on a weekly basis. A different author will write the next “chapter” each week, to be posted every Tuesday, following the previous post from the previous week, and following a very limited set of guidelines (that each author has one week to write the next piece after the previous week’s installment goes up, that installments should range between 150-1500 words, and that pieces should somehow incorporate a real-life occurrence, current event, news item, or other happening from that week).
Follow the entire “novel” here: Their Days Are Numbered.
The tenth installment is presented this week by Christopher Higgs.
X.
Wait.
A terrible mistake. An incoherent city, littered with dust fields and barren lots? Even the herons
don’t want the rocket to launch? The trees were audible, but only to some?
Wait.
A woman in a bathtub?
Wait.
The source code cannot attain corroboration. Failure to integrate. Story reboot.
Wait.
Elsewhere. Meanwhile. Earlier.
I speak. I maintain the humidifier. I am an irreproachably essential task. Without my hand to
water the base, to fill the base with water, without me the land you have imaged cannot exist, the
rocket you invented could never exist, the woman in the bathtub would cease to exist. I am the
single most important entity in this entire narrative; but I am not an entity.
Wait.
How difficult the act of speaking. I want to say, but cannot. Who disallows me? For whom do I
speak? Myself, naturally. Naturally? Is naturally even an option? Are we not all doing drag?
We drag. He drags. She drags.
Wait.
A performance represents the limit of our experiences. Your performance, my performance, her
performance, his performance, their performance.
Wait.
I drag the straight white middle class male alone in his room awaiting a phone call from the
doctor detailing the terms of an unspeakable condition or else maybe I am attempting to pull
heartstrings, using pathos, but what pathos have I earned in such a short amount of time?
Heterosexual heartstrings, no doubt.
Absolutely.
Never mind.
The toilet lid slams shut, I can hear it. Can you hear it? Where are you? Can you see the smoke?
Wait.
A spell inside the mirror of her face. A blinding scowl. Fragrant isosceles triangles radiate from
the curb appeal of her father’s abandoned heart. Make sense of the fugitive questions and
stammer out some type of provisions, we’re going inside the cave.
Inside the cave we see drawings we draw on the walls we separate the past from the future and
now we are seeing the drawings we drew more than three hundred thousand years ago.
Wait.
Absolutely no one can know the truth. Please. Hide it. Please. Whatever you do, hide the truth.
Wait.
Hands up.
Wait.
