The Obsoletes
The boy is tired. Tired of the arbitrary components that jigsaw up his days. And the jigsaw is still so dull, too. It’s mostly negative space, but not in a purposeful way as to focus your eye on the important, colourful stuff. There was no composition. No clever tricks or colour or stuff. it’s as if so far all the pieces were anticipating the construction of something entirely dull, like say, a grey pavement. The dullest most greyest of pavements. Not even a hint of a ‘pavementy-peak-of-interest’; such as one of those albino style dog poos, all dry and brittle and white and right there in the middle of the pavement, glowing in it’s calcium-rich pride. Not even one of those. No two pieces united to reveal a scrawled obscenity, claiming a newly tarmacked oblong adorned with lime green spray can caps, lazy execution making it all the more offensive. It is….ugh, just grey. Life, he decides is one long slab of aggrieved grey.
The epiphanic episode exhausts him and he encourages a little nap during the office meeting. Under the spell of slumber he rises up at if in levitation, and, being a great rejector of supernatural claims, he peers down in awkward and hovering bewilderment, squinting through altered eyes to attempt some sort of rational explanation. Seeing and feeling a prickly black surface beneath his body, he notices that his hands are clenched tight to clumps of wire, is it wire? Both horrified and electrified by this unexpected tableau, he checks his lucidity, loudly articulating the sentence ‘Okay so now I am riding a giant fly’. And he is, he really is. The fly, as if intrinsically linked to the boy’s new commitment to the dream, (if this is a dream, he thinks he hopes it is one), changes gear. And they are off!. Intense vibrations surge through the boy, ending at his teeth, which he grits until they crumble. He realizes that he isn’t just riding this fly, he is part of it, the whole thing. Like a cheap action figure-the ones that are made in a single mould, once you chip away the paint job, which had created the illusion of ‘man on a horse’, underneath you see in fact it’s ‘man horse’ all one entity, all one lump of plastic. He doesn’t care though.. He isn’t plastic, or a man horse, but he isn’t absolutely sure what he is. I am….well….anatomically more insect he supposes……This is also the most ridiculous fantastic slab of his life pavement so far, and he doesn’t want to pick too hard at the details, because it’s what he tends to do, and it is an effective way to sabotage these fleeting moments of pavement life respite. This fly, ‘this thing’-has infiltrated the grey. He is more happy right now, anchored to this beastly fantasy, than the day in his earlier reality. Happier still than the time when they offered him this position and he thought everything mattered.
Gleefully, he kicks the side of the soaring spectre-subsequently kicking his own side, as you would after having your organic matter fused together with that of a giant fly…….A sort of ‘giddy up’. And the saucer-eyed steed darts forwards with incredible speed……so fast the boy feels sick, they land violently on a pen-chewing work colleague. The work colleague twiddles the pen, agitated. The boy vomits over the nib of the pen. Newly toothless mouth shining with saliva and stomach acid. He watches, impressed with how an appalling act like this exalts him. He is high. Higher than all the other times in the old human attempts. Overcome with purpose, fly boy sets his gaze on an indignant hole punch. Who still uses a hole punch anyway? Everything went paperless a million years ago……he smiles at how silly it all is, remembering that he still has a binder filled with empty slippery fish in the top drawer of his desk. It’s all so depressingly obsolete, I’m obsolete, he thinks. But how lucky I am to have no use for it, not then and not now in this state, now that I am fly boy. And, with less than a micro second’s hesitation, flyboy attacks an unsuspecting stapler. Fly boy was enjoying the absurdity of it all. I mean, from the outside , from the perspective of the pen chewers, he was just this persistent little critter. He was a tiny fly , sorry, fly boy, with a real hatred for office stationery. It was ludicrous when you put it like that. But it was also sort of true, in a ‘I’m not actually a fly boy’ way. That was the awful part that was bugging him………
