As It Happens by Nicholas Gitomer

As It Happens

What we want in private is a secret unknown to public wishes. Our public desideratum may be clear to us; but inside we are never sure, never knowing. Wants are secreted away, hiding – closeted from ourselves.

Ceremoniously coming down the stairs after an hour or so of wafting in the breeze and floating through a window, the leaf thought it clear that the timing was not right for awesome things to happen that day, even if it was brighter than the day before. The leader of the free world crunched the leaf beneath his steel-toed boot on the way into the room where he made most of his decisions, the foyer of the dining hall.

Sharon had pressed the button—he had initiated total planetary destruction. All because of a mere slip of his curled fingers unfurling spontaneously. Luckily there was a CAPTCHA, so he was unable to go through with his unintended attempt. Lazily, he had no desire to decipher the strange letters blurred across the screen. It seemed strange that he was not the first leader to have the button for global annihilation listed next to the food specials on his vid-menu, but he rolled with it. Three terms earlier, he knew, other leaders had to face these same decisions and ultimately decided on dinner not doom.

Complete planetary destruction was not what anyone wanted publicly, because if they wanted that, well, they would have become a pariah to everyone. No one wanted to be hated, so the citizens and their leaders in the different countries practiced mutually assured assuagement. Nuclear danger loomed at all corners of the world, but they knew that if they just kept telling themselves that it was not much to worry about, well then it would not be that big of a deal.  After all, such global decisions were tied to the global historical narrative and not the faithless whims of the populace.

That planetary doom could be much closer than anyone imagined did not phase Absalom as he walked down the sidewalk to his local fruit market. Persimmons, quinces, pomegranates, and pears all vied for his fickle affection, and ultimately he went with the strain of fruit least resistant to his present desire: strawberries, so sweet and tart and delicious. He knew that though it may have taken a month for the fruit to be driven here, and although he knew that they probably didn’t taste anything like the strawberries of even fifteen years earlier, when agriculture was fifteen years less advanced than it was today, he knew they still tasted delicious, to him, and that was all that mattered.

Overhead, gulls tasted the air with a passing “caw-caw” that even a less discerning listener could tell did not lack a certain amount of stress. The stomachs of these simple birds stretched suddenly as they tasted the alka-seltzer bubbling in their stomachs.

Absalom looked overhead and winced as he saw one of the gulls burst into a white, watery mess mid-air. Kids sure do play rough sometimes, he thought as he watched the resulting red-white goo land in front of him.

The children no longer had “Duck Hunt” to shoot at. So the children shot at real birds with their bee-bee guns. It was fun for a while. Then it got strangely gruesome as the sidewalks of the city became littered with dead birds, and other birds that were not quite dead because bee-bee guns sometimes were not fully capable of murder. Bee-bee guns were outlawed amongst the city’s youth. The youth started messing with alka-seltzer tablets, taking after their older cousins of the twentieth-century.

Absalom wondered, how did the desire arise in the youth to destroy birds, the birds that were an unimpeachably normal part of city life for so long? He never wanted to kill birds, so the desire seemed foreign. Many people foreground the need to kill, he thought. Some people kill large things: buffalo, whales. For the most part people can only muster the courage to kill small things like birds, Absalom thought to himself.

Instead of taking pleasure in the pain of another species, falling asleep in a microwave was Absalom’s idea of an enjoyable activity for a Saturday afternoon. Disengaged from the hustle and bustle of shopping and killing and shopping that represented the Saturdays of many urbanites, he crawled into the local tanning salon each Saturday afternoon, to get his skin baked to a beautiful golden glow that made him look like some sort of Greek idol.

Absalom walked into his usual tanning salon. His favorite technician was off today, so he decided to have his skin bronzed by a stranger. He undressed and lay in the booth, which seemed slightly larger than the booth he usually lay in. When he asked why this was, the technician reacted as though Absalom were making some kind of affront, and said that the older tanning booths were still there, gesturing to the cobwebbed corner where his usual booth now resided. The technician said they were in the process of moving the new booths in and the old ones out.

This sounded reasonable, so against his better judgement Absalom crawled into the larger booth, wrapped the eye-shade over his eyes and as usual and the warm light of the booth initiated along with the typical whirring machine hum. All of a sudden there was a flicker of colors in his mind’s eye—bright pastel greens and blues, flashes of red. Untypical, yet strangely calming, he thought. Absalom fell asleep comfortably for the first time in ages. It was nice for him.

-

Sharon got out of the foyer where he had almost destroyed the world with the push of a button. Can’t go in there again, he thought, might cause a big boom boom. He didn’t want the boom boom. He walked out into the main dining room and cried out, “Your leader is prepared to eat!” to no one in particular. His servant and assistant were the only other people in the room.

Loosening his belt, he sat down on his favorite chair. He looked around, theatrically turning his head left and right. The time was right for dinner.

The radiator started leaking noxious black, the chair spun around as if of its own accord as the leader’s feet spooled it ever faster. Dogs barked outside, a light turned on only to shine brightly up and down the room, spotlight landing on the leader’s head. A spotlight, a chair, a moment too soon. His meal was served forthright upon the table. He dug in, letting the cream and gristle coat his throat. Deliciousness! He let the flesh coat his esophagus, fall down through him into the soul of his belly. It was beautiful. For the first time that day he felt full, bloated even. He liked it. It was how he wanted things to be. So tasty.

“What soul sacrificed itself to the grace of your leader today?” he asked. His assistant pulled the printout of his meal’s source from a manila file folder. It had been a young man named Absalom who was disintegrated in the tanning booth in Glendale two days earlier, slow-baked for a day, and then devoured in around ten minutes by the leader, at this very moment.