A couple friends and I sat down to study and write and decided to get our brains started by writing this. We rotated writing paragraphs:
Roger
wasn’t a fan of Walkie-Talkies.
For reasons that would soon be known (though Roger would not be pleased
to let his little traumatic incident involving Walkie-Talkies and the local
haberdasher known to the public, he’s dead now—Roger, not the haberdasher),
Roger tries to avoid Walkie-Talkies at all costs. But being a prison guard in a
state penitentiary that wasn’t actually in the state of Hawaii, but was on a
small island in the middle of the pacific--well, the Walkie-Talkie was his best
friend. It was his only friend.
It’s little red light stared back at him as he lay on his cot, sweating and
thinking about how his dismal life
had become a little less dismal with the introduction of that Walkie-Talkie.
So
when his son, Roger Junior, asked for the new “Ultra-Long-Distance-Rough-and-Tough-Walkie-Talkie”
set (batteries and the urge to actually go outside for once not included) for
his birthday, Roger said flat out, “no.” For weeks Roger was ostracized within
his own house, his wife and son treated him like kids in the hallway treat a
hall monitor, like he took all the fun out of life with one little word, “no.”
“Roger, he’s a kid. He asked for ONE thing for his birthday.
He needs this!”
“No.”
“I can’t even believe you right now. You’re acting like…
like a dictator.”
A warden. He was acting like a warden of a penitentiary, or
at least that was how she was making him feel. He thought about this for a
second. The warden, the Walkie-Talkie, it was all the same, and yet different.
Now he was the Warden, his wife was the guard, and his son… the haberdasher
himself: A wolf in sheep’s clothing (very well-made sheep’s clothing).
With a sigh
Roger said aloud “Enough of that kind of thinking, for now.” Roger frequently spoke audibly to
himself when no one was around, a product of his lonely, wardenly existence.
This unfortunate habit was the root of the entire confounded haberdasher
debacle. That and his inability to ever turn the Walkie-Talkie off (“Too many
infernal buttons”) Roger leaned deeply
into his pillow and decided to contemplate the next day which would hopefully
include chocolate cake.
The problem with thinking was that once you start doing it,
it just isn’t going to stop doing it.
The human mind is one of those wonderful things; it will do whatever it
wants to do, even when the person who happens to possess the mind has told it
to stop. This was happening to Roger as he tried to not think about things. His
mind told him to shut up and pay attention: Roger fell into the darkness of his
mind, spiraling and coiling into the oblivion that is the human memory—where
memories not only were stored, but fabricated. Roger landed with a thud onto a
giant chocolate cake.
“Cake? We’re having… cake?”
“Yes Roger! We’re celebrating!”
Celebrating, Roger thought. Since when does the Warden celebrate
anything? Since when has there been
anything to celebrate in a prison?
“I’m sorry sir, but what exactly are we celebrating?”
“Life, of course. I figured since we can’t have a birthday
party for every prisoner on their birthdays we might as well just have one big
birthday celebration a year for everyone!”
“Chocolate cake. Is that chocolate mousse frosting? With
almonds on the trim?”
The Warden just laughed and turned back to talk to some of
the prisoners.
Roger still couldn’t wrap his mind around what was going on.
He scanned the room. All of the prisoners were laughing, smiling, enjoying
their cake. No one seemed suspicious of the situation. Finally he spotted the
haberdasher sitting in the corner at one of the tables, alone. He walked over
to sit with him, both of them cake-less and word-less, until Roger noticed that
the haberdasher had a black eye and he felt obligated to say, or at least
think, something.
“I’m
sorry I blackened you eye, good sir…You understand how it couldn’t be helped
after the, you know, thing.” The haberdasher did not raise his head or
acknowledge Roger in the slightest. “Now, don’t hold a grudge, Haberdasher. You
know I had to do it. I just had to…” He trailed off. The Haberdasher still did
not alter his continuous gaze at the dark green table-top. Roger’s irritation
swelled inside him like rising bread, “I’m just trying to help after all” he
sort of yelled accidentally. The
haberdasher raised his grizzled head, staring directly into Roger’s face with
his ghostly eyes and whispered “I’m not alive and neither are you. You know
that, don’t you?”
Dead people were all the same. They
were dead. Most people who die have the chance to come to terms with death
before the scythe nips off their heads, but some, such as Roger his Walkie-Talkie,
just couldn’t put up with the whole idea of it.
“Dead?”
he asked, his eyes were open wide, trying to absorb the information, but all
they could do was wander off to a very slim piece of cake, which had just been
set in front of him. He took up the cake and fork and was going to eat it when—
“Don’t!”
the haberdasher said.
“Well,
why not? It’s a perfectly good piece of cake.”
But
when Roger looked back down at his “perfectly good piece of cake” it had turned
into a small man holding an umbrella. The man was in a very sporty suit. He
smiled up from the plate, but when he spotted the fork that nearly maimed him,
his expression became very serious.
“Hey
dad,” said the man in the suit. “Do you have my Walkie-Talkie?”
Roger woke with a start. It took him a second to focus enough to realize where he
was. His son was standing over him; he must have fallen asleep on the couch.
“Roger that.”
