Roger That

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.”