• Home

Warped Fairytale

Posted on July 22, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He was tired. He had been sitting at the computer terminal for close to thirteen hours and his shoulders had become so stiff that he felt like his head was being propped up on rocks. The muscles in his neck felt like they had gone into arrest, he expected to become a twitching wreck that fell to the floor every two hours and suffered periodic spasms. He knew that this lifestyle was going to kill him before it made him rich and if it weren’t for the sheer satisfaction of seeing his ideas come to life in 1024 by 768 resolution, he would have wasted all his life wondering why he did it.

He sighed and lit another smoke.

He didn’t consider himself a smoker and most of his friends agreed. It was almost as if he used the smoldering tobacco cylinder to warm his fingers. He was often seen with a cigarette between his long, knuckle-cracking-thickened fingers and a thin stream of smoke often curled up from his lap as his limp wrists entrusted the task of supporting his hands to his upper thighs. He would often sit in a chair, didn’t matter if it was straight-backed or swivel, and allow his eyes to glaze over while another cigarette burned itself out, ever closer to the biting-roughened sides of his fingertips.

He was waiting for someone so he whiled away the minutes by playing games. The irony of his having chosen to bind himself to the machine he also used for work was not lost on him. The ever-present cigarette was burning, in an ashtray this time, because he needed both hands to manipulate the polygon-mesh realisations of famous soccer players. The bunching in his shoulders was getting ever more intense and he was beginning to feel a muscle in his left forearm was close to spasm but none of that mattered as long as one his players was running with the ball. He almost didn’t register the doorbell the first time it rang and it took three ALT+Tabs and two Escs before the game was off the screen and he was able to open the door.

She rushed past him and said, “Bathroom?”

“The door on your left past that door.”

“Thank you.”

She disappeared into the bedroom and he heard the bathroom door shut. He was surprised to note that she was early. He’d expected that 9 p.m. would arrive and he’d have to make small talk with frustrated cyber fans while they all waited for the star of that evening’s chat to arrive. The other thing that surprised him was that she came alone, no hangers-on, no best friend wanting to see how these things were done and no family entourage.

He heard the latch slide back and realised that he hadn’t stepped away from the front door since she disappeared into the bathroom. She smiled as she took in what served as his bedroom and workspace and sat on the bed.

They were the perks of being good enough at his job that the portal he worked for allowed him to work from home. He wasn’t sure he came out ahead in the trade-off. He didn’t have to commute but he was also never really off the clock.

He was unsure of how he was supposed to pass the minutes until chat time. He had already checked the connections thrice so he couldn’t even busy himself in a pretend technical check. She looked around with a smile, “So where do I sit?”

He scratched his head and flailed his arm in the general direction of the computer, “You can sit near the monitor or you can sit right there, I’ll call out the questions to you and you answer…”

“Can I type?”

“Hunh? Oh sure. If you want to…but it’s no problem, I can do it, you just need to sit there…and answer…”

“No I want to type.”

“Okay…you can do that too. Lemme show you how it works.”

She sat in his chair while he touched various sections of the screen, showed her where she would type stuff in and where it would appear. She almost immediately had a question, “Can I change the words if I make a spelling mistake?”

“Yes.”

“But it will slow me down right?”

“I guess…a little.”

“So I should try and not make mistakes?”

He shrugged. She looked around the crowded table and her eyes fell on his wallet that sat like a paperweight atop a few sheets of computer printouts, a couple of faxes and a coaster. She looked up at him, then at the wallet, then back at him and smiled. He looked at the wallet and made a wry face, “It feels like I’m on a rock when I sit…”

“So did you think you would be able to use it?”

“Hunh?”

She smiled in the direction of the wallet again and for the fist time he noticed the condom wrapper that was peeking past the edge of the wallet’s fold. He scooped it up and made it disappear into a jeans’ pocket even as a look of acute embarrassment turned his features as red as his dark skin would allow. She looked more amused than angry, “You mean that wasn’t an indelicate way of saying all actresses are sluts?”

He didn’t trust himself to form the words so he just shook his head in the negative. She looked at her wrist and smiled up at him, “What the hell, we do have six minutes…I might be able to do better if I’m relaxed”

“Hunh… what?”

She stood up and untucked her T-shirt from the waistband of her jeans, pulled it over her head and looked at him, her arms still inside the sleeves of the shirt, “You’re not going to go all coy on me now, are you?”

He went to confirm that the door was locked and then they tumbled onto his slightly dusty bed. She did something as they were falling that somehow put her on top when they landed.

Six minutes and fifteen seconds later, she was answering the first question on chat –

what kind of guys do you like?

you mean before I got married? I liked the shy but impulsive ones.

He stared at her with complete incredulity as he struggled to get his breath back. The fact that the very married actress was chatting in the nude or that there was a used condom in his hand didn’t make it any easier for him to believe.

He also didn’t know it at the time but her husband and she were trying to get pregnant.

The newspapers made a big deal about it all.

How she was going to be a great mother and how her husband couldn’t be prouder if he tried. One of the many articles he read on the subject also hinted that the news would finally put an end to rumours that her husband was impotent.

In the run up to her stay in the hospital she was quoted as saying that she didn’t want to be the type of mother who handed off the raising of her children to hired help.

He never found out that the actress was extremely relieved to see that her son bore a stronger resemblance to her husband’s and her fair skin than he did to the melanin-rich tone of his birth father.

He just filed away his memory of those magical six minutes into a space between dream-come-true and fantasy and in the years to follow he would be hard-pressed to believe that it had actually ever happened.

Comments