Call me Tombas
Call me Tombas
YeahWrite
Writing challenge 9/27/2020 #494
Soft snores rippled the stillness of the dark air. Tom dozed in his office chair, arms folded across his chest, head nodding slightly forward as his eyes fluttered. It was the same dream he always had, though it seemed to be occurring more often.
In this dream he is a toddler of
three years, he surmises by the white number candle outlined in blue. The faces and the chatter of adults swirl
indistinctly in the background, eclipsed by the sulfur heat of the candle
warming his nostrils and the buttery scent of frosting. This cake sparkles in the candlelight with
columns of white frosting and sugar flowers piped in tropical hues. Surely this is a mirage which will disappear
in his grasp, but he delights when extending his hand his fingers pierce the
frosting and emerge with a spongy sticky sweet handful of cake that he thirstily
brings to his gaping mouth.
Vaguely Tom is aware of another
blonde head and an identical cake nearby.
He notices that the faces and the noise of their voices moves towards
him, and his eyes focus on a young boy with neat blonde curls. His white shirt is fastened shut with a white
bow tie as the boy beams and claps his hands, blowing the candle out in one
raspberry blow. Tom’s eyes flick to his
own candle, the top portion of the number 3 is half-melted as globs of blue and
white wax flow down the side to carve a sunken pool in the rainforest floor of
his cake. Tom has a sinking feeling his
toddler mind cannot place as he wipes his hand in a long rainbow streak across
the chest of his white t-shirt.
Tom leaps into alertness at the
sharp sting behind his left ear, opening his bleary eyes to the computer
screen, he looks over his shoulder to see his supervisor staring down at
him. She pushes her horn-rimmed glasses
up her nose and pulls a stylus from her tight gray bun to furiously tap on her
tablet, As he rubs his neck to relieve
the sting of her slap, she spits dismissively “Mail clerk,” and turns on her
heel.
He sits up, coughs nervously, and
taps the envelope icon on his screen. “You
have 1,684 unread messages,“ coughs a mechanical voice. He smiles wryly at the irony of the quaint
referral to “mail”, as actual paper mail hadn’t existed since 2032. If only this rich bloke weren’t too important
to check his own mail. Though filtering
software became increasingly sophisticated, the spam hackers were always one
step ahead. He’d never met his
client. He’d never met anyone outside
his caste.
Most of the mail was snooze
worthy, hence Tom’s narcoleptic fits. He waded through ads for the latest food
printers and holograms of the latest fashions.
Incessant emotionally charged political videos lit up the screen in
fireworks of red and blue, though everyone knew the purple party pulled the
strings. There were ads for programs that promote you to internet fame, codes
to make you rich, and elimination programs that allow you to disappear from the
framework. Tom always laughed at the
latter, there is nowhere you can hide they won’t find you.
The videos he dreaded. He felt twitching deaf after the sudden
assault of bright 3D images and top volume sound sent tingling blasts from his
toes to his scalp. It caught his breath
to open the evening news, the newscaster’s red lipstick burned red blotches
onto his retina that made it look as if she had blotted her lips on his
sleeve. She was neatly forking petite
bites of a cake into her mouth. The golden brown ridges of the cake dripped with
a white frosty glaze that cascaded down into a gaping cavern in its
center. That cake is me, thought Tom, we
both are missing our core.
The newscaster pursed her lips in
a flirty pout and made eyes at the man with blonde curls standing next to her
in a chef’s coat. “How quaint! A bundt
cake! My great gran described this from
her childhood. Well, there you have it
folks, Chef Tombas has done it again!” The video zoomed to examine the man’s face.
Though Chef Tombas boasted his award-winning dessert, Tom could hear nothing
over the blood rushing in his head.
For while his own face no longer carried
the muscle memory for such cheer, Tom recognized this smiling countenance as
his own.
I liked this somewhat bleak futuristic world, and the disdainful boss. The job of "mail reader" for the rich was a particularly nice touch. I couldn't figure out who the boy was in the dream. At first I thought Tom must have had a twin brother, with the two of them blowing out candles at the same time, but by the end I wondered if that dream was Tom looking back into the past at a younger, happier version of himself.
ReplyDeleteThank you, I had fun with the digital mail clerk! They are twins, but what I was trying to get at is that Tom didn't realize he had a twin.
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