Hologram Kebab - June's free comedy story
A few days back I let you all vote on what my next story should be, serious, or silly.
I am very glad you picked silly. Increasingly I realise I am more a comedian writing science fiction, than an author who sometimes does comedy. Even in my serious books, such as The Stephanie Glitch, comedy finds its way in (at one point Stephanie does a whole stand-up style slam of one ancient robot god, but we’ll get to that some other time).
Comedy finds its way in because, to me, that’s realistic. Anyone who knows me in person knows I’m cracking jokes every five seconds. And it’s not artifice, it’s hardware. I see a thing, I make joke about thing. Rinse and repeat.
Anyway.
Hologram Kebab
For this young couple, making up could be a matter of life or death
Anya crawled out of bed in much the same way she had crawled into it the night before. Her hair was still damp from the rain, her phone still sputtering unread alerts. It was still half-charged, the charger snagged and damaged during the aftermath of another forgotten night out. The air was heavy with the stink of cold chips and vodka, and not the good stuff either. You wouldn’t poison someone with this stuff, it would be too cruel.
Anya barely remembered the night before. Her friends’ faces were vague etchings, scratches brought to her mind by paparazzi flashes of memory. They had gone out all dressed up. She knew that at least. For most of the night she must have been out of it, surfing on another plane of existence, a place from which her soul was permitted to take only one memory: The memory of the argument that had convinced her to go out.
Backstory - Keaton had almost always been at least a bit of a dickhead. It was what made him attractive. That, and Anya’s friends’ belligerent disapproval of him.
And his jawline.
And his taste in music.
And the fact he actually read books.
And that those books weren’t recommended to him by the local supermarket or coffee shops, but that he discovered them himself.
And his shoulders.
And his hair. Oh, his hair was the most attractive part of him. In fact, Anya had only realised how much of an all-round, universal, all-purpose, equal opportunities, diversity quota tickbox dickhead Keaton was when the insufferable cretin had lopped all his hair off. Apparently it had contained at least 99.9% of his charm and charisma. His acoustic guitar likely had the rest.
Without the familiar mop, Anya was forced to make eye contact with Keaton a lot more often than usual, and what she found in his eyes didn’t align at all with the jokey, comical dickhead she had made of him. It wasn’t the same dickhead who did funny impressions of anyone new they met, and it wasn’t the same playful dickhead who had built up months and years of in-jokes and references that only Anya would get. No, Keaton was dead behind the eyes most of the time. His eyes only lit up when he was being a dickhead. And he was a real dickhead to everyone, including Anya, and when she finally realised this, it stopped being funny almost as quick as they had both fallen in love, perhaps quicker, if that was possible. Physicists have yet to work that one out.
The argument last night had happened because Keaton had sent at least a dozen pictures of himself and his penis - that was still attached to his body in the photos but that might not be by the end of this story - to one of Anya’s friends, and then several more pictures of the same penis to another friend. Both friends told Anya right away, and without letting him explain (this had happened before, and his excuse was that he was asking the woman for tips on taking good penis selfies before sending them to Anya), Anya left the house and asked her friends on a night out, most of which she didn’t remember.
She looked down at the kitchen counter. The remains of the kebab were smothered in a thick, blood red hot sauce that, coupled with the troughs carved by Anya’s drunken past self, gave the thing the impression of road kill. She leaned in and scooped some up in her bare hands, then, feeding her head and jaw as if it was a separate entity to her arms and body, some mere sense organ designed to experience headaches and sadness and kebab in forever recurring cycles of spice and torment, she began walking to the living room, still nodding to a drumbeat that had yet to fully bleed away from her ringing ears. She collapsed into the oversized sofa and nearly wept from the sheer comfort of it. She told herself she should have just moved in with the sofa instead. It would be a better lover. She was still pissed at Keaton, obviously.
Buzz fucking buzz.
Her phone from the other room. It had either died or Keaton was saying something deliberately unimportant. He would be out on his morning jog, the wanker. Anya only had the buzz on for him or her parents, and they’d never use the mobile, it would always be the house phone. She looked in the direction of her bedroom and the phone across the open plan house and decided that she could not be arsed. No, not even if she had an office chair to roll from living room to kitchen to bedroom (an idea she pitched to the once fun-loving Keaton and which he promptly rejected for no reason at all). Not even if that office chair had mounted to its flanks two fire extinguishers. No, even if the act of getting the phone was made fun, Anya wouldn’t bother.
Buzz fucking buzz.
And again, once more for those in the back. Buzz fucking buzz. That fucking buzzing fucked Anya off to such a degree that she may have got out of her chair, if it wasn’t so unreasonably fucking comfy (and still pissed) and her entire body wasn’t so fucking destroyed from the night before.
“Anya,” the bastard said out loud. Keaton, the dickhead, king of the dickheads, world’s most prolific and idiotic dick-pic sender (seriously, who sends those to their girlfriend’s friends?), was standing in their jointly owned living room, looking sad. Anya nearly passed out again from the sheer force of the disrespect. What the shit did he have to be sad about? Was there no suitable photo filter for his next dick pic? Was he coming to borrow her old polaroid camera?
“Keaton,” she replied.
“Anya, I’m-”
“-Sorry?”
“Yeah.”
“Congratulations. What do you want me to do about it?” Anya said. She was quite proud of herself, but she didn’t let her face show it.
“I want to move on from it.”
“That quickly? You want me to just forget you sent a dick pic to my best friends?”
“Ideally. Yeah. That would be nice.” Keaton seemed embarrassed, as if someone else was listening.
“And why should I do that?” Anya asked.
Keaton stood there ghostlike, his stupid face looking sorrowfully at Anya like an old toy he had broken. She crossed her legs and folded her arms. She was used to being looked at this way. He was used to her noticing, but not in the way Anya thought he was.
“I miss you. I miss us,” Keaton said.
“I’m right here. Both of us are, including your dick.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I felt unappreciated, like there was something wrong with me.”
“Probably because there is,” Anya said. Keaton moved forward a step, but Anya curled herself up tighter and he noticed, stopping himself from coming any closer.
“That’s no excuse. You’re right,” he said.
“I never said that. But you were always so full of jokes and excuses, I’m sure you’ll find one,” Anya said.
“No, you did say it once. That’s my point. I don’t want to have this argument anymore.”
“Because we had it last night?”
“Because we had it today,” Keaton said. He fumbled with the pockets on his jeans and tried to look as useless as possible, which wasn’t much more useless than how he usually looked.
“We haven’t spoken today,” Anya said.
“You’re going to find this hard to believe babe. But we have.”
“Don’t babe me.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean we’ve talked already today. I just got up, unless you’re confusing me with Jenny or Hannah?”
“I’m not. Look it’s all my fault, I didn’t know what I was thinking. I was just so desperately lonely.”
“Lonely?!” Anya yelped. “I barely get a break from your stupid face.”
“Thanks,” Keaton said, “But yes, I was feeling lonely. Isolated. I didn’t think you loved me.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I told you you’d say it,” Keaton interrupted.
“Stop fucking about Keaton. This is end of the line shit you know. I’m tired.”
“I know. I am too. I miss us.”
“We are both here. It’s not me that changed, that stopped being fun, that started faxing nudes to your best friends.”
“That’s fair. I deserved that,” Keaton admitted.
“Yeah you did,” Anya said. She took the last bite out of the bit of kebab in her hands, wishing for another alcoholic drink to wash it down. Finally she said, “And you know what else, I don’t think I can trust you ever again.”
“I know. But that’s why I’m here,” Keaton explained.
“You’re here because you live here, dickhead,” Anya said.
“No. This isn’t here. Look,” Keaton said. He reached up and moved his arm through the acrylic chandelier at the centre of the living room. His hand and wrist fell through it like smoke.
“What the fuck,” Anya said. She felt dizzy, as if the kebab wanted to climb back out of her.
“I told you. I miss us,” Keaton said. Anya screamed. She kept screaming and pushing herself back against the back of the sofa until she almost passed out, then she screamed some more as Keaton stood silently before her, watching as if he was on the other side of some forcefield or barrier, as if she was a caged animal.
“We had an argument. You went out into town. You don’t remember the night out because you didn’t live that long babe. You were hit by a guy driving the wrong way down the road. The police chasing him attended to you seconds later but you didn’t make it.” Keaton’s words were cold and close to indifferent. It was clear to Anya that he had rehearsed this, or relived it several times before. He was never this good at suppressing his emotions.
“The backups,” Anya said, reaching the conclusion before Keaton had the chance.
“Our three year anniversary. I gave you the rights to a backup locket of me,” Keaton added.
“And I did the same,” Anya said, “In case one of us died.”
“So the other wouldn’t be lonely,” Keaton added.
“So we’d never live alone,” Anya finished. She remembered their backup vows and smiled. She relaxed a little, allowing her feet to reach the thick carpet she knew now wasn’t really there. It felt real. She felt around the sofa for some giveaway, some fragment of unreality that would have given it all away had Keaton not appeared. There was nothing. The simulation had every last detail. She wondered how long she would have gone on not noticing, had Keaton not intervened. She wondered if she had been here for months, repeating the same day, forgetting and waking up again.
END (for now)
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Endnotes
Those of you who have been here a while may remember that Hologram Kebab was once the title of an upcoming book, but that I scrapped it when I realised I was in fact writing WBTH2. Perhaps the hologram kebab can still be mentioned in the title.
WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? TWO - HOLOGRAM KEBABS AND TELEPORTING CRABS.
Yeah, that sounds good.
