William Hammett's Fiction Blog

Friday, August 12, 2022

Einstein's Merry-Go-Round (science fiction--flash fiction)

Originally Published in Threepenny and Sixpence
Copyright William Hammett 2015, 2018, 2022
All Rights Reserved

Sam Palmer was seventy-six and lived on a fixed income. He worked the merry-go-round at the local amusement park in the suburbs of Kansas City to bring in a little extra income. He was a pleasant fellow despite having a few melancholy days on occasion. Life had passed by so quickly. His wife had died ten years earlier, and his two children had moved away decades ago. In the time it took to blink, his entire life had whizzed by in a blur like the carousel he spun five days a week.

Sam liked to read books, from detective stories to weighty tomes on quantum physics. It helped pass the time and kept his mind sharp. He was sitting in his straight-back wooden chair one Saturday morning, having pulled the large wooden lever to set the merry-go-round in motion yet again, when he recalled Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Einstein's famous treatise stated that people theoretically aged more slowly as they approached the speed of light. The faster one went, the slower one aged. In the early days of the space race, astronauts returned to earth a few seconds younger than they normally would have been if they'd stayed on terra firma.

Sam smiled and let the carousel whirl a few extra times before he slowed the great machine by easing back on the wooden handle. By God, he still had a mission in life. The carousel didn't move as fast as rocket ships, but move they did. A child seated on a painted horse was going faster than he would go if just walking or running. Unknowingly, Sam had been helping his young patrons slow the aging process if only by a nanosecond or two. Maybe that's all they'd need to get a leg-up in life. Every moment, or fraction thereof, was precious.

Sam began giving out free rides when his boss wasn't looking. And he continued to allow the carousel a few extra spins each time he set the colorful machine in motion. Decades after he was buried, the children wouldn't look back and think that life had passed them by. Sam would have given them a few extra blinks of the eye.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, August 11, 2022

A Prescription from the Heavens (literary--flash fiction)

Originally Published in Short Short: The Journal of Micro-Fiction
Copyright William Hammett 2012, 2015, 2022

Norma Whitehead of Surrey, England was obsessive-compulsive. She was compelled to touch every doorknob she passed. She was equally compelled to wash her hands after touching each of the knobs. She daily checked every picture in her home to make sure it was straight since passing trucks on the street had a tendency to shake the house a bit. She couldn't pass a table without swiping her index finger along its edge to make sure that it was free of dust. For Norma, life was comprised of an endless series of chores consisting of maintaining order, balance, and equilibrium in her universe. Her husband Henry suggested that she take Prozac, but Norma didn't want chemicals sluicing through her veins. Besides, she didn't mind the disorder. She felt that more people needed to pay attention to the smaller things in life.

Norma and Henry were sitting and watching television on a Tuesday evening when her life changed forever. The couple sat on their living room couch, which was exactly ten-feet-five-inches away from the TV screen since she'd read an article in the Guardian that claimed this was the perfect distance to avoid harmful radiation from the TV's cathode ray tube. It was also the perfect distance to maintain proper eye health. Sitting too close to the screen exposed the eye to far too much brightness. Sitting too far away caused eye strain.

The event sounded like a small explosion. There was smoke and debris, and Norma and Henry climbed from the floor to see a gaping hole above them. A small meteorite had slammed through the roof and ceiling and knocked Norma unconscious for a full minute. She seemed perfectly fine, however, when the neighbors showed up at the front door to see what all the fuss was about.

"It's nothing," Norma explained as she picked up broken objects from the living room floor. "Just a meteorite."

Henry was perplexed. Norma was handling the debris--there was a lot of powder and dirt on the floor--without worrying about getting her hands dirty. From that night on, she lived a life free of OCD. A doctor subsequently told her that the knock on her noggin had changed the electrical currents in her brain, which had, for all intents and purposes, been cosmically rewired. The meteorite had been a prescription from heaven.

Norma also had a changed mindset. If one couldn't guard against something as dramatic as being hit by a meteorite--what were the odds?--there wasn't much reason to worry about things a lot less important, like whether pictures are plumb or tables are free of dust. "Life just has to happen," Norma told a local reporter. "You've got to go with the flow. As Hamlet said, there's providence in the fall of a sparrow. Or a meteorite."

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, August 10, 2022

The Yellow Number Two Computer (literary--flash fiction)

Wally was thrown out of his suburban home by his wife, who thought he was too opinionated. In Wally's defense, it should be noted that she was addicted to amphetamines and was usually on edge. He'd also lost his job as a developer of food additives, a job that had been outsourced to China.

Wally retreated to the woods and decided to write his memoir. He lived in a shed and ate wild onions, berries, and dandelion greens. He felt great. He wrote most of the day and used a number two yellow pencil. His life was therefore rendered in graphite on a yellow legal pad.

At peace with his humble surroundings and duties, he realized that he had the best computer in the world: his pencil. It didn't need updates and was immune to viruses and hackers. Mistakes were corrected with an eraser at the end of the pencil. And it required no maintenance other than an occasional sharpening. Best of all, it was compact and cheap. He was able to buy a new one whenever one of his yellow number twos got too short.

That's when Wally had a brainstorm. He sold his yellow pencils on a TV shopping channel, advertising them as the most efficient computers in the world. He made twenty million dollars in six months. It was more than a novelty item. It worked.

Wally is now working on his next big product rollout, which is the finest toy ever made: a cardboard box. Not a kid in the world can resist crawling into a large cardboard box and claiming himself, like Hamlet, to be king of infinite space. The boxes are safe, inexpensive, and foster the imaginations of young children. He has advance orders for fifty million units.

Wally still lives in the woods, where there are no distractions. He claims that his modest lifestyle gives him a competitive entrepreneurial edge. For Wally, life is grand. Now a successful businessman, Wally sold his memoir for a five-million-dollar advance. As for his wife, she married a tractor salesman with no opinions.

~William Hammett

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Friday, August 5, 2022

The Flying Carpet Underground (flash fiction--fantasy)

As you might expect, the grandmother's name is Nana. She lives in an old Victorian home in need of repair, a ramshackle house with wings and porches and chimneys jutting this way and that like an uneven deck of cards. In the basement, Nana weaves throw rugs on her antiquated loom. She makes them with prayer and humility.

Across the meadow from her home is a modern town, on the edge of which sits a factory filled with dirty orphans working oily machines from dawn to dusk. The factory produces metal gizmos, although no one in town knows what they're used for. They're shipped by rail to parts unknown.

The orphans live in a large brick building near Nana's home. It's dreary and looks like a prison, and in some ways it is. Sometimes Nana sneaks into the orphans' dormitory and gives them extra food and a rug to place next to their beds so that their feet will be warm on cold winter mornings. But the rugs are imbued with Nana's boundless love of all creatures. She doesn't know it, but the rugs are magic carpets. One by one, the orphans are escaping, floating away in the night to families who welcome them with open arms.

The factory manager thinks the missing children are just runaways. With each passing month, the factory produces fewer and fewer gizmos. Nana's flying carpet underground is slowly shutting down the factory with a little prayer and humility. Not bad work when you can get it.

~William Hammett

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

The Permanent Record of Jude Wells (flash fiction--literary)

It's not like Jude Wells, electrical engineer and upstanding citizen of Carbondale, Illinois, hadn't been forewarned. Like everyone in the United States, he'd been told by his teachers that everything he did would follow him for the rest of his life.

Jude was stopped on a dark Monday evening by the Carbondale police for running a red light. Jude firmly believed that the light had been yellow when the tail of his Ford Taurus cleared the intersection, but Officer Warren Faulkner disagreed. Jude received a ticket.

At traffic court three weeks later, Jude pleaded not guilty, but Judge Clyde Muggers threw the book at him after the bailiff handed His Honor a file while whispering in his ear.

"You can't evade the consequences of your actions any longer, Mr. Wells," declared the judge. "I'm looking at your permanent record, and I don't think we can risk any further missteps on your part."

"Missteps?"

"It says here," continued the judge, "that you were punished in third grade for talking in class. You also failed a math test in sixth grade, a test on fractions. You being an engineer, I don't have to impress upon you the importance of fractions. And then there was your suspension from the varsity track team in high school, as well as your first set of ACT scores."

"How do you know all this?" Jude asked, perplexed.

The judge merely held up Jude's file, his permanent record, which had been housed in an underground warehouse in Wyoming for thirty-eight years. It's right next to the warehouse where everyone's IQ scores are kept.

Jude Wells was sentenced to twenty years of intense personal reflection at the state penitentiary. His permanent record had finally caught up with him.

~William Hammett

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Monday, August 1, 2022

The Court of Public Opinion (flash fiction--literary)

Frustrated, Oliver Bloom quit his job at a prestigious New York investment firm. He was tired of trading in pork futures and managing hedge funds, which enabled clients to bet against their own investments in case of a market downturn. Oliver felt that all was not right between himself and God. He gave all his money to the poor.

Not wishing to be a burden on anyone, he pocketed a few seed packets from a local plant nursery on Long Island, fully intending to return the two dollars and ninety-eight cents as soon as possible. He wanted to find a small parcel of public land and grow vegetables so as not to be a burden on taxpaying citizens. Unfortunately, the clerk caught Oliver shoplifting the seeds and called the local police.

Oliver was arrested and stood before a local judge the next day. The judge wasn't sure what to do with the defendant standing before him. Oliver was a well-intentioned man who was trying to live an honest life. The judge had lost a lot of money in pork futures and admired Oliver's mindset and rugged individualism. He decided that he couldn't render a verdict. He turned the case over to the Court of Public Opinion.

It took a couple of weeks to get the attention of people across the world, but thanks to social media, the earth's seven billion people focused on the Town of Nassau vs. Oliver Bloom. The verdict was unanimous, which was remarkable given that the jury was comprised of seven billion people. It was decided that Oliver had indeed committed a crime, but not a really bad one. He was sentenced to plant several acres of vegetables for poor people.

The Supreme Court of the United States overturned the verdict, claiming that Wall Street had been made to look bad during the proceedings of the trial. Most of the justices had investments in hedge funds. The Court of Popular Opinion overturned the Supreme Court, however, and the justices were sentenced to planting vegetables for poor people.

~William Hammett

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