Ficciones
Inspired by our grandfather, Jorge Louis Borges
(not that one, the other one), we published very short stories in
RockBill. Most of mine ended up in a bottle washed up on the shores of
Antarctica. But a few survived. Here’s one:
Somebody Bury Me
He
didn’t know he wanted to be a country and western singer until a tune and a
one-line lyric popped into his head as he fidgeted at his computer. “Somebody
bury me ’cause I’ve been dead for years.” He crooned it over and over to himself,
wishing he could play the guitar and pick out the somber minor chords to match.
As the day went by and he uncarefully
marked the fluctuating stock quotations of the companies he was responsible for
tracking, the tune refused to stop haunting him. It even grew stronger.
The steely face of his supervisor
reflected in his desktop like a still and permanent screensaver.
“What are you doing, Jacoby?” she
asked.
He turned around to look at her and the
peering bespectacled eyes darting out of other cubicle stalls.
“Somebody bury me ’cause I’ve been dead
for years,” he sang, not to her as much as to all the other after work losers,
cheaters, gamblers, and slackers nursing Lone Star bottles of beer in the honky
tonk of his mind.
He wasn’t fired. He didn’t quit. He was
given the rest of the day off. When he came in the next morning, he entered his
cubicle and flipped on the computer, just like always. The darting peepers
didn’t notice anything different in Jacoby. There was nothing different to notice except for the 100 percent rattlesnake cowboy boots clicking their heels under
his chair.
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