I just had a lil idea after dinner the other night, and popped out 500 words...
The chemist carried heavy black tongs with heavily gloved hands. He wore welding goggles, which I found myself envious of. If one squinted, you could see that the tongs were carrying a container. A metal cylinder, with flat sides, making it more hexagonal from above.
Mounting the tongs to one edge of the table, the container was suspended over his week’s food supply. Bringing out a wrench, he called to me, “Make sure you’re secure. Somewhere you’re not liable to trip and fall or something.”
“Is it going to… push me?”
“Nah, it’ll just be hard to see for a bit. Hang on.”
“What?” It was already so bright! The chemist clamped the wrench onto what I now saw was a lid. He heaved and strained. As the lid began to loosen, the brightness in the room became omnipresent.
I heard the loud clunk of the lid landing on the floor.
The brightness was such a shock, it took a while to realise it had come with sound, like a hurricane was escaping from the container, now resonating all about. I heard the light fixtures shatter, but this made no impact on visibility.
I hollered over the cacophony, “You should have lent me welding goggles like yours!”
“With it open now, the goggles… they do nothing!” His goggles landed on my hand - not for me to wear - just as proof that he wasn’t wearing them anymore. It didn’t stop me from trying them on. It was true. The goggles, my eyelids, nothing was impeding the light. If you’d told me it was bypassing my retinas, and just stimulating my brain’s optic centres directly, I would have believed you.
I heard metal move, and where I knew the container to be, I saw a single drop fall. It was somehow brighter than the surrounding light. I couldn't call it a different colour. I couldn’t only reason that it was a different frequency somehow- but that was almost assuredly too simple of an explanation.
The drop fell onto the supply of food. I assume that’s what happened, but only because it stopped falling, and I knew that’s where the food was.
I heard the chemist grunt, and the drop was broken. Smeared apart in one direction, then the other.
“Here!” the chemist called out as I felt a tool press against my hand, “Help me bury it!”
As we both attacked the food, trying to mix and bury the liquid, then mix and bury again and again, I eventually realised that the horrendous sound was dying down, and the brightness was subsiding, slowly.
“Almost,” the chemist said in a soothing tone. When he decided we were done, the food glowed silently in the otherwise dark room. “Hang on, I’m going to go get my eating calipers.”
He actually planned on eating it. I knew that was the plan, but it still seemed like madness. “I think I saw the time knife.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. That’ll happen.”
“Most people are fine with sriracha.”
As always, go by my site Ozero.ca, or right to my amazon author page to check out my novels... which have nothing to do with all of this.
