Something Kinky: A kind of sort of flash-fiction that has no discernible market

I'm supposed to write something today. but I'm exhausted and I still haven't studied for the huge History test I have tomorrow. I think I might just cheat a little bit and post something I've been working on. This is a long edit of the piece. I've already trimmed it down into a 199 word flash fiction, but I really enjoy the full edit. It just doesn't work as a sharp, cohesive story. It's rough, hence why I've since edited it further, and it can be a little clunky. I just like the shifting perspectives and the turn it takes. 

My time-machine-self lives in an art deco apartment complex just outside Seattle. The city is strong with dead leaves and rain gutters. Wind is a friend and it wraps around her chest and invites her to all the best parties. She lives in rain boots and thick sweaters that clash spectacularly with everything she owns. She gets fish at Pike’s. She runs along the shore and watches tourists snap pictures of fancy hotels and skylines. She remembers when she took the same snapshots and how last week she tossed them out with some expired yogurt and shredded pantyhose. She works as a secretary. Her boss, a man ten years her senior, sports a receded hairline. He writes encouraging messages on post-it notes and leaves them stuck to her desk.  

He knows about her real job. He knows that, while she e-mails by day, she lounges in hipster coffee shops by night and listens to beat poetry. And slowly her boss and she are falling into the gutters of the city. They are such romantics in a world of hard concrete and marble.

And my time-machine-self is independent.

And my time-machine-self is happy.

  But, I can’t have that time at all. I can’t create it, or trade it, or buy it. And anyways, I wouldn’t buy it. Even if I could. So, I’m stuck with Dr. Who and “what if?”

I don’t even watch Dr. Who. Never seen an episode. Know it vaguely as ‘the British television show.’  And yet, I have burdened my time-machine-self with existing in the very same fictional world, ether. I can’t think of the word: liminality, doublethink, Schrodinger’s time-machine-cat. Throwing Angels in America references into blog entries and facing the backlash. Buying Apple laptops with, illegally obtained, legal tender from my adoring fans. I have no order. Without my spectral daydreams, I would cease to function. Robots would die in the streets. The melodrama of my inner self would spill out of my mouth and lie, sticky sweet, on the tiles of my coral tinted bathroom. Overwrought, incoherent, ornate, Dickens-ian, adjective, adjective, adjective.

My boss, most of all, is the constant object of these fantasies. Sometimes he’s a grad student, a professor, a young adult novelist, or really anyone who could be deemed an ‘inappropriate’ receptacle for my affections. I steep myself in unhealthy relationships, towel off, and face my peers prune-fingered like my love interests.

But soon my time-machine-self grows weary of my desperation. She hops back into her time machine and sets off to assassinate her former-pathetic-self.

- Tori