“Where's the
kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!”
Wernher von
Braun*
Well, posting
this story early as tonight I'm going to a comedy show with the
family. It's a big family event, not just immediate family like
mother brother and father, its the extended branches, its and
extravaganza! My friend CJ is coming over this weekend, so maybe
he'll be able to help me with the book.
Anyway onto the
flash fiction!
Flipping to
Tails
There was once
a girl who was neither an optimist or a pessimist or anything in
between. A girl who discovered what she called Tails. The flip side
of reality. If you call reality heads that is. Tails was something
she imagined. An optimist would find the bright side of something.
She would make up a bright side by pretending whenever something bad
was happing that the exact opposite was happening.
When her angry
parents were yelling at her justified, or mostly not as she was a convenient vent that couldn't fight back. She just mentally “flipped”
it all around and pretended they were complimenting her. Her
expression showed regret to fool them as her body stayed real. But in
her mind everything was la la la, I'm being complimented, until the
whole facade was over. She knew the truth, but she pretended enough
that the extremely loud yelling of her parents was about as annoying
as a fan left on too high.
Optimists find
the diamonds in the rough. She would turn the rough into diamonds.
She carried this habit into adulthood. She wasn't crazy so she
wouldn't flip something good into something bad. But her parents
would yell and her teachers would struggle as she would only
understand “yes” in her rosy world she made. Negative
reinforcement wouldn't work, no matter how reasonable.
She didn't stir
up trouble. There was no trouble in Tails. But kids found her
unsettling as when bad things happened she just stood there and
watched with a generic expression of either regret or sadness she had
practiced with her parents or she would play energetically with the
children. Kids felt especially strange about her when they noticed
she had the same expression of sadness when the class pet died as
when the teacher lectured her about forgetting her homework too often
and how to not lose it to much.
Tails was
ingrained in her. It followed her from grade school to high school
and her parents kept using her as the vent that wouldn't fight back
and she would still pretend regret or sadness with those generic
looks she used for everything. But she still flipped all bad parts of
reality into that world where whenever something bad happened.
And in high
school she turned out to be one of the most attractive girls in the
school. It never took her long to get dates. Plenty of them. But as
soon as her boyfriends got to know her they learned about Tails. They
never learned about what she called it. But she couldn't have even
told them, she had forgotten the name a long time ago since it had
become habit by that point. They couldn't handle the fact that an
argument between them yielded the same response as her stubbing her
toe. And the fact that later because of Tails, nearly all bad things
in her life were forgotten. Boys who dated her broke up with her,
making up reasons to not offend her, but they got even more disturbed
when the same reaction came up each time. The generic sadness she
used whenever she went to Tails where she pretended something else
was happening. Some happy spin on the situation. Some happy version
of events, maybe where she broke up with him or that he thought she
was too good for him. Turning something from a bad event to good
didn't have to be the exact opposite, she had to keep Tails logical
as he would be leaving her. But in Tails everything bad was good.
In her blissful
world she would accept nearly every boy and that's who would come to
her, the most attractive popular ones came first because popularity
in high school dictates who went out with the girl. But by the
twelfth boy the school kids began to believe their tales of her
oddity and not the fact they were making it all up. And just like her
grade school teacher the high school teachers saw it in the class
room along with her class mates. They could all tell there was
something off with her. But the teachers couldn't get a psychiatric
evaluation off of the claim that she was “unnaturally happy”.
This followed
her out of school. She was kicked out as soon as she could get a job
as she was inside of tails so often College or anything of that
matter never crossed her mind. She just worked her job happy at all
moments. Her coworkers always got that unsettling feeling as she went
along happily.
Her parents put
together the pieces eventually. When they started visiting her as she
was an adult they became more objective. She was no longer the object
they could yell at every day because she wasn't always there. So they
started see the patterns. They noticed it all. They of course blamed
something else, making up things, even asking her if she was abusing
some sort of happy pills or other drug. They never understood it
completely, but eventually after much denial they figured out that
there was some problem and they caused it. Why else would she act
that way? They couldn't
get her to go to a psychologist she was an adult now and Tails was instinct at this point. The parents just had to let her go on with her life.
And so she did. She just merrily went along in her
workplace being happy. A happy working drone that pleased all her
bosses. It was difficult for them at first when they realized they
couldn't yell at her to get things done. But when they figured out how to get her to do things they loved her. A happy worker bee was
amazingly useful so she was promoted and taken by various bosses
higher and higher up the company. She followed orders mindlessly and
that was perfect enough. And she retired happily just the same on the
exact date the company set up.
And she lived
through retirement happily as well, flipping to Tails just the same.
She never had any children. She never spent the money she got in her
positions in anything adventurous. She just went on, flipping to
Tails when she needed while her parents and coworkers watched. She
never had children or even married. So she died unknown to most in a
hospital, happy, while having a heart attack. Because in Tails a
heart attack is something else in a way, even in the last moments
when the doctors are trying to save you.
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