Today's #flashfiction Orlando The Indecisive

“And the dish ran away with the spoon.”

Neo, The Matrix* #quote

      Hope you all have a fun, or had a fun father's day everyone! Time zones and whether or not you got this through email delivery or are reading this later than it's posted kinda make anything I say have a weird relevance in space-time. Internet posts are funny like that. The worst are when you see less obvious April Fools jokes past April Fools. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Orlando The Indecisive

       People knew Orlando as an indecisive man. His primary flaw since overall he spoke with good manners in the way that made him sound smart, but not pretentious. Genetics chose to bless him with the good looks that gave off charisma and made him generally more likable by anyone who saw him. But that indecisive nature always got him everyday. He practically wore a uniform of the same set of shirts since he couldn't decide on anything else and went back into habit. If someone in the office forgot the day of the week they could look at Orlando and based on the color of his shirt tell what day it was.

         This led Orlando to a life of monotony. “No thank you” became the default on many choices and habit to avoid choices left boredom. Even the same TV channels. A friend at the office knew of his problem with choices and gave him a deck of tarot cards telling him, “When I have difficulty making choices, I use these.” Orlando took the deck, the friend refusing to take his “No thank you” for an answer. He took it and went to bed, leaving it next to his alarm clock.

        The alarm clock shook him awake as it did every day. He stood up and put on his pants for work like usual. He went to his closet to decide which shirt to put on. Orlando remembered the deck. His hand pulled it out of the box and he shuffled the cards. He then realized that he had no idea how to use these cards or how this would have anything to do with shirts. But he chose a card from the deck anyway. He pulled out “The Devil”. The picture looked quite ugly with monstrous, red Satan staring right at him. At least that's what he thought. Ah, red! It hit him. He could wear red today. So he choose to wear red instead of the normal blue because of the card he pulled.

      When he went to work panic erupted. People checked their calendars again and again. Orlando normally ran like clockwork, and red was the Thursday shirt, not the Wednesday shirt. People relied on Orlando for the day of the week more than their calendars because they can forget to cross that off. The boss began cursing because he thought he missed an important meeting with a massively valuable client. A day evaporated into the mist. Someone noticed that Orlando also changed the way he combed his black hair and pinched themselves to see if some dream pulled them into bizarre world where the sky would soon start falling.

      People didn't say anything, as if not talking about would make it go away. The next day came and his shirt varied from normal. Eventually the boss walked up to Orlando and she asked,

      “Is something wrong Orlando?”

      “Nothing's wrong,” he said. The boss dismissed him, shocked when Orlando turned to one of his coworkers and said, “Oh, I can make it to the party.” Whenever anyone had some sort of event they invited Orlando, but never expected anything besides his usual “No thank you,” but after be asked he first delivered the unusual answer “I need to check my schedule,” then at home used the tarot cards to decide, pulling tower and deciding that since parties take place inside buildings and a tower is a building he should go.

       Orlando forgot his deck when he went to the party and while holding a drink in hand he glanced across the room and a girl caught his eye. He felt that little spark that tells your heart there's chemistry somewhere, someplace. And maybe there's more than you think. Without his deck he wasn't sure what to do. But as he looked at the girl ideas of what to do started to come to his head, like how ideas of what to came to his head when he looked at the cards. When he looked at the world the same way he did the cards he decided that he should walk over to her and say hello.