Author: Ridley

So here I am, out in the middle of nowhere, and I have no clue what time it is although I’m not really sure that matters. The weird thing is that I’m pretty sure I just saw the most imporant thing in human history.  Let me back up and explain. This is a response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge of 6/26. Go to your music player of choice, pull up a random song, and use that song title as the title to your story. You don’t need to make the story about the song or inspired by the song (unless you want to) — all you really need is the title to run with. On iTunes, it’s shuffle, I think, but if you google “play random song” you’ll find plenty of ways to conjure one from the chaos. Write the story with the song title as your story title. This sucker’s gone through so many permutations so far, being a completely different story 3 days ago, that it’s both a 13th draft and a 1st draft, so it needs a hacksaw to cut away huge chunks as well as some sandpaper to smooth it out. I like the story, though. I’ll like it more, I suspect, the next time I go in and mess with it. __________________________________________________________________________ So here I am, out in the middle of nowhere, and I have no clue what time it is although I’m not really sure that matters. The weird thing is that I’m pretty sure I just saw the most imporant thing in human history.  Let me back up and explain. Last Spring, Tomas and I were going through a rough patch. More specifically, I thought he was being distant and evasive and I was acting like a jealous asshole. We weren’t exactly fighting, but we weren’t exactly not, if you know what I mean. Tomas was ready for it to be over and I wasn’t. That’s the best way to put it, even if it lacks poetry. Anyway, like any guy raised on John Cusack movies, I did the only thing that made sense to my panicked mind: The Grand Romantic Gesture. One of those stupid blinking ads that should have been blocked popped up on the right side of some story I was reading. It promised a romantic New Year’s spent at the South Pole, where, for twenty four hours, you could re-experience the new year every hour, on the hour.  I clicked on it and, by some force of sheer luck, didn’t wind up with any ransomware. Twenty thousand dollars and thirty minutes later (their site was as shitty as the ad you’d expect from a company using pop-up ads), I’d booked the two of us on a ten day vacation highlighted by “the Longest New Year’s Kiss on planet Earth!”  Of course I didn’t tell him exactly what I’d planned, but I made sure he knew I’d planned something big because, otherwise, what’s the point? As you might have guessed, with the relationship already on fumes in the Spring, a huge New Year’s celebration was too much, too late. Tomas was emotionally involved with someone else and was reaching the point where he didn’t care too much if I knew. Which is all a long way of saying, I took off from Baltimore, heading as far south as a body could get, by myself. Ten days sounds like a long time to spend at the South Pole and it probably is, but we never found out because all but about thirty-six hours of your vacation package is travel. By the time the dozen or so of us got off the little ski plane, we weren’t going to be too picky about where we finally stop moving for a little while. A good thing, too, as our romantic day at the South Pole was going to be spent in a big, only slightly-glorifed tent. The tent was huge, probably big enough for a hundred people, and it was weirdly festooned in some of the cheapest New Year’s regalia you’d ever encounter at the dollar store. Lots of cardboard numerals indicating the year hung from strings, a needlessly plastic ice sculpture, folding tables with cheap white table cloths, and extremely harsh LED lighting. Oh, and there was champagne. There was a lot of almost decent champagne and, if you dug a little, enough vodka to keep us from paying too much attention to the cheapness of the fixtures after a very short while. The key feature of the tent, centered around the thirty-foot tentpole, was a huge ring, with twenty-four spokes, one for each time zone. The idea, obviously, was that we would all huddle inside the slice representing the zone which would be experiencing the New Year next, and we’d yell, and kiss, and toast, and be merry for a short time, then do it again in an hour, fifteen degrees further along the circle. Not exactly what I would call “romantic.” If I weren’t so miserable and lonely, I would almost be glad that Tomas and his scientific brain weren’t here to see this.  Around the sides of the room were cots partitioned off by canvas walls. I presumed these were for people who couldn’t hack twenty four hours of revelry, but it slowly dawned on me that the copious amounts of alcohol and the forced romantic nature of the event might tip the ickiness-to-horniness ratio enough to make sharing a cot seem like a good idea. Ew. I made note of two couples who seemed most likely to pursue that line of action: Two trust fund babies from an American university for whom the “mile high club” probably also seemed attractive, and a middle-aged German pair whose affection I may have mis-identifed as lechery, but there was no point in risking it. I avoided both couples all day and night as best I could. Now, the first really strange thing I noticed was that, outside of a small crew in jumpsuits that were supposed to have sort of looked like tuxedos, obviously the “staff” at this establishment, there were sixteen people including me. It didn’t take world-class math skills to recognize that there was either someone else alone or some group had an odd number of members.  It didn’t take long to discover it…