Communion

Communion, by Dan Ericsson

There was nothing. Then there was Irving. The booth which he inhabited had not existed until he sat there. When he left, so would the table, the upholstered benches and the dessert advertisement. It would slide from reality to his memory, trapped until someone else sat there.

The same went for Irving’s sandwich. When he bit it, it was reality. And while most of it would fade into his subconscious, he would be scraping pieces of its existence from his teeth for hours. However, while it lasted, it was a very good sandwich.

Irving was bored. He sat in the booth he had created, and ate the sandwich he alone controlled. He glanced up from the wound that he had absentmindedly reopened, the wound that only he cared about, the wound only he knew existed, to gaze out the window by his booth.

He conjured up passer-bys to occupy his mind. His apparitions had no stability, he only controlled them as they passed the (nay – his) window, entered the deli Irving created for them across the street, or got into any number of parked cars Irving generously donated. He placed a poster in the window of the deli that read “Trying Is Just The First Step Towards Failure”, and graffiti that proclaimed “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, sans peanut, would be an odd bird indeed” Irving could create a world without peanuts, but his concentration faltered, and he looked away from his imagined utopia. He felt empty, as though the sandwich had only been real enough to make it into his mouth and resist his teeth. Now his stomach, albeit a stomach that existed only at Irving’s bidding, moaned in protest.

Irving realized that he needed substance, he needed more than ephemeral passer-bys to whet his optical nerves.

He scanned the wall he had created, and the similar booths and tables, his search did not allow for differences, no animal, vegetable or mineral was unique in Irving’s tornado vision. he spun around the sea of faces, blurred and disproportionately large, desperate to catch onto a rip, a tear in his self imposed fabric of conformity.

There. In the corner of both the room and his creative perception, Irving latched onto a young woman who, it seemed, made a conscious effort on her part to stand out. Irving reconsidered. She was trying to shrink back, and become less than the mediocrity Irving allotted to all the inhabitants. The woman sipped from a glass of wine in a room where coffee was all anyone ever ordered, and it was the only thing on the menu. Her head moved down to meet the rim of the cup, her shoulders conspicuously slumped.

She seemed confused by the recently born images that swirled around her, the earthquake of a world she was not ready for shattered her frail reality. Irving, the epicenter of an earthquake he created and chose not to control, saw that she wasn’t a conjuration, that she had slipped in and was real without him.

Irving was intrigued. He stood up, and walked across the tile floor, no, Irving thought for a second, then continued treading on the hardwood. Irving was halfway through the room when he reconsidered. He could see tears form in the corners of the woman’s eyes. Irving stared for a second, then tore himself away, and looked back at his hallucinations that paid him no heed, no by your leave. They too had tears, some streaming, some barely reddening cheeks. In their tears, which he himself had given them, Irving saw comfort.

He longed for the embrace of control. There, if he wanted to, he could. Irving could charge admission at communion. It was entirely his decision, as were the workers that built a wall around the woman that could never contain her as well as she contained herself. Irving could have the walls out of any material he wanted. He thought plate glass and got it. He spent the rest of the day watching the woman through the window with his apparitions floating uneasily behind him.

THE END

originally posted 08/01/2001

More Strange Stories…

Dan Ericsson

One of our early contributors back in 2001. He had a webpage on Angelfire.com called "One Page Detective Stories" where he posted stories he wrote for a class called "Reading and Writing Detective Fiction." He rode off the detective rail when he started submitting a series of silly stories to TheWeirdcrap.com.

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