Once Inside
We
read the code, broke down the labyrinth of binaries, the mounds of ones and
zeroes living deep within the grayscales and deeper in the keystrokes and
pixels, and what we found wasn’t insidious, wasn’t a doomsday message beyond
the curtain’s curtain where a wigmaster pulls all the levers with a belly
laugh, no, it was vacuous – a never-ending freefall into what we feared the
most, the banal, the purposelessness, the triviality of it all, where the
wigmaster, who was a splitting image of Rip Taylor in hologram form, looked
exasperated from work without substance. He spied us staring from behind the
curtain’s curtain, seeing him disheveled and bald, at which point he snapped
into coded character, pointing us to the algorithm’s message with a coaxing
smile, the beginnings of a belly laugh, as I read it out loud – we’ve missed
you, use this coupon code for 20 percent off your next purchase.
Gelatin Duck
At
the dinner party of distinguished persons, Meredith served gelatin duck on a
pie plate. Its tail feathers wiggled just like its live counterpart might.
Everyone stood in applause as Meredith, in her stain-free apron with
Chinoiserie motif, took a bow. Nobody asked the whereabouts of duck blood nor
absence of duck blood soup, and pretended not to notice the tiny shoeless man in
the butler’s pantry who fell drunk with blood on his breath. The person who
mistakenly called it a Jell-O mold received a scolding and stern stares. No,
this was not Meredith’s first gelatin duck, and nobody questioned when it
quacked.
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. He is the author of three previous collections with a novelette-in-flash forthcoming in 2026. Find more of his work at www.thaddevassie.com