Short Story | Fred Aiken Writing

November 5, 2021

Pleasant Things for Pleasant’s Sake

I started For Pleasant’s Sake after a string of failed business ideas ran into the ground.

There was the coffee shop. The flower shop. The light bulb shop. The general shop. The hair plugs shop. And a few more, though I’m sure it doesn’t matter.

Either way, it’s a bit impressive how much failure defines my business career.

Some might take it as a sign. Stop failing. Or stop opening up shops near Walmart and Target. Come up with an actual profitable idea that customers will actually come out for.

Rinse. Repeat. Recycle. Or something like that.

So, I had this dream. Nothing super out of the ordinary. But I had this dream to open up a store that offered customers the service of pleasantness. It seems ridiculous, I know. I don’t mean to make it sound as such. But I also didn’t want to over-complicate the matter of my business prospectus with some over-the-top dissertation of a business plan.

Instead, all I do is perform various tasks and services for customers’ customized needs that have the end result of being pleasant.

Take for example the case of Mr. Barmoti, this sixty-two year old man widower who hadn’t experienced a home cooked meal in over four years. He hired me to come over to his house, cook and serve him a pleasant meal, and fellowship with him for the evening.

The operation is pretty customizable, and no two jobs are exactly alike, since no two customers have the same definition of pleasantness.

“So, I need to come up with the service for you to do for me?”

I guess, in a way. Or, if you’d like, I have an entire binder of services and specializations that I am known for. Specials, I guess you could call them. But if don’t want to be constrained by what other customers or myself have come up with as a pleasant service, then I’d be happy to develop on for you.

“Would you even be willing to kill yourself?”

That doesn’t sound pleasant. I can’t believe that anyone would find that pleasant, would you?

Don’t get me wrong, of course I retain the right not to serve customers that make ridiculous requests to fit their demented sense of pleasantry. I have standards and policies.

I won’t commit a crime. I won’t harm or injure either myself or others. I guess in a way, it has to be generally agreed upon as mutually pleasant by all parties connected to the service, I would say, or else I’m probably not going to do it.

I do hope you’ll come back and see us some time. I think everyone would enjoy a little pleasantness in their lives. And sure, it might be a little sad that the state of this world requires pleasantry to be dictated by profit. But you gotta get joy out of something in life, am I right? Why not make this your one stop shop for a pleasant experience?

October 16, 2021

I Dream of Ads

I don’t hide out in the bushes late at night for no reason. I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m some creep or something. I have a job to do.

I was hired by Dream It, Inc. about four months back now. It was a bit of a happenstance sort of hiring.

I happened to be miserable at my previous job. They happened to be hiring. Thus happenstance, though I’m sure I’m using that word wrong.

Either way, I found myself as a dream advertiser. Companies got tired of a third of potential customers not thinking about their products for a third of the day, so they partnered up with Dream It to tap into an advertising market with untold potential.

Essentially, I shoot laser beams packed with ads into people’s unconscious brains. I don’t know the exact science behind. And I definitely don’t agree with the ethics of it. But a job is a job, and somebody would be doing if I weren’t.

Plus, I really don’t want to be one of those people sleeping and having their dreams manipulated by someone like me, a desperate, indebted ex-student that is barely getting by and takes precarious and dubious jobs to scrounge enough money to one day, maybe, just maybe, get by.

It’s also not the most glamorous jobs. I have to stealthily go from one household to the next in my assigned quadrant each night, get within ten feet of their door, and shoot an invisible beam into their house with the hopes that it gets to their target.

I guess it’s not all that difficult. I don’t know the science behind how it works, but it’s suppose to transpose an array of suggestive images and even olfactory senses into slumbering brains as they unsuspectingly are fed advertisements on a loop.

There’s no proof, technically, that the transposed brain waves have any lasting health effects. But I think there has been some lawsuits.

Either way, some suit overpaid another suit to make the whole negative aspects go away, and so now I spend my nights stealthily going from house to house to steal people’s dreams and replace them with capitalism.

I’ve always wondered what I would say if anyone ever caught me. Maybe I’d tell them I’m lost. Or perhaps I could make up some story about being a police officer on a stakeout. Either way, I doubt I could tell anyone what I was really doing.

Even my friends and family don’t really approve of my night time activities. Most suggest I find a real job that doesn’t require me to be so shady. To which I reply that I don’t know of any purely ethical company out there, and the one I’m at pays just fine.

It doesn’t, but I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of being smug about my poor life decisions.

If I’m going to be a complete garbage person and invade people’s most sacred time away from the bustle of busy business bullshit, then I’m going to play into the part by not letting busybodies dictate where I can and should and would work.

Anyway, I guess I should get back to work subverting the common man’s dreams and whatnot. If you see me out there at night, though I doubt you will, I’m pretty sneaky, then maybe say hello. It does get pretty lonely working all by myself late at night.

October 9, 2021

Suicide Speaks

“I don’t know if I can take this anymore.”

“What?”

“Life, Tom. Life. I just don’t think I can keep going.”

“All right. That’s something.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Don’t you think this is something you should be telling, I dunno, your therapist, a doctor, hell, maybe even a cop? They seem like they might be equipped to handle this conversation.”

“You’re my best friend. Why can’t I confide in you?”

“Because I don’t care.”

“You don’t care if I kill myself?”

“Not particularly.”

The phone cut out. I checked my signal, but it, along with my hopes of connecting with Tom, the guy I met outside the arcade, or having a healthy conversation with a compatriot flittered off into the mist, never to be heard from again.