Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: Short Story

April 27, 2023

Creative Suicide, or The Real Evolutionary Reason for Mustaches

It was February when Darby killed himself. February 22. That date used to not mean anything to Cathleen, Darby’s sister. She found him hanging. She couldn’t believe it. Darby hung himself by tying a noose from his mustache. She doesn’t know how he did it. But she can’t get the image out of her head.

He wore a bright-red plaid collar shirt with his favorite corduroys—Who can kill themselves in their favorite corduroys? she thought—and he had grown out his mustache for fifteen years. Had he been planning it that long? Had he been miserable all those years?

April 26, 2023

The Murder that Took Place in an All-Red Room

Detective George Handell stood in the middle of an all-red room staring down at an unidentified man’s body wondering why anyone would kill anyone in an all-red room. Carpet, wallpaper, curtains, desk, couch, knick-knacks, lamp; someone went out of their way to decorate the room entirely in red. 

Have you ever seen anything like this? an officer asked Detective Handell.

No, he responded. No, I haven’t.

It’s quite amazing.

It certainly is. It’s as if someone designed the room specifically so they could murder someone in it.

What do you mean?

You can’t tell who died: him or the room.

April 21, 2023

Marriage Counseling, or DayDreams that Look Like Pieces of a Puzzle

I should be better at this by now. As depressing as that sounds, that’s what I tell myself right before my wife and I engage in any sort of love making or intimate displays of affection.

It might be because there’s too much going on in my head. I’m not saying I’m smart. In fact, I’m certain I’m not. But I tend to overthink every action and reaction happening in the world to the point where it sounds stupid.

For example, just in case you needed proof: as my wife and I begin to engage in foreplay, our affections clearly leading to sex, or at least that’s the only conclusion I came up to, I’m thinking about whether it would be possible to go to the bank to ask for a small business loan to start a company that sold people clouds. It would be called Shape the Sky, LLC., or Shape the Sky, Inc., or CloudCrafters. I go through a handful of other names, as well.

But it’s not just the idea of having some nonsensical business idea and trying to go to the bank to get a loan for it; I also play out the scenario of what it would look like to interact with the bank teller, who I would ask if the loan officer was in today, hoping that they hadn’t gone to lunch early, or played hookie with their kid to go see the new Lego movie on a random Tuesday because the local movie theatre had matinee prices that were half the price normal tickets were, and then I would explain to the loan officer that I had this business idea, something no one has ever thought of, or at least I hope not, and I would give them a small binder with my business plan, numbers that I randomly generated in hopes that they wouldn’t look too closely at them, all before they asked me how much I was asking for their bank to give me, to which I would reply: How much do you have?

I’m not paying attention to what’s going on around me in my own bedroom. 

My wife looks bored. I can tell. Her eyes are glossed over, as if the kinetic energy in her molecules had completely drained out of her. She asks me where I went. She asks whenever she notices that I’m not mentally present.

Nowhere, I lie.

In the cloud business scenario that I concoct, I make it out as if it were a genius idea that take off and makes me a millionaire, or at least well off enough that I no longer have to work, but rather can pretend to work by giving myself some executive title while going into an office in an empty office park and spending all day looking out the window of my nice, cushy corner office looking at the clouds. I guess in a way, I am working.

The sex between my wife and I is mediocre at best. Those aren’t my words. That’s not how I would describe how I feel after it’s all said and done. But I also realize that it takes little to no effort to satisfy me.

This has become boring, my wife says. She’s still naked and turned to the side. For a moment it looks as if she is staring at her toes, maybe wondering if she made the right choice marrying me. Maybe she realizes that she’s a modern woman that can easily take back the bad decision to marry me by just divorcing me.

What do you mean? I feel like she wants me to ask.

Our routines. Everything about our lives now. It’s all become really boring. Neither of us is really paying attention. It’s like we’re just going through the motions.

What do you suggest we do?

I dunno. Maybe play some Russian Roulette?

This is not the first time she suggested that. I hesitate, but relent.