A Little Off

by Ken Brady

“Penny for your thoughts,” Rachel says.

Blake hears her words, looks up from his financial statements. Rachel, his secretary, is in the outer office, so it can’t have been her. Hearing things, he thinks. Too much coffee. He takes off his glasses, pinches the bridge of his nose. Then he stares at the wall to clear his mind.

A minute later, the door opens and Rachel walks in. She opens her mouth, her lips move, but nothing comes out.

Blake looks at her and blinks. He puts his glasses back on.

“Um, just thinking I need to take a break,” he says.

“You work too much,” she says. But her mouth doesn’t open.

Blake just stares as Rachel looks at the financial statements on the desk, back to him. Then Rachel’s lips part and mouth the same words.

“Well, er, you know,” he says. He lets the thought trail off. He isn’t sure he really had one to offer.

Rachel smiles widely at him, winks once, then turns and goes out the door. Blake is sure she says as she leaves, “You should go on vacation. With me.”

Blake stands, paces around the office. My mind is going, he thinks. No other explanation.

His phone rings and he goes to answer it. There’s only a dial tone when he picks up the handset. He places it back in the base. Sitting at his desk, he waits a minute, picks up the phone. “Hello?” he says.

A robotic voice says, “This is an automated reminder from Zuma Travel that you have eight hundred points toward a future leisure cruise. Call us to book your next vacation! Goodbye.”

Blake hangs up, sits still for a moment. The world is definitely out-of-synch. Or he is. Then again, he thinks, when has it ever really been otherwise?

“What the hell is going on?” he says aloud, wondering if his words will come out wrong. But his lips move in-synch with his speech, so no problems there. Maybe it’s just the universe’s way of telling him something. Maybe things were actually in-synch after all, and it’s time to do something about that.

He buzzes and Rachel comes back into the office.

“I think I should go on vacation,” he says. “With you.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but she says nothing for a minute.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she says finally. “I mean, I think I’m in love with you, but… God, what am I saying?”

Blake stands up and walks to her, takes her hands in his. By the time her lips catch up with her speech, he’s ready.

A Short History of the Supreme Democratically Elected Tyrant

by Kat Beyer

After his inauguration as Supreme Democratically Elected Tyrant, Walter Fishwrap began to enact the first of his visionary reforms in the tiny country of Beetroot. First, he outlawed fog and artificial banana flavor, while at the same time increasing government funding for other types of weather and for the artificial flavors of mango, watermelon, blueberry, and cheese.

He followed these triumphs with the now famous Tax Reform Act of 2012, which, in addition to other improvements to the Brobdignagian behemoth that is the Beetroot Internal Revenue Code, reduced the national tax form to a single sheet. Detractors complain that he did this by making the text so small that Beetroot’s one magnifying glass producer quintupled its income overnight, and special Accredited Tax Form Readers leaped into business around the country.

But what of the man himself? His biographer calls him “a mystery ‘Fishwrapped’ inside an enigma.” His neighbors say that he was a quiet man, kept to himself mostly. “Never would have guessed him for the type to put on red tights and a silly hat and issue proclamations from his back step,” says Mrs. Emmeline Harper, who shared a fence with him for thirty years. “Guess we know what all them tiny building and railroads back by the apple tree was for.”

— From A History of Backyard Megalomaniacs, by Marcus ‘Aurelius’ Boomer, Ph. D.