Instant fictions

MANILA, Philippines - Every picture tells a story, or so the Rod Stewart album title goes. That goes for Instagrams too. Here are three very short stories inspired by some smartphone-snapped images.
 

The girl on the bus

It was a rainy Saturday night in Makati, and I was glad to get a Philcoa-bound bus that was uncrowded. I sat near the middle, and noticed a girl across the aisle from me wearing a party hat and eating Jello from a cup. She could have been anything from 16 to 26 years old. I wondered if she was coming from a party, or headed towards one; it was late — or early — enough for either to have been plausible.I stole glances at her as we trundled down EDSA, and wished I could talk to her. I wondered whether she was an artist, or somehow damaged in the head, or both. Or perhaps everyone on the bus was headed to or coming from the same party and I was the interloper. I resisted the urge to stand up and look around at the pther passengers. Around the Cubao area, she presed the buzzer, and stood up. “Here,” she said, handing something to me, “you can have the rest of my Jello.” She exited. I looked at the plastic cup, slightly sticky in my hand. It was empty.

Ghost city

Everything was gray. He stared through the curtain at a city like a still photograph. He had lost count of the days. He had lost track of his thoughts. Practical considerations had stumbled aside to make way for a dull and constant numbness, a quiet and enduring disbelief. He silently pleaded for a knock, a ring, a shout, anything, from anywhere. Every second was an anniversary of loneliness. In time, despair was eroded — not by epiphanies, but by the mental equivalent of filler. He remembered a cat he once had. Two lines of a favorite song. The air was cool and indifferent on his skin. Maybe this is what I wanted, he thought. Maybe this is what I wanted all along.

We built this robot

We wanted to do something with our lives, so we built this robot. Everyone loves talking about the grand projects that they’ll embark on when they have the time, but it turns out they never have the time. We made the time, my best friend and I. We made a skeleton out of PVC pipes and innards out of pilfered electronics and raw dreams. We spent weeks putting it together, talking about the things we would do with it. “It doesn’t have a central processing unit,” I observed, as we were finishing up the (in my opinion) crude corrugated cardboard exterior. My best friend said, “Don’t worry, I have a solution,” and then he stabbed me with a screwdriver and took a saw to my skull. When I woke up I was a brain in a jar inside the robot’s cardboard head, and I had been put on display in a gallery, under some halogen lights, and labeled “ROBOT” (Mixed Media, 2013). I could not scream or cry or go on a rampage, much less protest that my best friend’s betrayal meant that our creation was technically a cyborg, and not a robot at all.