Flash Fiction Friday: How to Be Boring

Garrett Cook here. I have known Michael Allen Rose since BizarroCon 2 where we found each other to be staunch defenders of each other’s pitches in the pitch workshop, which is notable because mine was otherwise universally disliked. He is now President of the Bizarro Writer’s Association as well as a respected Bizarro whose work is both acerbic and playful, enthusiastic and glum. For all the respect he has earned, he is still, in my view, criminally underrated.

How To Be Boring by Michael Allen Rose

I’m at a family reunion. I’m the only kid there. Everyone else is old. Adult. Boring.

There are some cats here, and I’m mostly hanging out with them. I like cats better than people. They aren’t boring. They go down slides. There’s a swingset in my backyard, and earlier, the cats and I were going down the slide. Now they’re mostly cuddle-napping in a cardboard box, and I’m sitting here watching the boring adults be boring.

I chuckle. Oops. That needs to stay inside my heart and not come out my mouth. I’ve got a secret. The boring adult lives are about to get more interesting, at least in my yard. Because of the hats.

The hats. The brown hats? The ones full of caramel?

They’re sitting there on the concrete picnic table. One, a brown felt derby. The other, smaller, more delicate. Looks like a fried egg, but with a chocolate brown yolk instead of the vibrant yellow one would expect. Only I seem to smell the aroma of burnt sugar in the air. Only I taste caramel on the wind. They have no idea. Adults are so dumb.

I watch as two distant cousins, old maids, in my estimation, take the hats, pick them up, and flip them over on top of their heads. They chuckle as they do so, like they’re part of some joke. These hat-donning sisters have lived together on the farm as long as I’ve been alive, and I am led to believe, much longer than that. Over the many years together, they have grown more and more similar. Now that they have donned the hats, they will look identical.

The caramel, a seemingly endless amount, pours forth, oozing over their hair, their foreheads, their faces, their shoulders. They sit, unmoving, as the symmetrical brown blobs envelop them. As though they are willing victims. As though they desired this, sacrificed to the sticky-sweet gods of caramel.

But the boring adults are not amused or interested like me. They are on the edge of a quickly flashing panic, as they watch the sisters disappear under the flood. They couldn’t move if they wanted to.

Chaos erupts. Dad rushes over and tries unsuccessfully to move one of the sisters, as though she’s underneath a faucet, but it’s too late; he can’t move her, she’s already cemented to the ground by strands of the substance that have reached the concrete.

I think about yelling a warning to Dad, but something keeps me from opening my mouth. His arm gets caught in the sticky flow, and suddenly he’s part of the sculpture. There’s a part of me that’s worried about my dad, but it’s quickly overwhelmed by a single thought: I’m no longer bored.

There’s a true panic now. I hear someone, an uncle or a cousin or someone, ask how it’s possible that there’s so much of the caramel. Where’s it all coming from, he asks. I don’t know the specifics. All I know is that when that thing showed up at the foot of my bed and asked if I had any wishes I wanted to make, it wasn’t difficult to think of things I’d ask for. I said: I wish I wasn’t bored. I wish I had some candy. I wish I had a cool hat. The thing stopped me there and said that was enough. Granted. All of them? Yeah, all of them. That was just the other night, and here we are, no boredom in sight. Just the growing screams of terrified relatives and a feast of caramel sauce that’s enveloping everything in sight.

In slow motion, past all the running, tripping, falling people, dishes clattering to the ground, flying off the picnic tables, my vision zooms in on my mom. I see her open-mouthed panic. She’s yelling something, and her eyes flicker from the growing ball of screaming and burbling family members to catch my eyes. We stare at each other in this moment, everything suddenly silent, and I know she knows. I don’t know how to have a whole conversation with my eyes, not one like this, how I wished for something to happen, how it did, how it’s my fault, but it’s not really my fault. My stomach drops as I realize that I’ll have to explain myself, and I wonder how I’ll even begin to try, but then I see that her momentum is going to take her straight into the pile.

I watch as Mom’s foot slides to a stop right outside the spreading border of the ooze. She thinks she’s safe now, but I finally find my voice and yell “Mom!” but it doesn’t matter now, as the caramel continues to pour forth impossibly fast and thick, and quickly covers her tennis shoe. It’s already working its way up her leg when I hear a piercing, anguished scream. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s coming from me.

I am barely old enough to cook for myself. I can microwave things, I guess. I can’t drive, but maybe I can bike to the grocery store to get food? The caramel flow isn’t stopping. I walk over to the box of sleeping cats and pick it up off the ground, so that it won’t be taken by the flood of sweetness that has now turned the backyard into a swamp. One of them sleepily opens their eyes halfway and mews, sniffing the air. Cats can’t taste sweet. I learned that doing a report for school, so at least they won’t be tempted by the ever-increasing deluge. It isn’t stopping. I calmly exit the backyard gate and close it behind me. I wonder how far I can bike before I’ll need to stop for a rest?

I have essentially turned my entire family into candy to alleviate my ennui but of course realized too late that I have damned myself in the process. At least I can say I’m not bored anymore.

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