Karl (1-2)

I've decided to go back to my favorite subject matter for October! Here's yet another comedy about death and what comes next. I'll keep posting more as I finish editing it. All feedback is appreciated!

Karl

By, Ashton Macaulay

1.

     Karl was a simple man with a simple life. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the Pacific Northwest with no more aspirations than to remain in the middle class, which was always climbing higher than he could reach. Every morning he would get up, sweep the stoop, and then head off to his mediocre job as a customer support representative at a large tech conglomerate. When he returned late at night it was often to the animosity of his wife and the pleading of children who did not so much love him, as they did the tiny rectangular pieces of paper he brought home. It was the American dream in every sense of the saying, and Karl soldiered through it. 

     Karl’s wife Melinda was rather displeased with the whole arrangement, but unwilling to try anything new for fear of the unknown. It led to a cycle of bitterness and occasional copulation that had in turn resulted in the birth of the two children who could have been categorized as awful. The entire cycle was a beautiful work of nature, even if it did nothing to please those who were within it.

It was on a Friday in early October when Karl went to work and found that some papers on his desk were out of place. He had a very organized system that kept everything where it was supposed to be, and maintained order in something that would have otherwise been chaos. It wasn’t so much that papers were out of order, as it was the intrusion of a particularly bright piece of paper in the mess. This piece of paper was pink, and bore a rather disturbing headline. The call center in which Karl worked had been replaced by a computer that took up an entire room and automated the process. They needed the office that Karl worked in to build another machine that would no doubt eliminate the need for another department.

It also said that the management was very sorry, but this automation had made it unnecessary for Karl to work any further. They would also be unable to pay any severance, as that department had been automated, and the machine did not recognize Karl’s situation as anything past unfortunate. The word ‘unfortunate’ was not grounds for any sort of compensation other than a pat on the back. A man from management walked by at that exact moment and offered two pats for Karl. He politely declined and gathered his things.

Karl was glum for the entire walk home, matching the grey skies that always hung in the area. Soft drops of rain fell, and they mixed with what had almost become tears in the corners of his eyes. Karl was afraid of crying, because if he seemed weak in front of his kids and wife, he was likely to get yelled at, and he didn’t much like that. On those evenings it was impossible to hear what the people on television were saying, and he couldn’t relax.

Karl reached the door of his apartment and took a moment to stand on the stoop which had already collected leaves and pine needles from the early morning bluster. It was to be the one moment of peace before he entered into what was sure to be a battlefield. As he turned the doorknob, he could already see Melinda standing in the living room, staring straight at him. He pushed through the door and tried to bypass her by hurrying to the kitchen. The apartment was not very large and this did Karl no good. Melinda rounded the corner and said “What are you doing home so early?” in a tone that even a lawyer would have called incredulous.

This sudden outburst startled Karl, and he slipped on a patch of milk that had remained on the floor since breakfast. Ordinarily it would have been nothing more than a minor nuisance, but one of the lower cabinet doors had also been left ajar by the children who had been searching for sugary breakfast cereal. This tripped Karl further and he fell straight back onto the tile floor. On the way down he nicked his head on the corner of the counter, and due to a most unfortunate positioning of his spine, died instantly. It was the happiest moment of Karl’s life.

2.

     Steve was a frightened man of twenty-five, with a job, and no girlfriend. He moved into a small two-bedroom apartment in the Pacific Northwest when he had been drawn to the area by said job. The work was nothing out of the ordinary, he was a maintenance repairman on a machine that had gone out of date nearly ten years earlier. In the old days it used to automate call-centers, but in the times of the internet, it had all but been replaced. Mostly it was kept for nostalgia and those who wished to tour the facility.

     The truth was that Steve didn’t really need two bedrooms. He had purchased the apartment in hopes of keeping his otherwise testy feline counterpart happy. This cat was his constant companion, despite her sour nature, and tendency to shit where she shouldn’t. To Steve this was all just details, and he loved the fur ball as if it were the child he would never have. The two-bedroom had become expensive due to the cropping up of fancy shops and organic grocery stores, but he could afford it as his job paid very well. He wasn’t quite sure why they still payed him as much as they did, but he didn’t press the issue, as he was rather fond of money.

     The move had put Steve on edge, and as he sat in the middle of several plastic tubs that contained his life, he could not help but shake the feeling that he was being watched. This came from time to time as a result of faulty neurons in the center for threat response in Steve’s brain. Doctors had tried to prescribe him medication to quiet these centers down, but he had refused as they mellowed him out. Living in a state of nervous tension was part of what made Steve so good at what he did, and was an edge he was not willing to lose.

     Oftentimes at work he would be assigned a task for the day and find that he had completed it before noon. It wasn’t that he was any more motivated than the rest of his co-workers, but he was scared that if it wasn’t done immediately, it never would be. This spawned out of a series of incomplete assignments from the years of his youth, which had managed to haunt him through various parental punishments and reprimands. In the end it did him good, and admitting that sickened him to the point where he thought he might have developed a stomach ulcer.

     This was another one of Steve’s most frequent fears, as at one point while studying for a master’s in computer engineering he had in fact developed an ulcer after a bad presentation. Of course then he had thought it was the deadly touch of appendicitis, but the cycle of fear moved in ways that were far too complex for his anxiety addled brain to comprehend. In the end, Steve lived a happy life, in a state of harmony with what others might have described as a mental disability. There were days when it became too much, but most of the time he was alright with it.

     The feeling of being watched sent chills up his spine in what otherwise appeared to be a warm apartment. To combat this, Steve began to rummage through the boxes in search of his tea kettle. In times of need it was always hard to find, but the aroma of tea would be soothing. He found it and heated up the coil stove. From behind him one of the boxes tipped over and fell to the ground, spilling its contents on the carpet. Steve jumped, and in a moment of idiocy grabbed the stove for support, mildly burning his hand.

     His heart pounded in his chest, sweat beaded down his forehead, and his hand throbbed in immense pain. As he looked round the kitchen corner, he half expected to see a grim specter, reaching for him to take his soul. It was highly implausible, as ghosts had better things to do than terrify the living, but Steve didn’t know that. Instead what he found was his cat, rolling in the spilled contents of the moving container as if it were orgasmic. “I hate it when you do that,” he said, walking over to pet her with his burned hand. For a moment she purred, and then latched onto his arm with her claws, digging into the seared flesh with her hind legs.

     “Ow!” Steve flung the cat into the remains of the fallen plastic and went to run his hand under cold water. As he did this, he remembered the kettle, and filled it up with water as well. He placed it on the now red stove coil, and let out a deep sigh. The move had been hard on him. It took him away from all the security that had been the home of his academia. Six years in one place had made the town pleasant enough to the point where he no longer feared it. The new apartment smelled musty and old, despite somewhat modern furnishings. It made him more nervous than usual, which flushed his body with hot tension.

     The tea kettle whistled at him, announcing that it had finished heating. He pulled a tea bag out of the groceries he had bought earlier and plopped it in a cup. The sweet aroma of ginger wafted through his nostrils, putting him somewhat at ease with the situation. As he prepared to take a sip, the TV in the living room clicked on and showed static. “Sorry kitty, I haven’t hooked up the cable yet,” he said, assuming both that the unintelligent tabby had the power of understanding human speech, and that she had indeed stepped on the remote. Neither of these things were true.