OUT BEYOND THE STATUS QUO

                                         short short story

                                                  by

                                         Patrick Breheny

     They kept saying it was Oates. Oates had won the charity ticket for a seat at the table, wherever he got the money to buy a ticket, but Mr. Calendar insisted Oates had won clear and fair even if the charity’s purpose was to help people like Oates. It was helping him, wasn’t it? A year of seven course dinners seated with the gentility? Was that not help?

     Oates acknowledged conversation with the people at his elbows was uncomfortable, and imagined how they felt---he had that sensitivity----but that FOOD. He brought bags to fill with what he couldn’t eat, which was most of it, to bring home to his kids, even neighbors, and would have taken what the gentility didn’t eat either, which again was most, except the rules prohibited that, though sometimes the acquaintances he made dining slipped leftovers in his sacks anyway.

     Mrs. Calendar said it wasn’t Oates. She said Mr. Calendar was a good man who liked animals and people and children, was particular to punctuality and stability, disliked germs, war, tattoos, and had been extremely upset by recent weather patterns and their portensions.

     No, she said it wasn’t Oates, but his associates tried to blame that. Most of them disputed Mrs. Calendar’s reasoning about the night he killed himself. It was when the people from all those countries we were fighting over in the world wars put that device on a comet almost outside the solar system. When he looked closely at the pictures, he could see an ironic, grimacing don’t-bother-me face, but an indifferent face of incidental synchronicity, a stony configuration of simply what is, definitely not a face that could be attributed to God or Satan or karma, or to any other communicative intelligent entity or concept.

     Mrs. Calendar didn’t think it was Oates at all, whom Calendar had stood up for, believing that was the right thing. She said it was that rock we were on out past Pluto, and how that questioned those ideas in all the books people were going to keep on using to pretend that that was why they were killing each other. It was the realization that the universe isn't flat, its kind of round, and doesn't have any edges one could fall off from. Mr. Calendar himself had been a deeply religious man, though she didn’t think he was still that devout on the night he used a pistol on himself. She asked, how could he be, and do that? She thought not. She understood. She knew him, and his beliefs had been contradicted. The stars weren't small lights in the sky. People didn't have telescopes when they wrote that, hadn't know the sun itself was a star, nor that the other stars were big lghts far away. She thought that perhaps they had only been illustrating to make their point, using metaphors like in the parables that came later. 

    She said for herself, as sad and troubling as it was, if it turned out proven that all the books had in fact been erroneous--- their followers would never concur, they’d be traitors to their own if they did, but in time their progency would--- that was all the more reason to continue living as long as possible. She knew she would still find something beyond just herself to believe in, and only wished that Mr. Calendar had been able to do so too. As she said when she eulogized him, "He had always meant well."

(Copyright, Patick Breheny, all rights reserved )