The Stars Have Aligned
This is another story I did from a prompt in my writers group.
Prompt: The stars have aligned. Is it a sign of fortune, or a devilish curse? A stroke of luck, or terrible misfortune?
The stars have aligned. So what? Nothing happened. Everyone thought the world would be ripped apart when they all came together, but all we ended up with was a bunch of snooty little bearded fucks in longshoreman caps and crusty socks who refuse to use commas.* I guess that in and of itself is pretty disastrous, but if that’s the worst thing that happens, then I guess we’re doin’ ok.
Oh, there was one other thing that happened, though I wouldn’t really consider it all that bad to be perfectly honest. There was this cult down in Arizona that thought the stars aligning was going to bring about some sort of a spiritual enlightenment, or take us to the next evolution of man. Unfortunately for them, when the stars went out of alignment again, all that really happened was that they all stunk to high heaven. I don’t know what they expected really, but that’s what happens when you sit around in the desert for three days sweating your ass off while you wait for something that was never gonna happen in the first place.
Oh, and then there were the armchair ufologists who thought that some kind of a wormhole would open up, and that we’d finally get the alien contact they’ve been waiting for. Again…nothing. There were however a rash of suicides, a rather large number of murders, more than a few bank robberies, and a wide variety of other assorted crimes.
For me it was just another boring day in a lifetime full of boring days, and yet…there was something kind of special about it. Getting to see so many people so freaked out about a non-event and all the different ways they processed it was not only amusing, but it validated my extreme distaste for humanity as a whole. There’s no logic…no reason. It seems as though when people are faced with the unknown, they’d rather make up fantastical stories in their own minds about what it all means than to take it at face value.
When it was all over and I woke up the next morning, I went to work, just like I’ve done every other morning of the week for the past twelve years. I work in a coroner’s office, so as you can imagine our clients aren’t all that chatty, which suits me just fine. I came to realize though that corpses are the ultimate evolution of humanity. They don’t worry about things they can do nothing about. They don’t make up crazy stories in their heads that lead them to do stupid things, and they don’t exist in a permanent state of complete and utter illogic. They simply exist, and if there’s one thing we can all look forward to as human beings, it’s that we’ll all eventually reach that point in our evolution. Until then, some of us will continue to live in a stress filled world full of imagined problems, while I and the others like me will simply wait for the evolution that’s yet to come.
* Note: This comment was me goofing on Javier, the guy that runs the group. When he wrote the prompts on the white board, he left out all the commas. I got up and added them in, and then he got up and erased them again just to be a shit. So that’s what that part of the story is referring to. It was just a little inside joke that we all had a good laugh about.
I just added two more short stories…
I just added two more short pieces that I wrote from writing prompts in my writers group to the Bonus Scenes & Short Stories section here on the website.
A Prison Without Walls – Literally what it says. It’s a prison without any locks, bars, or outer walls, and yet the prisoners can’t leave. Anyone who’s ever tried has met a tragic end.
The Stars Have Aligned – The stars aligned and people all over reacted to it in a variety of ways. A man who works in a coroner’s office relates what happened on that not-so-fateful day.
By Duane • Uncategorized 0