December 2-
Pick an ordinary object.
Make it somebody’s obsession.
Write a story about the obsession.
Dr. Frank Chesler hated taking the train to work. Ideally, he would be able to fly his
brand new Hover 3000 straight from his house to his office like all of the
other doctors that he knew, but the roof of Frank’s office building hadn’t yet
setup a landing pad for personal hover crafts. Frank hated every minute of his hour long commute. It was foul with disgusting people. People yelling into their phones and
laughing at their own jokes.
People opening junk food wrappers, chewing noisily, and coughing phlegmy
coughs. People sneezing without
covering their mouths, and blowing their noses into insufficient tissues. Frank cringed harder with every ugly
specimen in the human hoi polloi.
He closed his eyes, put his headphones on and turned the music up,
desperately trying to distance himself from his surroundings. But there was one thing that could cut
right through his attempts: the distinct click of someone trimming their
nails.
Somehow,
the course of history had not highlighted trimming one’s fingernails in public
as an offense against the common good, and Frank could not abide. In the rare occurrence where someone
felt the need to do their personal grooming on the train, Frank would
immediately snap into a near catatonic state, his muscles flexed to the max
with hatred and disgust. The quick
click of the clippers as they chopped off a nail sent a jolt through his veins
like an electric shock. And if
there was a 2nd click of the discarded nail hitting the ground,
Franks whole body would spasm. His
efforts to hide from his fellow commuters would be stripped away to the core,
and it was all Frank could do to not bash this person’s head in. Two months ago, a passenger began
clipping their nails in the seat in front of him and somehow, a rogue clipping
sailed between the seatbacks and landed on Frank’s knee. If a red hot ember had touched his bare
skin, it would not have caused as much of a reaction. Frank’s entire body exploded, and he rocketed out of his
seat. Words from the darkest part
of Frank’s soul were birthed in his stomach, but they immediately collected
bile and vomit as stowaways. While
some of the other passengers on the train may have been uneasy with the nail
clippers near them, no one was ready for the man who simultaneously jumped out
of his seat, vomited over the seat in front of him, and screamed fiery words of
malice at the passenger on the receiving end of his acidic eruption. Despite a few gasps, the entire train
car was frozen, their minds struggling to comprehend the last few seconds of
reality. Frank was too full of
adrenaline to sit back down, let alone apologize to the shocked
passengers. He wiped his mouth
staring down at the disheveled passenger in front of him and growled, “Stop
clipping your nails in public.” It
was on this day, at this moment, that Frank Chesler decided to become a
superhero.
From
an early age, Frank had known he was smarter than everyone else. He excelled in school and his elders
showered him with praise. “You’re
going to become a doctor one day!” they all said, clapping their hands with
delight. And Frank assumed that he
would, in fact, become a doctor.
However, it wasn’t long before Frank realized that he didn’t have the
stomach for the nastiness and gore that came with most medical
professions. Instead, he found
Audiology to be both mentally stimulating and agreeable to his delicate
nerves. Frank became an expert in
the intricate mechanics of the human ear, patenting multiple technologies
assisting in sound receptors in the brain. His research made him quite wealthy at an early age,
reinforcing the belief that he stood in a class all his own. On the day that Frank decided to
dedicate his life to eradicating public nail clipping, he created a computer
program able to detect the audible click specific to that of a nail being
clipped. It wasn’t hard. Frank had done similar work his entire
professional career, but had never focused his efforts on such an exact
sound. Within hours, his
program was able to accurately differentiate the sound of a nail being clipped
versus the click of a pen, a light switch being flipped, a computer keyboard,
and countless other sounds. He was
happy to see that by the time he had completed his work, it was well into the
evening and rush hour was long gone.
He took the train home that night with a smile on his face, knowing that
this would be the last time he would ever ride the train to work.
The
next morning, Frank packed his audio receivers and computer into the back of
the Hover 3000, and took off towards the main commuting artery into the
city. Hovering over the train
tracks that usually took him to work, Frank turned on the audio detection
program and pointed the receivers down into the floor of his vehicle. The indicators flickered as trains
passed underneath him, picking up sound frequencies similar to what he was
looking for, but not exactly. And
then!! The program caught
something: the distinct clip of a nail on a train headed east. He raced his hovercraft down towards
the train and matched it’s speed, waiting for another click. CLIP! The program was erupting with lights and alarms, indicating
the sound was coming from the car directly below them. Frank swerved down next to the windows
of the speeding train, dangerously avoiding a train racing the other way. In the window, he could see a man in a
suit, casually trimming his already manicured fingernails. Frank felt his stomach churn, vomit threatening
to move up through his body. He
fought the reaction, and steadied himself. “This man is garbage, and I am the only one that can do
something about it,” Frank thought to himself. He pulled out his laser cannon and took aim.
Maggie
was absentmindedly playing a game on her phone, impatiently riding the train to
work like she did every morning.
It wasn’t until she heard the distinct click of someone nearby trimming
their fingernails that she remembered the story one of her coworker had told yesterday. Apparently someone on the train had
puked all over a person who was clipping their nails! And now, upon hearing that sound, Maggie’s attention left
her game and searched for the nail clipper inside her train’s car, secretly
hoping that this vile person might be puked on as well. Instead, Maggie only saw a flash of a
red light coming through the window of one of the seats across the aisle. The flash, although silent, was
followed by an explosion of skull and brain matter sprayed across the entire
train car. Screams of terror and
disgust rocketed out of passenger’s lungs, and in the chaos that ensued, Maggie
only saw a glimpse of a hover craft as it flew away from the scene. Yet in that one instant, she thought
she was able to notice a symbol roughly painted on the side of the vehicle. She later told police that it sounded
crazy and she couldn’t be sure, but the symbol looked like a red line crossing
out a pair of nail clippers.
