New (VERY) Short Story

Here is a very short story that I wrote today on my lunch break. I think it is fun and fluffy!




ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS
By James Bezerra

If all the world really is a stage then my prop master is totally going to lose his job because I can never find my keys.

This time they are in the fish tank. I grab them and shake off the water as I dash DownStageLeft and my apartment slides off on casters. Stagehands all in black push my car across to StageRight as the scenery goes flying by.

The library is lowered in on thick steel cables as I hop out of the car, which the stagehands drag off. I rush up the steps of the library; they look like granite but they are really just knotty wood wrapped in muslin.

As I fling open the doors, the library swivels around so you can see the interior: rows of books and a center aisle that widens toward DownStage so as to create a more pleasant sightline and to imply size and grandeur.

I dash into one of the rows. You can’t see me anymore but you can see the books that I am hurling out into the aisle. I’m looking for one book. Just one book. One play. This play. My play. The play that you are watching right now. Why is it so hard to find just one specific thing in a library?

You see more of the books that I am hurling.

I need to know how this ends, because if there is a gun in the first act, then it has to go off in the last one and while there was no gun, there was a misplaced newspaper. The prop master left out tomorrow’s paper for me during the first act and I started reading it while I was drinking my coffee and having a bagel and then whatallthefuckalltohell! there was a blurb about my tragic death and I nearly choked right then on my bagel.

“Killed by a meteorite!” I exclaimed and then started looking for my keys.
I find the book! The play! This play! I step back out into the aisle and over the pile of books and DownStage toward the footlights and I read out loud . . .

“JAMAL (Moves DS and reads out loud): Suddenly there is a rumbling …”

But then suddenly there is a rumbling. Then the lights go all bright orange and as I look up toward the balconies, I can see it there, out over the audience, descending fast toward me on a cable, like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera: a giant Styrofoam and paper mache meteorite! Barreling down toward me at galactic speed!

I don’t even have time to leap out of the way. I only have time to look down at the play in my hands and I see that it says: THE END.
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