Created at Your Whim

“Here you go!”

A white porcelain mug was gently placed on the polyurethane-coated walnut surface. They must’ve stared at the blank digital page since the time of order, absentmindedly listening to a playlist dubbed ‘Study Music’, in hopes that inspiration would guide their hand. Alas, they managed to divert their gaze to meet the waitress’s eyes. Their face turned an entire thirty degrees, in two dimensions, to settle their social obligation. Ostensibly satisfied, the waitress returned a light smile and continued making rounds across the room. Their fish-eyed gaze hovered momentarily before converging on the saturated steam emanating off the mug.

They ushered the mug to their lips after obeying an impulsion to wipe the condensation from the table, knowing it would return shortly after putting it down. The temptation to take a sip was stalled by a pleasant assault of their senses; the scent of freshly roasted coffee beans brewed into an ebony life juice, a soothing radiating heat on the skin, and Laputa between their ears. However, they opted not to risk it and returned to their work with nothing but the smell of caffeine to remember. The page was still blank. A sudden pang of exhaustion washed over them, punctuated by a somber sigh, as they resolved to commit.

“Are you kidding me?”

They hadn’t completed the first sentence before being interrupted by an annoyed child slamming palm-over-table. Without uttering a word, they slowly removed their headphones and paid their undivided attention to the intruder.

“You know,” he started, “I flew all the way from the first quadrant because I heard your little black book was about to open.” Silence. “Oh? You’re still confused? Is that coffee?”

Before they could react, the child helped himself to the hot beverage while taking a seat on the chair directly across them. His face soon contorted in disgust as he cartoonishly spits it onto the floor. “Ew! Is this what coffee tastes like? You have a weird taste.”

They were perplexed by the extravagant child and the fact that nobody paid any mind to his unruly behavior. But most of all, “that was scalding hot…”

The child slams his hands over the table and stares in bewilderment, “you can talk!”

“Can you stop slamming the- “

“I was excited, you know. I hadn’t heard from you since you started adult school.” The child settled down on his chair, slumped back, and grimaced. They unsuccessfully tried to peer over the table. “Say, do you think I’d look good in those heels?” Their attention was brought to the waitress from earlier. She was wearing a pair of yellow, open-toe heels with a single strap at the ankle and a small silver buckle; regardless, before they could answer, the child had already moved on with the conversation. He seemed in a good mood as he climbed onto the table, revealing that he sported the exact same heels.

“Wha- wait,” they were speechless. The amount of incongruencies at once rendered them unable to decide which question to lead with. The room continued to be as unconcerned with the child as when he arrived. The sound of his oversized heels clacked against the table up to every last step. He crouched beside the laptop and their eyes met.

“When I finally landed, there were a lot of blocks scattered over your book -no wonder it wouldn’t open! But I was determined to witness your story, so I pushed them off the edge one by one! And still, you struggled to open the book, so I took the time to fish for some muse at the shore and carried them back to you. -And what do I get in return?” The child asked rhetorically. He reached for the laptop and gently closed it, “this load of baloney.”

They were flabbergasted; bombarded with an incoherent monologue from a heel-wearing child standing over a table in a café, the stress of having their personal space breached, their work insulted, and property rudely child-handled without consent -any sense of justifiable anger was nullified by sheer repudiation of present circumstance. In the moment of silence, they reached deep down and formulated the only logical response to the situation. “Where are your parents?”

“Heh,” the boy’s lips cracked a gnarly smile. He was in disbelief, “you people are so dense…”

The boy started walking to the opposite end of the table with hands locked behind his back. He spoke in reflection, “you grasp so tightly to your sense of reality that even the most absurd event couldn’t break your illusion. The mental gymnastics you’ll undergo just to make it congruent with your world view is boundless.”

As the child inched closer to the edge, it didn’t appear obvious that he intended to stop. “You’re going to fall!” they exclaimed. As if on cue, their surroundings soon morphed and blended at the seams. The wooden floor turned concrete while simultaneously eating away at the melting chair. The people, the roof, the walls, and everything apart from themselves were turned to dust and dispersed into the wind. They watched in awe before them, a city of clouds amidst technicolor skies reflected from their spectacles. The breeze intensified into an exquisite gust inspiring their locks of hair to dance.

The boy, still composed with hands locked behind him, turned to meet their gaze. “Even now, you still think- “

“I-I must be dreaming…”

He sighed. The boy shook his head. The change in his demeanor, the pain evident in his face, the slow and sad clapping of his heels as he dragged his feet to the edge of the building -it all spurred something within them. More so, something clicked after his next question, “do you even know my name?”

Gaining some modicum of understanding, they stood off the ground and solemnly responded, “I’ll write about you.”

“No, you won’t,” He retorted, unconvinced. The boy had been tracing the Muse River throughout the city, a network of veins transporting nutrients to the motivation trees. The trees were wilting.

They clenched their fist and prepared to reaffirm their statement, but the boy interrupted. “You can’t. You only thought about me because they bribed you with $20,000. But you couldn’t figure out how to make currency work in my universe, so you scrapped the idea. Great writers, artists, and producers all fall victim to the throes of capitalism. They abandon me, just like you, and only create what sells. What’s that? Money? I guess I’ll invent you and your universe, except I won’t bother giving you a name because I just realized I can’t capitalize you.”

The boy’s tone changed and turned to face them. He writhed with a visage no child should make. His gritted teeth deadened the breeze while his clenched fists cast storm clouds over them. The once colorful sky was now as dull as his heart. “Do you know what it’s like to exist for so long without a name?” The ground beneath his heels cracked. “Do you know what it’s like to exist on a whim?” Tears beading over his eyes overflow and spiral off into a gale violently thrashing his clothes every which way.

Before they could answer, the boy raised his fist and commanded the ground to rise around them. They were trapped in an immobilizing pillar of concrete which promptly sucked their body into the ground. The boy maintained them at eye’s height. His fist released enough heat to clash with the cold air surrounding them and generate a succession of localized lightning crackling at his fingertips. The ground caved as he walked closer, his gravity-defying hair on end as he spoke, “entire buildings erected in milliseconds at your whim, entire lifespans leading to me, only to abandon everything in the same void you left Nam.”

With mouth agape and dilated pupils, words escaped them. It seemed that listening was all they were capable of. Wind escaped their lungs and sabotaged any attempt to speak.

“You remember Nam? What about Bubsy? Glover?”

The child stood upon them holding his unbridled emotions in one hand. He was ready to end everything out of spite. The only salvation they had was their blatant ignorance of their identity. They mustered all the air they could retain and spoke, “I-I… d-didn’t… m-make them…”

Everything stopped. Debris was suspended in stagnant air like the photo capture of a storm. As much as he wanted to hate them, he couldn’t justify unraveling the full extent of his wrath on someone who couldn’t understand what they’ve done. “You didn’t, you did.”

The boy’s iron fist loosened beside him, shedding the ferrous layer that had enveloped him. The rubble he had created collapsed around them, along with the pillar which held them captive. He descended into the crater his outrage forged as they fell to their hands and knees coughing and gasping for air. The integrity of the tower on which they stood, a testament to the surreal world they inhabited.

“You humans are so irresponsible with your creations…” He resumed his monologue while they caught their breath. “It’s so ironic, isn’t it? The economy is one of the greatest man-made inventions designed to facilitate creation, and yet it systematically drains its peoples’ creativity. Only a select few obtain the privilege to manifest an expression of themselves into the material world, the rest must find solace in manufacturing or distributing them, -the very act drying up my rivers.”

Still gasping for air, “what… can I do?”

His indifferent stare turned to acceptance, the final tenet of grief, “nothing. Even self-driven artists are forced to taint their work by catering to the consumer. Only a select few get to write about me, children, if they’re lucky. Parenting is just the transferring of creativity. They sacrifice their own life-energy to shield their offspring from the grip of necessity and hope they may achieve some form of expression before they’ve grown up -and that’s just the good ones.”

“Is that… why…. you’re a child?”

The humor of such a benign question at this stage in their interaction was not lost on him. The boy turned away to hide a smirk he soon decimated as thoroughly as his surroundings, “no, for some reason you made me like this. Although I’m pretty sure I was an adult just before I slammed my hands over your table.”

“Well, you were being childish…”

“Ha-” he choked, suppressing the urge to laugh. However, not even covering his mouth would save him this time. The child’s laughter reverberated off the pristine glass of his city, only stopping after realizing his voice had become deeper. Surprised, he turned to find them standing eye to eye. No table to stand on. No kneeling.

Awakened, the voices of billions spoke in unison, “you’re wrong. Our infrastructure is imperfect and perhaps unfocused, but it has made strides. Our ancestors graduated from a handful of tribes living for survival, to a thriving cacophony of diverse individuals; their art inspires us and preserves our sanity. Their expression is the reason the individual can survive postponing their own because we’re all the same entity discovering the different facets of me by interacting with each other.”

The misty-eyed man meekly stares at the ground. “If that’s true,” he choked. “Then who am I?” He flinches and closes his eyes in a panic as they extend their hand out.

“Find out for yourself,” they said.

The man opens his eyes to a little black notebook in their hands. Noticing them beginning to fade, he exclaims one last time, “Thank you!”

“You’ve grown into those heels.”

He smiled, wickedly.