This Narrator Doesn’t Want to Eat It

Every short story published in magazines is written in first-person. So I got a single-shot nerf gun, a two-toned piece in orange and yellow, the kind with a loop on the end of the lever. I slid my left pointer through the loop, yanked it back in a single strained motion, and aimed the plastic pistol right at the narrator’s groin. Click. A pfft of air. The neon blue dart and its plastic tangerine tip whizzed across the theater, over thousands of velvet upholstered folding cinema seats, whizzing like the whistle of a gym teacher dying of heat exhaustion. Whizzing and flying upward now like a wall of wind had sprang up out of the 12,345th row because it had. I saw it. I was there. Me. I watched the wind, visible in streaks of grey like a gust of air out of the mouth of some anthropomorphic cartoon cyclone. The dart went up up up, far from that stupid narrator’s crotch.

So I made the dart a shark. I didn’t have enough time to make it a specific shark species or to give it defined gills and ridges, but anyone who saw the thing up above the vast expanse of the theater would have identified it as a shark. Shouldn’t that be enough? The shark looked down at me and then at the narrator. It frowned. I say it because I did not remember to give it a gender. That sort of thing happens when you are trying to kill a narrator who must have at some point traded his storytelling powers for a survival instinct. Idiot. The shark frowned, accepted the gravity I imposed on it, and fell a million feet down toward the narrator. Only a million more feet until that human-inspired lump of narrative iceberg lettuce was squashed out of existence by a mass of leathery skin, knife-like teeth, and sharp fins.

Falling. Falling. Whooshing. Whooshing. Whizzing. Whizzing. The projectile, once more a dart but not the same dart. Now it was all black foam with a crystal tip. It fell through the skull and brain of the narrator. It made a sound like a gloved snap as it traveled instantaneously through the narrator's head, neck, chest, stomach, and groin. Then it fell with a pitiful tinkling sound on the glossy hardwood of the stage.

Stephen Nothum teaches high school Language Arts and Creative Writing in Eugene, Oregon. He likes to write strange stories about pop culture, education, perceptions, and reality. You can follow Stephen on Twitter @mr_nothum.