The gnat landed on my laptop screen again.
It was starting to irritate me. I wiped at it, but it flew to safety before I could smoosh its annoying ass into a drop of bug guts and blood.
“Damn it,” I whispered with no energy.
On the third time, I thought I got lucky. As I pressed where I thought the gnat was and didn’t see it fly away, I felt something unusual. Rather than some miniature explosion of gnat components, I felt a tiny click and then nothing.
I pulled my thumb away from the screen fully expecting to see a gross little splat of bug guts smeared upon my screen.
It was still there!
Enough is enough. Time for you to die, sucker!
I slowly brought my thumb up to the screen, anticipating its every turn on the screen. My thumb was an undetectable ninja.
As my thumb lowered one last time on the pest I said, “Bye-bye buggy bug!”
It continued to ignore me and the unstoppable mass of my mighty thumb. My thumb pressed down. I felt nothing that time. I lifted my hand away.
Something’s wrong. Leave it alone. Stop messing with it and just write already!
Good advice; I would have been smart to take it.
Yeah, right! As if!
The gnat continued to crawl across my letters and words composed with wildly variant degrees of brilliance.
I pressed again. Nothing.
It had become immune to my incredible strength and superiority.
Leave it be!
Of course, I didn’t do that. I was several hundred rungs above this minor nuisance in the food chain and relative intelligence. I expected nothing but victory in this minor skirmish: the bug had to die. But truthfully the story the gnat had interrupted, had kind of stalled. So, the gnat-killing project turned into a much-needed distraction for me, an excuse for me not to write.
Like you need more of those! Ha!
I leaned in to study the gnat with the audacity to both interrupt my brilliant storytelling and not die when I deemed it necessary that it should do so.
I leaned closer and blew on the gnat. Nothing.
Panic began to seep in. Not an existential crisis kind of panic for my safety. It was a disconcerting realization that I was bumping up against an unfamiliar edge in my reality map. In my belief system, when one pushes on a gnat it dies. This was something I believed.
Before today, that is.
Let this go!
I did not let it go.
Incredibly the gnat continued crawling left to right as though it were reading my words. Rather than asking its opinion on the passage it had just “read,” I swiped at the screen with some actual pressure, more than enough to convert even the heartiest gnat into a long smear of ooze.
When my thumb finished its motion, there was no smear, no ooze, no blood, or guts. There was just the gnat still steadily tracing the path of my sentence.
Speaking mysteriously about the book Scott had found within its secret stacks.
To this brilliant construction, my editor had had the unmitigated gall to note: “Incomplete sentence!”
I’ll incomplete sentence you!
I had no idea what my remark meant, but I reread my sentence and realized she was right. Again. She is usually right, and I wouldn’t be near the writer I am without her efforts. She buoys me and offers me so much support.
My jaw dropped. To say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. My mind was threatening to burst at the seams with this new bit of data.
The gnat was inside my computer. No longer physical, it had transcended into the realm of all things virtual. It didn’t physically pass through the screen only to find itself in some intermittent layer of display screen construction. It was in my file.
My file has a bug! A literal bug!
Was that right?
Is it a literal bug? Or had the literal bug become a metaphorical or virtual bug?
I made a mental note to ask Karen which was correct when I spoke to her later.
But I had to focus on containment! As I watched the gnat continue its journey across the screen, I grew alarmed. It had reached the end of the sentence and rather than doing the sensible thing and carriage-returning to the beginning of the next line, it followed the next line’s letters from right to left.
What fuckery madness be this?
“Good luck figuring out my meaning, dumbass!”
As it crawled in its unconventional direction, it began to dislodge the letters. An “n” in “and” swiveled slightly before dropping to the bottom of my screen where it was fractured and broke into two pieces: an I-shaped piece as well as a now sideways J-shaped bit. It hit the “o” in “about” at such an angle that it rolled up and sat on the lap of the “b.”
I think my virtual bug just grew even more virtual. Just another typical day of being a speculative fiction writer.
Stories by Shawn 