Three Flash Plays
BELIEF IS THE END OF REASON AND THE BEGINNING OF EVIL
Arctic sunshine. Tundra.
Stage left, a giant iceberg.
Sound of electricity. Lights flicker.
Stage right, a man runs as fast as he can into the iceberg. He bounces off, falls on his back, slides across the floor.
Silence. Stillness.
Sound of electricity. Lights flicker.
The man's legs start to run, but his body doesn't get up. He moves in a pinwheel around the axis of his pelvis, slowly, then faster and faster.
He stops, goes limp.
He awakens, screams.
Stands. Reconnoiters.
Dashes into the iceberg, screaming. Bounces off. Dashes into the iceberg, bounces off. He continues in this fashion, screaming louder and louder, achieving a hysterical pitch … then abruptly stops.
Silence. Stillness.
The man gazes down at himself, at the iceberg. He looks offstage.
Sound of electricity. Lights flicker.
The man collapses like a marionette puppet whose strings have been cut.
Long pause.
The iceberg explodes. Shards and chunks of detritus fly into the audience and litter the stage.
The man doesn't stir, doesn't wake, doesn't get up. He's dead.
In time, the residual ice melts. We can hear it pooling across the floor.
Tableau.
CURTAIN
***
NOTA BENE
Dimly lit parlor. Vintage décor. Bright color-coded walls, carpet, and furniture, with psychedelic designs on curtains and oversized lampshades. Center stage, a large pullout sofa situated at an angle.
Foreboding tubas narrate the entrance of a woman. Barefoot. Silk nightgown. Smoking a Virginia Slim from a long cigarette holder.
She circles the parlor several times, impressed with the room and herself, then removes cushions from the sofa and tries to open it.
It's stuck. Tubas consternate.
She uses more force, straining, yanking.
The sofa won't open.
Turning to the audience, the woman screams, over and over, pausing only to retrieve breath and take drags from the cigarette. At their peak, her screams drown out the anxiety and furor of tubas.
As if triggered by the commotion, a bedframe springs out of the sofa and slams down on the woman, stabbing her through the back with a metal leg. She flails like a pinned insect. Dies.
Tubas fall silent. We hear blood pooling across the floor.
Tableau.
CURTAIN
***
LOW-LEVEL MALEVOLENCE
Bare interior.
A grotesque, forty-foot tentacle unravels and slams onto the stage with a deafening thud.
Long pause. We hear mucous pooling across the floor.
Hundreds of expressionless men and women in business suits pass from stage right to left and vice versa on autowalks, one downstage, one upstage. Nobody acknowledges the moist, oozing tentacle that the autowalks flank.
Slowly, less and less businesspeople appear onstage, and eventually there's nobody left.
Long pause.
A bearded hippie with a knife clenched between his teeth descends from the rafters on a creaky, self-guided dumbwaiter. He lingers over the tentacle, inspecting it. He climbs onto the tentacle and begins to pace back and forth across its expanse. His pace quickens to a gleeful run.
Stop.
The hippie kneels, removes the knife from his teeth, and stabs the tentacle uncontrollably, emitting crazed baritone screams. It's as if he's stabbing himself, hurting himself. The tentacle bucks and gesticulates. Eventually, it ejects the hippie, who tumbles offstage, but not before damage has been done.
Stiffening, the tentacle slams the stage repeatedly, then withers into a limp tendril and dies.
Pause.
The dumbwaiter slowly creaks back into the rafters of its own volition.
Tableau.
CURTAIN
Author Bio
D. Harlan Wilson's work has appeared in the pages of The Cafe Irreal eight times previously, and his story "Giraffe" was included in our print anthology, The Irreal Reader — Fiction and Essays from The Cafe Irreal (Guide Dog Books 2013). He can be visited online at www.dharlanwilson.com and www.thekyotoman.com. Comments on his book Three Plays (Black Scat Books 2016) were a part of Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe.