Tag: Fiction

You’ll See

Don’t even blink, it will be so fast you might miss it

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

All my life I’ve been running. From bullies, from teachers, from shame, and later from hunger, from bullets, from cops.

I’ve been running after elusive hassles, and more often than not after a loaf of bread, when you’ve been running the course of honors. I’ve been running on an empty stomach, bare feet on the cold concrete, when you were running after a world record in 500 dollar-running shoes. I was running after my life while you were rushing to the podium, running for gold and eschewing silver.

But now, things have changed. I am the underdog. It took a lot of blood and tears. It took a lot mockery from people like you, to whom I may not look like much, with my tired borrowed sneakers, to whom I may not sound like much with my weird accent, in this lingua franca of the 21st century I can barely speak. I can hear it in your laughs.

You’ll see.

The Olympic games were never the same ever since. This guy just came out of nowhere and destroyed the 100m sprint in just 33 steps, with a headwind of -1.6m/s.

The time it took him? 07:81 seconds. The previous record of 09:58 seconds had stood unscathed for more than thirty years. The 100-meter sprint lost its shine after that, and most sprint athletes turned to other disciplines. No one could fathom this new world record. It was too great a goal to reach. It was way beyond what mere mortals could hope to achieve.

One can only wonder. He had been racing great contenders day in day out, maybe the greatest of all contenders you can encounter in a lifetime. Misery. Adversity. And for once, just for once, he was not racing for his life.

That gave him wings. The rest is history.

Let the board sound

Rabih

The Shiny Guy

And a ray of contagious light, travelling the universe

Photo by Josh Boot on Unsplash

So, there was this guy. He was shining. A ray of bright light. All who bumped into him were touched by his light and for a while, became alight themselves, and this light was contagious.

When his time came and he left for a better place, they uncovered a diary he seemed to have been keeping. Not really a diary, more like bits and pieces of inner thoughts intertwined with some lament.

It turned out the guy had no light inside whatsoever. He had been walking in darkness the whole time. A deep well of despair and loneliness, a constant yet unfruitful search for an ever-elusive ray of sunshine. His writings left no doubt about it.

So where did the light come from? 

It came from every wrong turn he took because those who knew better never gave him the right advise.

It came from every piece of bread he would be denied when starving at the side of the road.

It came from every border he could not cross, every job he could not get, every opportunity he would lose because of who he was and where he came from.

It came from every failure, every broken dream, every sleepless night, it came from the indifference he had faced when most in need of human warmth.

You see, this guy was carrying the curse that others, more worthy of it, did not wish to carry. He was burdened with crying all the tears they would not cry anymore. 

A burden chosen with care, a curse embraced with full prior knowledge, for he had already been there before, took the wrong turn, cried the bitter tear, begged for a piece of bread, a job, an opportunity. He had been left outside in the cold when others were boarding first class. 

Broken dreams had been daily bread for as long as he could remember, and from the rumbles of his dreams and the ashes covering his days and nights, he found the strength to shine, not on others, but for others, to make their lives a little bit warmer. 

This constant shining got the best of him. He died of exhaustion on a sidewalk on a cold November evening.

Those who knew him quickly forgot hit legacy, if they ever knew it, and save for his writings, nothing remains of him today. 

Except, maybe, a ray of contagious light, still travelling the universe. 

Let the board sound

Rabih

The Ultimate Weapon

Thermonuclear? Think again

Photo by Oscar Ävalos on Unsplash

Non-Proliferation Treaty

August 25, 2026. The United States of America withdraws from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Reason? The United States of America is no longer a nuclear-weapon state. It stopped being one shortly after the conflict in Ukraine ended some years ago. The stockpile was dismantled and the fissile material was recycled into fuel rods for nuclear power plants.

The move was decided by the American administration after it had an epiphany. You see, America, land of the free, home of the brave, ended up realizing that it possessed the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and had been since 1944. And it was not nuclear […]

You can read the full story on my medium page here.

How Worse Could it Get

A more than weird episode at the office

Photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash

8:04 AM.

I’m in the elevator with a weird colleague I had never seen before. The company had been growing like crazy in the past years, and the days when you could say “I know everyone” are long gone.

Long story short, I get off the elevator on the 6th floor and I think to myself:

Damn! That girl smells like the sixties and looks like shite…

Cold tobacco and wet leather kind of smell. And the looks, well I leave that to your imagination. Don’t get too wild though.

As the elevator door closes, I hear her whistle.

… All the lonely people…Where do they all come from …

OK. Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles, 1966. How odd. How fitting actually. The song could have been about her. I go my way whistling Your song by Elton John as a tribute to her.

You can tell everybody, this is your song …

I know, I am being mean. But hey, what can I say, it is just not my day, and besides, my thoughts are my own to think.

And it is not like she could hear me!

I head to my desk. A message is waiting for me in the chat.

Rabih,

If I smell like the sixties and I look like shite, you’d better be a nostalgic scatophile for I’m here to stay. Just saying.

Eleanor Rigby, COO

It was sent the previous evening.

That would explain the sixties smell.

And back to the main title, it can hardly get worse than sharing the elevator with a telepathic-time-travelling C-level executive. I guess the fab four would agree.

Let the board sound

Rabih