Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25763427-20150423171145

 I’ll never understand why people put their lives in the hands of machines daily, relying on nothing short of the odds that something won’t suddenly go wrong.



 There are over 250,851,833 registered drivers in the United States of America alone. Of them, 4,000 people are driving drunk in the USA, at this very minute. There are more than 5,000 planes in the air at any given moment.



 But the fact that there are so many machines, all of them ready to slip up because of improper use or just bad luck, is not the reason that I refuse to board an airplane or drive in a car. It is not the reason I live in a small town in Illinois. It’s not the reason that I don’t take busses, and have never set foot on a train. Why this computer is the only piece of technology that I use. After all, washing machines and dishwasher can explode, or break and flood, and if any water reached the electrical circuit, I could be fried up.



 I know that those things can kill me, so I don’t own any of them, and I never use any of them. I walk to work, I climb the stairs. No one lives with me, I can’t imagine that anyone would. But being lonely, is better, then being dead.



 What you may ask can be attributed to my paranoia? There is a menagerie of answers; fate, superstition, self-preservation, but undoubtedly the truest of them all, is my grandfather.



 My father would often take me and my brother Mike to the resting home, to visit my grandfather. And, of course, to sneak in alcohol. My father was a great man, he didn’t like leaving my grandfather there, but my mother said it was too small in our house to accommodate his presence, and I know that she detested his drinking, and considered him a poor influence on me and my brother.



 Maybe he was. I miss him all the same.



 But whenever we smuggled in the liquor, he would be so happy. Laughing and jostling us, up until his third or fourth swig. Right around then, he would start to go quiet, staring off into nothingness, as his eyes wetted. Then he would start to tell me and Mike a story, a story about our family. He would always begin the same way. “Your family’s cursed…” Sometimes he would describe the wreckage of his mother, how her body had been squished by the sheer force of the elevator crash, almost entirely turned to a bloody paste by the snapping of a simple wire.

 How at the funeral his father began screaming about the little men, saying that they had caused this atrocity and that they had to be stopped at all costs. That they had infiltrated the nation.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Sometimes it would be about what happened to my uncle, who was on a plane, one that crashed into the sea. How because of the leaking oil, he, the other passengers, and the flight crew, all burnt alive. How they never found the body, but the lone survivor of the crash described seeing “little men, with long claws, and blue skin” dancing about on the wing moments before the crash.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Or how his wife, our grandmother, had been killed when the taxi that was supposed to take her to the hospital, popped a tire, ran through a huge puddle, and skidded straight off the road, slamming into a shop before exploding. My grandmother had been pregnant with my aunt at the time, she had been going through labor. He told us that he had rushed out of work, and arrived at the hospital looking for her, but was terribly confused when she didn’t arrive.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> His terror and confusion turned to grief and sorrow when he finally heard the news.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> He showed us a picture of out grandmother. She was a beautiful woman. Soft cheeks, and lovely brown locks, I would have very much liked to meet her. Occasionally he would leave in the detail, that the taxi driver, who survived, crippled and half blind, raved about goblins tearing up the inside of the car, about him spotting one of them popping the tire with one dangerously slender claw.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> And then, once in a blue moon, he would tell us, about his father. He blamed it all on his father, called him a bastard and worse, said that he was to blame for our “curse.” He said that my great grandfather, who had flown planes in WWII, had fired upon civilians, while in Japan. Said he was a ruthless gunner, and that, he had deserved it when his plane had malfunctioned, crashing, and stranding him behind enemy lines. He said that his father had been driven mad by the labor and hunger enforced by his captors, and thus, when he returned home, the veteran was a changed man.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Always raving about “Gremlins” creatures his father had told him about in WWI, creatures, “responsible for most mechanical failures”, tiny buggers who could hid in the tightest of places, and enjoyed tearing out cords and wires, rupturing pipes, watching as humans were scarred and killed by their mischief. Creature who, watched us with deep black eyes, and treated our lives like playthings.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Unlike me, my brother never believed in the creatures, or the curse. Said it was a load of rubbish, and called me mad when I approached him after our father’s funeral, telling him that the truck crashing into his house had been no accident, but rather, had been set up by “The little men”.

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Despite his refusal to accept the obvious, Mike was a good man. He worked at a hospital, and tried to work his way up the ranks, with ambitions of one day being a doctor.

<p class="MsoNormal"> So I was very saddened when the ambulance he was in crashed, killing him, the two orderlies with him. I felt further justified in my paranoia not just by this incident, but also because the patient in the back of the ambulance survived, and according to a nurse, muttered something about “Little men” before falling into a deep coma. <ac_metadata title="My story &quot;Technnophobia&quot;"> </ac_metadata>