Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25763427-20150428003755

VERSION 2.0

'I'm sorry if there are still sentences which drag on too long. '

 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 go terribly 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. All of them accidents waiting to happen.

 There are more than 5,000 planes in the air at any given moment. Five thousand. All of them waiting to plummet to the earth in a plume of hellish flame.

 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. Those are not the reasons this computer is the only piece of technology that I use. After all, washing machines and dishwashers can explode. Or break and flood, and if any water reached the electrical circuit, I could be fried.

 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 than being dead.

 What you may ask, is the origin of my paranoia? What is responsible for a lifestyle most people in my country would call extreme? There is a menagerie of answers; fate, superstition, self-preservation, etc. But the root of my fear, the crux of my problem, is most undoubtedly 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 our house was to small to accommodate his presence. 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 of course. 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. It was always a story about our family. He would always begin the same way. “Our family’s cursed…” Then he would tell us a story which explained why we were cursed.

 Sometimes he would describe the wreckage of his mother, how her body had been squashed by the sheer force of the elevator crash. How she had been almost entirely turned to a bloody paste by the snapping of a simple wire.

 He would go on to describe how at the funeral, his father had begun screaming like a lunatic. Telling his wife's pallbearers that "the little men" had caused this atrocity and that they had to be stopped at all costs. That they had infiltrated the nation.

 I never met my great grandfather, he died in an institution as far as I know.

 Sometimes it would be about what happened to my uncle, who was on a 747 flight that crashed into the sea. He would explain that because of the leaking oil, our uncle, the other passengers, and the flight crew, all burnt alive as they drown. 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.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> Other times he would talk about how his wife had been killed when the taxi that was supposed to take her to the hospital popped a tire, slammed into a shop and exploded. 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 as soon as he heard the news. But had been mortified when he arrived at the hospital, and she wasn’t there.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> He would stay perfectly stoic as he described his terror and confusion turning to grief and sorrow when he finally heard the news. How he had been forced to visit the school, and explain to our father what had happened.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> One time he reached under his pillow, and brought out a picture of our grandmother. She was a beautiful woman. Soft cheeks, and lovely brown locks; I would have loved to meet her. Occasionally he would include the detail that the taxi driver, had survived half blind and crippled. And when my grandfather spoke to the driver, he raved about goblins tearing up the inside of his car, and one of them popping the tire with a twisted yellow claw.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> 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. He claimed that he had been a ruthless gunner, and that, he had deserved it when his plane had malfunctioned and crashed. This malfunction caused my great-grandfather to be stranded behind enemy lines, and be driven near mad by the labor and hunger enforced by his captors. So when he returned home, the veteran was a changed man.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> He would always get drunk, and rave about “Gremlins." Creatures who his father had told him about. A pilot in WWI, my great-great-grandfather had told his son about the creatures, sparking the obsession. My great-grandfather relayed the message that they were responsible for most mechanical failures, to his son. He also told him, that gremlins were tiny buggers who could hide in the tightest places, due to their small and slender frame. That they enjoyed tearing out cords and wires, rupturing pipes, and snapping cords. And that they did it all, purely for the purpose of watching as humans were scarred and killed by their sabotage. They watch us with deep black eyes, and treat our lives like playthings.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> Apparently, the creatures rarely followed a particular human or group, but if one was to show a gross lack of respect for other human beings, the gremlins would hone in on the sadism, and follow the depraved soul. Oh and occasionally, their family as well. This explains why they were most often seen near battlefields, and were seen less and less after the atrocities of the First and Second World War.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> Unlike me, my brother never believed in the creatures, or the curse. He said it was a load of rubbish, created by our, “crazy old grandfather.” He called me mad when I approached him after our father’s funeral, and tried to convince him that the truck which crashing into our father’s house had been orchestrated by “The little men.” I’ll admit that I could have phrased the theory in a way that sounded less ridiculous, but my brother would have brushed it aside either way.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> He didn’t respect the old powers. The creatures which lurk around every corner, and have evolved since we grew "sophisticated" and came to ignore their prescence.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(212,212,213);"> Despite his refusal to accept the truth, 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. So I was very saddened when the ambulance he was in crashed, killing him, and 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. He survived, and according to a nurse, muttered something about “Little men” before falling into a deep coma. <ac_metadata title="My story &quot;Technophobia&quot; Version 2.0"> </ac_metadata>