Animal Spirits 4-1-9
Short Story by George Wehrfritz
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The plan hatched during another hard night with my dead editor at Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern.
“Just might be crazy enough to work!” bellowed my earliest mentor and best departed friend -- revealing once again his fondness for confidence games. So, I jumped in with both feet, spun a yarn along credulity’s tattered edge and staged a quintessentially American comeback set in London’s fashionable West End.
By hacking an £8,000 flash fiction contest and retaining affordable healthcare.
My rum-soaked apparition’s “crazy-enough” appraisal echoed the prompt for one of the UK’s richest literary competitions. And as he knew, cliché and desperation (two additional elements on which contestants would be judged) dapple my writing quite naturally. Stacked against me: advanced age, declining health and the cruelest deadline imaginable. I needed to put points on the fiction board pronto to avoid losing my Short Story Writers of America Guild (SWAG) membership for “professional inactivity” -- and comprehensive medical insurance along with it.
Like most 4-1-9 fiddles, this one played on sympathy, gullibility and greed. My story submission began:
“Gout debilitates even with proper medication, trust me on this. Or don’t, for my gambit rests entirely on the corrosive power of cold, hard cash – albeit a digitized and untraceable variant, as we’re no longer living the dream that wasthe1990s.
“Accordingly, I proffer baksheesh, backhanders, a golden-yellow confection; I slip payola from my sleeve and grease a proverbial duke. The, ahem, attached figure being entirely yours to name, whatever it would take to sway this nut-bag contest in my favor.”
Conceptual foundation thus laid, I introduced a pivotal character:
“So, here’s the deal: there’s this Nigerian prince – I know, I know. Heard that one a thousand times. But trust me. My Man in Onitsha is as real as viral malaria, traces of which still course my veins, compounding the need for medics who don’tbill by the quarter hour or shuffle fat sweaty mopes like me into dying rooms.
“This prince -- what say we call him Charles? -- holds a crypto stash sufficient to float Elon himself over an afternoon of pump-and-dump cosplay on one dark trading site or another. And Charles owes me a debt as I once saved his ass in a Florida swamp near Disneyworld. My ‘dear friend’ will honor that duty with a one-time, block chain-enabled, double-blind transfer of wealth from him to you, unnamed judge(s) he’d never run across due to his abhorrence offlash fiction -- literary, middlebrow or pulp. Or flash grenades; though, if memory serves, he adored the film Flash Dance.
“Besides,” I reassured like a wise guy, “nobody knows nobody on the digital ledger.”
At this point I requested: 1) their price, 2) relevant automated escrow particulars and 3) an ironclad guarantee they’dnever wrong-foot so sick a man as me.
I weighed stopping there, but my legless muse grasped a second powerful hook, how my proposal would help them by deflecting the turds their “crazy enough” contest had unleashed. “Don’t stint!” he barked round after round until I relented, just like in the olden days. So, I warned:
“Beware duct tape spaceship repairs, WD-40 hacks involving a flamethrower, DNA manipulation or time travel to thwart Hitler, plus (cliché alert!) manhole-sized pieces of fathomless black fabric positioned by fleet-footed birds to send pursuant coyotes plummeting through jutting buttresses in Arizona’s Monument Valley.
“Seriously,” I pressed, “Ikea is building a bridge from surplus KALLAX office shelving to reach Middle East Peace. And Jacques Cousteau himself is back from the grave to share his personal Aqua-Lung with a forgotten survivor of the RMS Titanic, a waifish girl child stowaway found inexplicably in the frozen bilge of that unluckiest hulk and preserved down to the Dickensian smell of her burlap socks. Together they ascend – slowly, slowly, to prevent The Bends -- toward Calypso’slurching foredeck. In stereoscopic 3D animation by James Cameron.”
They saw it then, too. How all this incoming dross demanded gullibility far exceeding that already priced into myproposal – anchored, as it was, by capitalism’s self-pleasing animal spirits.
“So go ahead,” I challenged. “Rook the cards but make this flash-fiction punch-up look real. Let various contenders absorb a headshot or two, split their brows ugly and retreat between rounds Rocky-style to cornermen who cut. Then, mount the blood-spattered ring, grab the microphone that drops from the sky and raise my arm in literary triumph – to soon claim, via Prince Charles, your just reward for saving a life that hung in the balance due to America’s woeful lackofaffordable healthcare.”
Their adjudicators displayed a welcome propensity for larceny. And, true to my word, the requisite Bitcoin did transfer once I was declared THE WINNER. As only digitized currency can in this Oz-adjacent world, sealing precisely the sort of deal the folks over in marketing call “win-win.”
I wasn’t dismissed as a “that guy” with a Royal in his Rolodex. Instead, they saw milquetoast Tom Hanks marooned on a beach, H-E-L-P spelled across the talcum-white strand with crab exoskeletons and driftwood in a font size visible from space. Or, perhaps, a charity case awaiting pity like an RSPCA recidivist – a hangdog fellow writer. Past his prime, certainly. Lacking anywhere else to turn as SWAG’s cruel clock ticked to Zero Hour.
You may infer a plausible counter-narrative: that I have succumbed to inventiveness yet again, abetted by an agitator long dead who still enjoys stirring pots over Macallan and Montecristos.
In that contingency – which is to say, on the off chance I’ve imagined my West End windfall and, thusly, remain desperate for the sort of leg up success with your publication could provide – please know that every essential mechanism remains active. That, should you see your way to helping an old scribbler down on his luck, Prince Charles stands ready to make it worth your trouble.
Peace.
The author, a retired journalist, lives in Salinas, CA, and writes speculative fiction as a pastime. His recent work can be found in The European Literary Review, Periscope Literary and Spoon Knife 8 (forthcoming). He adores the 1990s unabashedly.