BPD (flash fiction)

BPD

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

            It started on the East Coast. Cases popped up from New York to Washington D.C. It spread like wildfire in ever increasing waves. The CDC had no explanation for the disease or its possible contamination vector. No explanation, no diagnosis and no method to fight it even though the symptoms were clear – the blue blood, the obsessive desire to speak in public, the need to take from the poor and give to the rich, and a strange fascination for guns and tea parties. The American Psychological Association rushed to update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to include Borderline Patriotic Disorder.  

Sigmund Freud Psychoanalyzes Albert Einstein

Sigmund Freud Psychoanalyzes Albert Einstein

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

So tell me when was it you started having these visions of riding a rainbow?

A light beam! A light beam! Are you even listening to what I’m saying?

Okay, okay a light beam. So tell me when did you first start having this delusion?

Oh Jesus and Mary, I’ve told you it’s not a delusion, it’s a thought experiment. I envision myself traveling at the speed of light – essentially riding a light beam – and look around and see what I see.

You mean like you think you are a light beam. Would you say that’s a little unusual. Most people dream of flying or being a sex star, not flying through the empty darkness of outer space.

Space is only part of it, time is the rest.

So you feel out of time as well.

No, no, no. Please listen to what I’m saying. I thought that was your job here, I thought that’s what you do. I suppose next you are going to ask me about my wandering uterus. Now listen, since I was a little boy I’ve imagined flying on a beam of light and trying to understand what the world, the universe would look like if I did.

So was this beam of light ‘penis-shaped.’

Oh Lord have mercy. No, just a beam of light, no rainbows, no penises, no Oedipus complex. Just physics. If I fly through the universe at the speed of light I will not grow old as fast as those I left behind, this is one result. It’s about the shrinkage.

Shrinkage?

Yes, shrinkage of space, dilation of the universe. Thrusting through and everything being relative.

Do you love your relatives as well? Do they fly with you?

No, how many times must I tell you, it’s just me on a light beam.

Ah, I see, self-pleasure. Hmmmm and look at that. My how time flies. I guess ours is up we’ll pick up there next week.