Notes from the God Chair by S.R. Bevilacqua
from Dystopia: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
Number 4 said she hated spiders.
Fuck, will she regret that. Number 1 isn’t moving. Sometimes they just shut down for a while.
The man was excited because he’d tried a new way to work, and it had saved him ten minutes. The system never even suggested it, but he tried it and he beat the system.
He sat in the dark, watching the monitors. An entire wall of them. It was like having forty-eight windows into Hell.
“If you press that button, someone gets hurt,” the man said into the mic.
No response. Just hollow eyes, not knowing where to look.
“If you press that button twice, someone gets maimed. But you get ice cream.
“I can’t.”
Then there was Number 8…
“If you press that button, someone gets hurt.”
“Okay.”
“If you press that button twice, someone gets maimed. But you get ice cream.
“I don’t like ice cream. What happens if I press it three times?”
The man had grown to like this Number 8.
Number 7 pulled off her fingernails with her teeth. It was a good morning, though, because the man had found his new way to work.
This story appears as part of Dystopia, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
Bio
S.R. Bevilacqua is a writer in Venice, California. His writing has been featured in the Mystery Tribune, The Brussels Review, Punk Noir Magazine (yes, this one!), as well as the anthologies Trembling with Fear, and Bite, which was just released by Graveside Press.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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