A friend of mine has asked me to write a short story about him and seeing how I’ll do anything anyone asks me – this is it.
In my early teens my mother offered to drive me and two other friends to California. She wanted to visit an old friend, take some time off from work and waste two days driving across the desert. I was living in Corpus Christi, TX at the time and this drive is the most unscenic shit in the world. There is absolutely nothing to look at. The best thing to do is sleep or reminisces over an enjoyable sexual experience. Obviously we wouldn’t be discussing pussy with my mom in the car, so we spent most of our time trying to sleep or telling PG-13 rated horror stories.
Somewhere in Arizona my friend Rick decided to fart in the car. I guess by that point he was like, “fuck it” because he’s already been there for 12 hours and we’re not stopping anytime soon. No one heard it over the ripping sounds of speeding tires on pavement, but we smelt it.
It was awful.
My mom smelt it first and then me. I think it was so bad my other friend Chuck was woken up out of his sleep. We thought the Machines had dropped a nuclear bomb of dog shit and our faces were about to melt off. You know like how in Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor has that dream about the kids playing in the playground and she’s shaking like crazy on the chain link fence, but they can’t hear her? They all look so happy and then a nuclear blast goes off in the background turning them all to ash. That was like us in the car happily listening to the radio and daydreaming about the first thing we’re gonna do when we get to the ocean.
Rick’s fart was that nuclear blast.
We had to roll the windows down while traveling at over 75 miles per hour. Loose paper is twirling around through the cab of the car and out the windows and my mother is screaming through the tornado for me to hold onto her purse. My friend Chuck is practically hanging halfway out the back window and my mom is frantically trying to steer the car through the storm and her own watering eyes. The fart was like acid. I’m just sitting there patiently waiting for death to take us, but Rick wasn’t worried at all. He only leaned back and smiled while enjoying the show. Nothing we did would make the smell go away. I suggested we light the car on fire and take our chances on foot. If the Terminator killed us it was still better than this shit. Rick’s asshole had been sent here from a post-apocalyptic 2029 in order to exterminate what is left of the human race. The only problem being the future humans didn’t send back a resistance fighter to protect us. There was no dirty dude in a trench coat and holding a shot gun ready to blow Rick’s asshole’s brains out. Fuckin’ Skynet, they always forget the details. That dude was my father and now I’ll never know the truth!
Rick’s asshole was an emotionless and efficient killing machine with a powerful machine endoskeleton, but with an external layer of living tissue that made it resemble a human friend worthy of taking on a surf trip. Knowing her fate, my mother was already recording herself on audio tapes she intends to pass on to her unborn son. That son is the one who will one day take on the machines – me! But Skynet never sent back, John, the resistance fighter to fall in love with my mother and make me. They were supposed to have sex in the future, but then somehow come back in time when I’m 16 years old in order to protect me from Rick’s asshole. Or I don’t know, it was weird. Rick’s fart was like PCP and none of our brains were working correctly.
The machine stayed there with us in the car for what seemed like 30 miles. I asked Rick to sacrifice himself by opening the car door and throwing his ass on the road so the CPU could be run over and destroyed forever. That way his technology could never be used to create Skynet in the first place, but he wouldn’t budge – only giggle and stare. I then tried to reason with the Terminator fart by explaining it couldn’t just go around killing people. When it asked why I said, “Because you just can’t, okay?!”
You’re not a Terminator anymore.
The fart then told me he knows why we cry.
It told me that he could never do that. It would never be capable to feel or know love and just when the fart was ready to blow out the window and out of my life forever, I screamed,
“I ORDER YOU NOT TO GO! I ORDER YOU NOT TO GO!!”
I was bawling my eyes out and this fart being the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. The Terminator fart then embraced me and threw itself out the window, killing it in the process.
As my mother’s Chevrolet Corsica made its way through the desert, I looked to the future with hope, believing that if a machine can somehow learn the value of human life, then perhaps humanity isn’t doomed to self destruct.
