With the Speed of Flatulence

or Hang Onto Your Pocketbook

Hello readers! What follows below is a writing experiment between the multi talented

Vanya Bagaev

and myself. It’s our submission to the STSC monthly Symposium #38 on Speed.

Vanya dm’d me yesterday to encourage me to submit something with the ulterior idea that it might also encourage him to get something done. Neither of us had a clue on this month’s subject so channeling

Terry Freedman

, also an STSC member who has excellent ideas on how to get started writing, I suggested we collaborate with each of us writing a paragraph and passing it back and forth without any planning or discussion whatsoever. It was fun and it got a little silly because both Vanya and I tend to decay into silliness from time to time. Please enjoy and remember the esteemed Vanya is sending us all beams of appreciation, which is nice.

Felix and Betsy play a game

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Everything in this world has sped up to such a degree that the very notion of speed has got itself properly frightened and stopped existing altogether. Take, say, a thousand years back — everything was dead slow, you could even say nothing was happening, so much nothing that sometimes a whole hundred years would pass and not a single event would occur. Now, though, there’s that much going on — bloody ‘ell, you’re clutching your head, tearing your hair out till you’re completely and absolutely bald. The notion of speed started feeling just like that: all baldy, all bare, unsightly, writhing from terrorshame in some corner well away from everything that’s happening, whilst all that lot just sort of happens of its own accord, so fast it’s like it’s all at once, like it’s even in reverse order. Yesterday, for instance, on Monday, such an amount of this, that and the other happened — crikey! — would’ve done for a whole century in the Middle Ages. And today… eeh, best not even say, probably, because whilst this text was being typed up, the volume of what’s occurred has already surpassed the number of events in this text itself in its entirety, even the upcoming paragraphs, look—

There’s no sense in it at all. Maybe relativity isn’t quite what Einstein thought it was… Betsy was trying to pay attention as Felix continued pontificating on the notion of speed but she couldn’t seem to focus no matter how engrossing she found the subject. After that chance meeting on the train, just a few days ago, days that seemed like minutes, if the pace of time still existed, she and Felix had spent nearly every waking moment together at the local café. At first she was spellbound by his theories. She had never met anyone so like her but as fascinated as she was by his mind she was slowly losing hers. It happened unexpectedly, in a flash, like lightning. They were having their coffee discussing the probability of parsnip pudding tasting like chocolate when she dropped her pocketbook under the table. Felix jumped out of his seat and crawled under the table to fetch it. It was then that her world started to crumble. All crouched down on his hands and knees she saw it. His baggy britches were drawn taunt against it and she finally noticed. Felix had the finest ass she had ever seen.

Then unexpected happened — Felix’s britches split. Double crikey! Embarrassed and horrified, or rather embarrified, he jumped up in rapid motion and in the same rapid motion hit the table with his head, or it was something with the gravity and the table hit him, for he couldn’t quite fathom what was going on at all. The dishes clattered, the drinks splashed and spilled onto the table, flowing in uneven streams straight towards Felix leaning out from there. His brioline was ruined! Triple crikey! Surprised by the unexpectedness and coldness of the sensations on his head and the back of his neck, Felix jerked again and hit his head once more. Tense and neurotic atmosphere imposed by a woman’s presence, moreso Betsy, hence stress, his neural connections as taunt as his britches once were. Two shocks, two sudden hits with the concussion potential, unwanted baptism in vodka elderflower lemonade, dead strong both in lemonity and alcoholity — all that made him realise something. Speed doesn’t exist! And if speed doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist either! Then music doesn’t exist! Chronology is a conspiracy everyone is complicit in, and to his luck, the faster time goes, the faster life passes, the more events occur in that furious whirlwind, the easier it is to understand it as it truly is. Well, at least he didn’t fart, he thought.

Betsy couldn’t think straight. What the hell just happened? Or rather when the hell did it happen? Felix fumbled. Betsy stumbled as she quickly jumped up and back to avoid the hot soup or ice cold limoncello or whatever the hell he was drinking (was that a hint of elderflower?) and strong black coffee. Tumbling backwards with no time to steady herself, she crashed right into the table next to theirs and as it toppled over into the next and then so on like dominos; the room began its collapse into chaos. She must have hit her head, because she instantly understood that every moment is an orderly disordered progression towards infinity and that as you approach it you get farther away. How long did this thought remain understood? Only as long as it took her contused and confused brain to register the smell. Did Felix fart? Too bad, such a lovely ass.

Felix couldn’t think straight either, moreso he wasn’t even standing straight yet, and no sane person is capable of proper thinking being in the position he was in: on all fours, hunched over in pain, brain convolutions so convoluted one wished to deconvolute them back. Flatulence typically exits the body at around 10 feet per second (roughly 7 mph or 11 km/h), though this can vary based on factors like pressure and the person’s muscle control. Felix’s muscle control was decent due to decent muscle development down there overall, hence his widely appreciated ass. Thus, surely he didn’t fart; he would’ve noticed. Regardless of the fact (non-fact), the ongoing café-collapse seemed to be happening faster than any fart could ever dream of. Tables were toppling and flipping over, sending plates, glasses and cutlery in the air, fountaining everything with various tomato-made dishes and alcohol, people were evacuating in panic, shouting, yelling, praying. As the dominoing tables reached a big oak cupboard propping the wall, it miraculously tumbled and with a great weight knocked down the wall. Quadruple crikey! Quite so. The speed of life seemed to have reached such unprecedented levels it was impossible to keep up. You blink — you miss centuries worth of events. You think — you lose important empirical material from the real world and never recover, dying from fomo on the spot. With such speed the predicament was unfolding (truly it was, there’s no better word than “unfolding”; unfolding into what? unfolding where, mind you?) all everyone could do was to be present, including Felix Futzbucker and Betsy McCall who now, as the café’s ceiling rushed themwards, both had to hide under the table.

Now, a café table isn’t an armored tank. Betsy knew their lives were in danger of joining the disintegration of their known world. Time began to run but it too was confused, running in the wrong direction. Betsy’s life flashed before her eyes. An instant, a mere instant, memories, accelerated creating an internal doppler whine. Her brain abuzz, she was paralyzed. Felix seemed likewise, or was he embarrassed or horrified, or both? (There ought to be a word for that). The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes to await her fate was the blackboard for the daily specials. Cabbage Soup $6.99. Ahah, that explains the smell. At least not asparagus. As the room filled with dust she calmly waited. Surely the dust would settle.

But how fast? How fast would it settle? When? “Would” it at all? Felix wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t hit with anything and could see what was going on; he only had to take his dusted glasses off. It wasn’t just the room, it wasn’t just the café. When the cupboard tumbled, when the wall flopped, when the ceiling fell, it did too cause rather an unfortunate chain of events: the café’s all four walls collapsed into all directions onto the buildings nearby: a vet clinic, some hipster matcha place, a small nearly-bankrupt bank, a ten storey block of flats. They all, of course, also tumbled and started collapsing, and the latter, the highest of them, hit the block of flats next to it (20 storeys and counting), and that one then collapsed sideways into the neighbourhood, on the way destroying a good fortune of other city amenities: hospitals, TV tower, mobile tower, a bridge, which, upon the total collapse, hit the town across the river, where it continued the unfortunate run-on sentence of destruction and havoc. Same happened with other towns and cities around, same happened with the subsequent ones, until the dropped pocketbook phantom-fart-induced domino effect imploded into the mass destruction of the whole country — via buildings, bridges, eclectic wires, trains, planes, etc. causing tsunamis and earthquakes from such a planet-wide resonance, resulting in volcano eruptions and accidental (or not so) activation of the nuclear facilities, such as rockets, submarines, power plants, until the whole Earth was touched and scorched, until it fell victim to the catastrophe, alas. The time it took to happen you can guess yourself; hint: very quick, super speedy, so that accelerationists would envy. Compared to other progresses, this one was sudden, immediate like a clap of hands — a few hundred seconds and the whole world is gone — absolute crikey — except… Felix and Betsy who were still hiding under the table.

Slowly they rose. Felix, always the gentleman, offered an outstretched hand to Betsy. Accepting it with gratitude, she steadied herself, brushing debris off her soiled skirt and particle board out of her hair she surveyed the destruction. Turning towards Felix she asked:

“Same time tomorrow? You promised to tell me about TRÜTH.”

“That would be an absolute delight. But we might have to find another spot.”

… Credits roll. We hear the music…

Should you enjoy this collaboration, subscribe, share, and look into Vanya’s Negroni fund — for God’s sake buy the man a drink, he spilled his! His book Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel is the best way to learn more about his work.

Bye!

☮️

J. and V.