My phone downloaded an update and now it shoots lasers. I noticed after I heard people talking about it at the bus stop. A guy on a bench in a hat like an oversized inside-out sock said, “Check out this shit.” Then he accidentally lasered off this old guy’s leg. He crouched over him and kept saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” as the old guy convulsed in the patch of grass where people let their dogs shit.
The bus was emptier than usual. An unusual number of buildings we passed were on fire. I saw some kids run down a side street carrying severed heads by their hair.
At work, nobody had turned on the coffee pot yet. Some of my co-workers were always saying the company should spluge on one of those machines that brews coffee instantly out of little disposable pods. Seeing the empty pot and realizing I didn’t know where the filters were kept or if the pot needed washed, I understood.
I found my colleagues in the conference room crowded around the flat-screen TV. Onscreen, an expensive car wound over mountains and past rock formations and disappeared into the desert. Then: live coverage of laser chaos in schools, airports, grocery stores, movie theaters, hair salons, and Congress.
The boss never showed up. No one got anything done.
That night in the middle of dinner, our kid pulled out his phone.
We said, “No phones at the table.” He acted like he didn’t hear us.
Instead of him putting his phone away, my wife and I suddenly discovered we had our phones out too.
Then the doorbell rang and we all jumped. It’s a loud doorbell.
It was the lady from next door. We never talk to her. There’s no good reason we never talk to her. She handed me a plateful of pie. “Try it,” she said.
“Mmmm,” I said. “Delicious.”
“I sliced the apples with the new app,” she said.
“Wow,” I said.
“Can you help me dial an ambulance?” she said, holding her fingerless hand up between us. “I lasered them off.”
Inside, I discovered that my wife and child had lasered each other into piles of laser-sliced meat.
Somehow, those piles of laser-sliced meat were still capable of operating their phone lasers well enough to laser me into a pile of laser-sliced meat too.
Somehow, even as a pile of laser-sliced meat, I was able to call an ambulance for our fingerless neighbor.
Somehow, when the ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, there was a moment when it seemed like everything might be ok.
And in that moment, I looked at my laser-sliced wife and my laser-sliced child with my laser-sliced eyes. I thought, future, here we come.
Then an EMT dragged our screaming fingerless neighbor through the piles of us.
Rick Claypool is the author of SKULL SLIME TENTACLE WITCH WAR (Anxiety Press, 2024), THE MOLD FARMER (Six Gallery Press, 2020), and LEECH GIRL LIVES (Spaceboy Books, 2017). He lives in Rhode Island.
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