Dinkaltranen

Richard had made it. 10 years ago he was grinding his way through this last years of high school blowing up his face with fryer oil. Now he was a senior engineer at one of the most renowned aerospace companies in the military-industrial complex.

You know the one.

The mortgage had been paid off during the pandemic when rates dropped to nothing and he was free as an engineer to work from home while doing as much overtime as he was allowed. His Mum would be proud. His Dad wanted him to bring home a girlfriend, but so did he.

He had insomnia. It wasn’t the work that kept him up, the idea that he was writing code to improve guidance and communication systems that would let them kill people 0.032% faster, after all he had sold his morality and dignity at 15 in front of the deep fryer. If it wasn’t then, it was when he spent $100k studying to be put in a room full of what was supposed to be future engineers, but was actually the learning equivalent of a schoolkid’s chapter-a-week book club reading, and still for some reason was too hard for certain people that they needed to cheat to pass.

It was like going back to high school. He had to tolerate being treated as a mouth-breather to get where he needed to go. Swallow his pride, head down, get it done. That’s part of why he was such a good engineer, that and the innovative creativity when it came to making two PCBs talk to one another in a slightly better way. He could have done it twenty years ago if he had been born earlier.

What he’d done would’ve been named after him, he’d have gained so much money and fame that he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. Maybe start his own company, maybe buy a holiday house or invest in gold and start a family. These days, it barely secured a promotion on its own. Software mechanisms that would be the gold standard for the next thirty years at least, and it had gotten him a 12% pay rise with about 30% more responsibility.

Dating had been rough.

“So what do you do for a living?”

“Have you seen those videos of the drone strikes Obama ordered on those hospitals? I wrote the software that let them make sure they were accurate enough that there was no survivors.”

He didn’t actually tell them that, he told them he worked in aerospace. The people who build your planes you take for a trip overseas are the same people who make different planes that can drop enough explosives to level a dozen blocks in the middle east. General Electric made dishwashers and the GAU-8 machine gun, and BMW made cars for the Nazis, but most people don’t like thinking about that.

He owned his own place, had no debt, didn’t drink or do drugs, he could cook well, had a close knit group of friends, and generally speaking apart from the work thing he was a very good, pleasant person, and dating still very stupidly hard. There were many fish in the sea, and dating apps provided an entire ocean. But holy fuck was it bad. After nine months of scammers, fake people, and straight up crazies, he pulled the plug on them. Forty first-dates and nights. That was enough.

There had been one early on that had been promising. An early childcare worker who had moved here when she was four. Heart shaped face, pretty laugh, she seemed like she knew where she wanted to be in the world. She was trying to lose weight and succeeding. She invited him over to her apartment for dinner, and they got along great with one another. She asked him to stay the night, and when he asked what that meant she told him that they didn’t have to do anything. They ended up in bed cuddling, his arm draped over her body. For the first time in half a decade he slept soundly.

...Up until the point she woke up screaming and nearly blinded him with a rake of her nails at 5 in the morning. Turns out she hadn’t actually been ‘moved’ here as she put it. He ran away so fast he forgot his shoes and he had no intention of getting them back.

For some reason that’s what he thought about now as he lay awake at night after deleting the last app off his phone nearly 7 months later. Why did he sleep so well? What was it that made that happen? He could figure out anything except his own body.

Maybe it was his own body that wasn’t the problem. He grabbed the pillows from the spare and laid them beside him in bed. He blinked, and awoke a few hours later. He felt refreshed. That day at work he even greeted the guards at the security checkpoint with a polite smile. The interns though, no, they deserved the glassy glare he gave as they did the one precise thing they had been instructed not to do.

When he got home that night he cooked a turnip and beet soup to give him some time to get to work. It took him a while, he hadn’t sewn since childhood outside of a few odd home repairs, but he sewed together the guest bedroom pillows in a way where you could clean both the pillows and cases if needed. Stitching away while the pot simmered behind him, he felt at peace. The peace the method gave him was wonderful, almost as serene as the sleep he got that night clutching his newly made person-length pillow.

Today not even the interns could bother him. A coworker bricked a 50k military circuit, his stocks dropped 5% in a single day, and yet, he still was the best he’d ever been.

There was a roll of memory foam on Facebook marketplace, that he managed to talk up from ‘free’ to ‘$25’ after insisting to pick it up that night. He cut into the foam until he formed a small, cupcake sized mound. Then another. Retrieving his long pillow from his bedroom, he stitched in the breasts, and added an internal flap that he filled with a hot water bottle.

Boiling hot tomato soup exploded from the stovetop, lacerating the mushroom grey walls, his blue work shirt, and his pristine white pillow with blood. He screamed, and princess carried his girlfriend to the bathroom. He laid her in the bath, took off her clothes, and washed her until all the blood was gone. As he treated her burns he coaxed and cooed. Told her what a good girl she was.

“That must have hurt a lot, and you didn’t even make a noise, not like me! You’re far too good for me.”

When she was clean and dry he carried her again to bed after preparing her a hot water bottle for her cramps. He draped an arm over her spongy, cotton body, and kissed her on the back. Her helped her roll over so that now she was holding him, and he could feel her cupcakes press into the back of his chest. It was the most comfortable he’d ever been.

“I’m so lucky to have you.” He said. Not even the smoke wafting in from the kitchen could bother him now. “Just so lucky.”

By the time he realised the kiss on the back of his neck was that of flame and not his wife it was already too late.

Needless to say, he slept like a baby.