Testing by Robert F. Gross

Testing

The sky crackled. 

They led him across the causeway and up the escalator. Down below they had tossed the machine parts, glass eyes and chronometers. When they got to the top, he hesitated before activating the lift that would take him even further. He flipped a coin. It didn’t come up. Slipped the draft of his memoir under his windbreaker. Put his back against the wall and felt for the cool smoothness of the button. He pressed it and shot up.

The sky broke in two.

They hassled him for foreign currency. They wanted zlotys, pengos, drachmas. He turned up two quarters. They started shoving him around. They’d seen what he’d written, what he’d passed out in the laundromat and natural history museum. They weren’t finished with him yet. There was tomorrow night. What did he take them for, transcendentalists? They mark him up with pink crayolas. Bleach his graying mustache. Take his memoirs and origami it. He throws what’s left of his lager across their minivan.

The sky falls to one side. And the other.

He tries to complete the examination in under forty-seven minutes. He ticks off the answers with a sharpie, an avocado and blowfish sandwich in the other hand. He can’t identify the quotations because they are all made up. He can’t describe the brand products because he only bought generics. Knows the deathdays but not the birthdays.

He sneezes across questions # 13-17. Smears avocado on questions # 21-23. He says hell, I don’t need a membership card. My credo was encrypted long ago. Put in a time capsule.

He tosses the exam down among the machine parts and finishes his sandwich. 

Things flash. He forgets completely. Bleeds total ignorance from his nostrils and anus.

A carbon copy sky comes back in shreds. Little by little. It’s years before he looks up. When he does, it looks a lot like his memoirs. But in a foreign language. 

And he doesn’t care.


​

 Robert F. Gross? Bio? Robert F. Gross is a playwright, director, performance artist, writer, queer, lone wolf, and lost soul. He lives alone. His work has recently appeared in Local Nomad, Thirteen Mynah Birds, and After the Pause. ​

---