Flash Challenge: "The Return"

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Wormtongue
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Flash Challenge: "The Return"

Post by Wormtongue »

We've only had one entry for this challenge, so take it away Robin Lipinkski!

They Will Come

By: Robin B Lipinski

Mr. John J. McDunn was a quirky sort of fellow. Modern society deemed him to have various mental conditions, all relating to being a person who had to have everything in order.

John had all his tools in order from large hammer to small hammer, large wrenches to small wrenches, large screw drivers to small screwdrivers. Even the shop the tools were housed in was so clean and tidy it could be a showcase article in some fancy magazine dealing with beautiful, tidy, clean shops and homes.

There was no significant other for John as he was the kind of person no one could tolerate for any serious amount of time longer than a day. His tidy habits and compulsive habits of having everything in his life arranged perfectly tended to make his contacts a bit uneasy.

If instructions for a recipe said one cup of flour to be used, that was exactly what he measured; a flat back of a knife slid across the top of the cup ensured success.

Life is not perfect, just ask any parent of a two year old child. Or listen to the stories of any mechanic, construction worker, or person who tries to get something done correctly only to be faced with the reality of, “Oh crap…” as a tool breaks, a boat sinks, new eyeglasses get a scratch on the lens only days of being purchased. Life truly is an orderly form of chaos.

It was a fun and interesting fact regarding the constant obstacle of chaos getting in the way of Perfection; Murphy’s Law. A law basically saying, “If it can go wrong, it will.” This is a law many accept and know full well of how well the law works.

Many people have also come up with other forms of excuses to explain accidents, broken items of value, and even that which mysteriously disappears. One interesting excuse for something getting lost was the constantly used phrase from people when they are missing a sock, “I guess the dryer ate one.”

Mr. John J. McDunn was an exception. He did nothing wrong. He broke nothing. He never got lost or lose anything. His life was one of order and perfection. It might seem strange, but John did indeed fold his laundry fresh from the dryer only to find seven Individual socks. It was odd he did not get upset or angry when learning he was missing one sock.

This was how his life went. Absolutely perfect in every way, and if you had to say anything negative about him it was the fact that he always had an extra sock when washing socks and drying them in a dryer. Thousands of socks.

If you dug deeper in the mystery of John and his single socks you would only see John smiling and taking the single sock and storing it away into a drawer until he had eight single pieces, and then with a slight sigh, combine them all so he then had four pair of socks. The mystery was not the single socks, no, it was the fact that his sock collection always stayed the same number. Thirty-two pairs of socks exactly.

The days after John died on the correct day and time of perfection…the people closing his estate had an easy job of it. Everything was clean and perfect. Everything was going perfectly. It was a perfect day. It was perfect indeed until one of the workers opened the door on the outdoor shop.

As the door opened outward, hundreds of single socks poured out.

The sizes of the socks ranged from gigantic to tiny, while the colors were black, white and every color in between. It was amazing. The single socks could not be stopped. No matter how long or fast the workers removed the socks, they were immediately replaced.

What you do not know is that while John was perfect in every way, he was a ‘single’ sock in the souls owned by God. Because of this John always lost a sock in the dryer, a sock going straight to hell.

Why the pieces of cloth went to hell is a mystery for another day, suffice to say, a lot of socks went to hell in John’s dryer as well as millions of other dryers spread across the face of the Earth.

Another thought you do not know is that God does laundry. God washes and dries Life, Life is God’s laundry. When God dries the laundry there is always a missing sock and since these are the stockings of God the missing sock would go…well…the missing sock could not go to heaven as they already were there. So, the missing socks went to the next best. The perfect home of Mr. John J McDunn.
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