Night Off
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Floating two feet above his sheets in the lotus position was the Buddha, highest of all the bodhisattva. Richie recognized him from the small shrine at his friend Ravi’s house, and squeaked in surprise.
“Hello,” said the Buddha.
“Hello,” said Richie, “you’re not the fat man I was expecting.”
“I know,” said the Buddha. “Saint Nicholas has fallen ill tonight. I am filling in.”
Richie sat up and stared at the Buddha’s smiling face. “So, did you bring me presents?”
“No. Something better.” The Buddha leaned down and touched Richie lightly on the forehead with the tip of his finger. Richie stiffened, then instantly relaxed. He forgot about his conflicts with his older brother. His poor batting record no longer mattered. His need for material possessions bled away into vapor. A smile as grand and beatific as the Buddha’s grew on his face as Little Richie Spencer achieved enlightenment.
All over the world, children awoke to the Buddha’s touch. When they went downstairs in the morning, they politely refused their Christmas presents, announcing that they would be donating all their toys to charity. Those children’s parents were forced to return the gifts, creating in one day the worst holiday sales season in history. Stores went bankrupt, but the owners didn’t seem to mind.
Enlightenment spread quickly from the children to the adults, like the most communicable virus. As the need for a consumer-based economy plummeted, governments from democracies to imperialist dictatorships fell. Each person contributed to society enough to gain the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, and spent the rest of their time meditating. A new world was born.
“Nicholas!” called the fat man’s wife. “Where are you?” She had been looking for him for nearly an hour, astonished he had managed to get off the couch. She found him in the attic, swinging from a noose, his face bloated and purple. She put her hands on her hips and exhaled loudly.
“You come down from there right now,” she said. “This can’t be helping your cold.”
The fat man opened his eyes and looked at his wife. His vitreous capillaries had burst, replacing the white in his eyes with red.
“Why did you even bother with this?” asked his wife. “You know you can’t die.”
The fat man burst into tears. “Woe ho ho.”
His wife looked him up and down and said, “Well, now that you’re out of a job, I can finally put you on that diet.”
The rope around his neck creaked softly.
“Shit,” he said.
“Night Off” was originally published in Four Seasons in One Day, a chapbook (with Janet J. E. Chui) of fiction, artwork and poetry which was launched at the 2003 World Fantasy Convention in Washington D.C. by Two Cranes Press.
Jason Erik Lundberg is a graduate of the 2002 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and is currently working on a novel. His fiction has appeared in Electric Velocipede, Intracities, and Zoran Živković’s Serbian sf magazine Polaris.
Copyright © 2003 by Jason Erik Lundberg.
