Story A Day In MAY - Day 4

 

Paper Cut

By J. Smith Kirkland

 

Paper cuts are the worst. Ramona doesn't even understand how it could happened. She had been chopping vegetables that morning. No cuts. Shaved her legs. No Cuts. She even managed to wrangle the neighbor's weird cat to remove the tissue box it had somehow gotten stuck on it's head. Not a single scratch. She picked up a new envelope from her desk. Deep cut that would not stop bleeding.

Oh, that envelope. She was going to mail the form to have the gas and water cut off at the old house. She had really hoped it would have sold by now, but she can't keep paying those bills. Hopefully she will be free of it soon. But for now, just get the form mailed.

That afternoon, the form, with a spot of blood on it, reached the sorting machine at the post office. The new high tech sorting machine, with the latest chemical detection devices and software. Unfortunately, the company that made the software decided they didn't need to spend so much money on software testers, and got rid of all of them except the owner's nephew. The results of this decision culminated in the blood on the envelope triggered an alarm stopping the mail sorter. It was a glitch in the software, AB positive blood was identified as ricin. There had never been AB negative blood detected by the machine before, and while blood was used while testing the devices software, apparently not AB positive blood.

The machine sounds an ear piercing alarm and stops dramatically fast, throwing another letter out of the sorter and into a small gap between the machine and the wall. The letter would never be found. The letter that was created using pasted together letters and emojis cut from printouts of twitter postings. It was a warning to the CIA that there would be consequences unless a man named Jojo Jordon was released from prison. He was convicted of breaking into a lottery vending machine and stealing scratch off tickets, but leaving the more than one thousand dollars in actual cash the machine contained.

The next day, Ramona is going to visit her friend downtown. She doesn't know what type of work her friend does, but there are lots of rules about signing in and getting a photo made for the visitor pass. Whenever she has asked her friend what they do there, he always says, “Well, then i'd have to kill you.” And laughs.

While she was signing in, the bandage came off. The cut was bleeding again. She got blood on the visitor log and the badge. She apologized profusely. Then she went down the hall to the glass doors that would open when she ran her badge through the reader. She had done this several times before. But today, it was not working. After three tries, the guard is alerted. He leaves his desk to investigate. He looks at the badge, wipes the blood off, and it works. He tells her where to find the first aid kit once she is inside.

While he was away from his post, the angry man walks in, and being able to avoid the sign in procedure, goes quickly to the elevator. His intended destination is a classified area. To avoid using his badge to enter, he shuffles papers near the door and waits for someone else to enter. As they are entering, he drops his badge. Bends down to get it. As the door shuts behind the other person, he quickly slips his badge in to stop the lock from catching. Looks around, waits a few seconds, then opens the door and enters.

After getting a new bandage, Ramona and her friend leave the building for lunch. They are sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying the sunny day and teriyaki chicken. At one point, she picked up her fork, and it pressed into the cut just the wrong way. She dropped the fork and pulled her arm back, accidentally elbowing the server behind her, who in turned spilled a glass of water on the woman at the next table who was looking in a compact mirror as she reapplied her lipstick. The mirror tilted up towards the sun and reflected into the eye of a sniper who was on the roof. The sniper was there to protect an alien ambassador from the zoxtroon nebula. The sniper twitched when the sun hit his eye, and he accidentally pulled the trigger, killing the ambassador and starting an all out interstellar situation that resulted in a war with multiple planets.

That's how a small cut on her finger led to the end of the world.

THE PROMPT

Write a 1000 word flash fiction story that ends with the line: “That’s how a small cut in her finger led to the end of the world.”