Please welcome our new serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday
Crumbling Slowly Down to the Ocean Part 3: The Moss Foundation
The bar smelled of stale beer, piss, and disinfectant. A black dwarf with an eye patch and a hell of a bank shot was shooting pool with a tall, lanky albino dressed all in white. The pool table was positioned awkwardly near the entrance to the men’s room; the green felt was worn through and almost totally degraded. An old man in a wheelchair, his left leg lopped off just above the knee, sat in a far corner nursing a beer and quietly watching the dwarf and the albino with a suspicious gaze, as if he expected all hell to break loose at any moment.
“Care for some company?” Evelyn repeated. “I have the entire afternoon off and I haven’t been to the museum in years.”
I had to get to know her a little better first; in this part of Hollywood, jumping into a car with a stranger, no matter how attractive and appealing the imagination of the libido can make it sound, can be counterproductive to one’s attempts to remain above ground. Just ask the unclaimed bodies resting in shallow graves up in the Angeles National Forest.
“What do you do for a living?” I motioned the silent bartender for another round.
“I work for the Moss Foundation in Santa Monica,” she said, then ran the tip of her pink tongue across her crimson lips.
“Never heard of ‘em.”
“We’re a think tank, privately funded. We’re concerned with the idea of entropy, the tendency of energy in a fixed system to run down.”
“So you sit around and think about entropy all day?” I tried to keep a smile from playing on my lips but intellectual bullshit always makes me laugh.
“It’s not terribly amusing,” she said, batting her lashes quickly. “Machines cannot go on forever, you know. The whole process that keeps our modern society afloat – technology, capitalism, industrialism – is subject to thermodynamic entropy, which creates waste, and communication entropy, which creates silence.”
“You’re waiting for an apocalypse,” I said.
“We’re trying to forestall it. Or at least slow its progress.”
