Pure Darkness
[The scene is pure darkness. Not a thing to be seen. This is because you are listening to an audio recording some years in the future, a future which you cannot imagine, and perhaps you like listening to audio recordings in the future with your eyes closed, anyway, so you cannot see the hovercars zooming by outside, the gigantic ads twitching and dancing on the glass of the buildings outside your window, and the thirty foot tall genetic experiments gone wrong, which now, funnily enough, have gone right enough, because they wander the streets, keeping kids off of them, and out of trouble. So your eyes are shut. The only noise you can hear, besides the audio recording, is the bleep and bloop of the kids down the hall playing on their Xbox 780,000,000.]
VOICE: This will be my last will and testament.
VOICE: The sound you hear in the background is the hiss of the tape recorder wheels, which is quite old by now, nearly as old as myself. Wait, no. That’s not the tape recorder wheels. It’s Kylie Minogue, who has just come on the radio. My apologies. Let me go turn it off.
[Sound of feet clumping across the room. A satisfying plastic *clack* from across the room.]
VOICE: Right. Done. No, no, it’s still playing. Oh, right. Sorry. Here it is.
[The sound of fumbling ensues. The sound of a space bar being pushed and Kylie is silenced.]
VOICE: Where was I? Right. My last will and testament. But first, a little recap. I have lead a full life. I know you may not believe this. Wait? Is that Kylie back on? Hold on… I swear I can hear Kylie. Is it just me? Future people, can you hear it, too?
[Do not nod your head. Unless, of course, you canhear Kylie Minogue’s dulcet tones wafting through the air.]
VOICE: Listen, I just can’t keep going with this with that music playing in the background. I’m going out to get some more cigarettes.
TAPE RECORDER: *click*
ANOTHER VOICE, THIS ONE NOT FROM THE AUDIO RECORDING BUT FROM FRIGHTENINGLY CLOSE TO YOUR EAR, WHICH CAUSES YOU TO JUMP AND NEARLY FALL OUT OF YOUR CHAIR: And that is why, kids, we have no money for Christmas presents this year, because your great-great-grandfather never got around to recording his last will and testament and the government, as they did in those days, assumed he meant to give them all his earthly possessions, and we got nothing, down the line at all.
And we keep plugging on. For whatever reason.
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