Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Just a Chemical Imbalance

200 men and boys all in one room, and not a female in sight - there's an odd sense in which everything feels slightly off-kilter, yet at the same time there is a sense of perfect naturalness in the camaraderie of deep manly voices and booming male laughter.

Perhaps it's just a chemical imbalance in the air.

We sit around the tables slurping and munching at baked potatoes and roast beef coated with a layer of heavy gravy so thick we can feel our arteries hardening just from looking at it. Laughing with our mouths full and wiping excess food with our sleeves, we say things like: "I wonder if they'll serve this meal at the Ladies Conference," or "Leftovers? What's that?"

Then at the far corner of the dining hall appear two attractive young women. Perhaps they are college students volunteering in the kitchen, or perhaps they are simply local strays who sense the strange but powerful tug of this peculiar imbalance. In the moment of their arrival, there is a lightening of the air in the room, and we all feel it.

The older men sense it like a change in barometric pressure. A hundred pairs of eyes look away from their sour cream (topped with baked potato) and glance around the room in perplexed bemusement, trying to find the source of this strange feeling - this sense of perfect naturalness which somehow feels slightly off-kilter.

For the younger crowd, whose senses are more finely honed, the change in atmosphere cannot be described with a barometer; it is more accurately measured by the spin of a compass or the blink of a homing beacon. For them there is no confusion or bemusement, and for one brief moment the sound of slurping and munching is replaced by the snap and crackle of sudden and painful whiplash.

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