Slipping into Madness

C1: Curious and Curiouser!

History can be boring. So, it’s up to you to spice things up for us. Pick any person in history. Write up a short story about this person with titles as ridiculous as “Ghengis Khan Gets a New Haircut”. In other words, make it fun! (<1000 words)

William Shakespeare Takes a Nap

From where I sit, behind the camera, I can see him. William Shakespeare. Yawning. Stretching. Putting down his quill, which is a good thing, because I don't think I could handle another writer lying nose down in his own ink well. He leaves a crossed over sheet on the table, lines crossed out, rhymes selected and discarded. And there he heads to his cot in a little office in the bowels of the Globe.

And I sigh. It's terrible to know that he's human, after all.

On my first day of History Patrol, my trainer warned me. “Don't watch your heroes. There's no quicker way to lose respect for a person than to see a grown man (or woman) throw a tantrum over nothing.”

I didn't listen to him, of course. I knew better.

As Historians, we were never allowed to do any actual interaction with history. That would have been too risky, given the probabilities and paradoxes involved. But time travel, combined with the latest in anti-gravity and cloaking technology meant that recording of various historical events was possible, and necessary given the curiosity of those involved.

As a Junior Historian, I spent my assignments primarily tucked into various ceilings, pointing recording devices at the various scenes. We are the true eavesdroppers, the itch that people feel when they're about to do something great that makes them certain that there's something out there—I can't tell you how many times I've had some historical person point to my camera, shouting something about God watching. People do feel it, of course, the eyes and ears on them.

We avoid battles as much as possible. After all, floating does not make us invulnerable, and no one wants to catch a crossbow bolt to the accelerator. Instead, we follow the important bits of history—the art and the literature, the music. All things lost to history because of circumstance or prejudice.

But all that is incidental. So far, my assignments had been fine.

I didn't mind seeing Leonardo da Vinci play paper airplanes centuries before airplanes were invented in a display of genius that he didn't even pay attention to. I didn't mind Geoffrey of Monmouth's smell. After all, everyone of the time had odors that were problematic to modern sensibilities, and he had spent most of his writing time in prison after all. I didn't mind realization that Robert Burns was deliberately speaking in limericks for the entire time we observed him—it fit. And I loved the opportunity to record lost works of literature or art that had been disregarded by their own time.

No, I never minded any of the human foibles that I found as I floated, mission after mission, reading over the shoulders of giants . . . until I met my own hero.

I didn't know that I regarded him so highly, until I saw Shakespeare, that greatest of poets and playwrights, snoring, with the greatest, most invasive of snores, so loud that it literally shook dust down to land on his drooling mouth.

Word count: 510