I came up with this idea while making coffee. I thought it would be fun if I took an hour or two to see what I could do with it. It is the story of a man driven insane by an artificial sweetener dispenser. I hope you enjoy this little horror-thriller short story.
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Stevia Sugar Substitute, by J.J. Jacobs
It started one year ago, whilst I made my customary morning cup of espresso. My prodigious coffee consumption had forced me to substitute my one teaspoon of sugar with two stevia tablets, a natural sugar substitute. The stevia tablet dispenser had a standard artificial sweetener push-to-release trigger. Like all these dispensers, the delivery system was temperamental.
I opened the dispenser on the 13th of March and got the two pills in three tries. Those two tablets, how they clinked when they hit the bottom of the small cup, haunt me. I recall the taste of the coffee; it was sweet; the dispenser worked. The problem began when I poured my second cup. I pressed the trigger; I pressed it again. Twenty… thirty times… it would not release a tablet. I recall how I smiled, how I laughed at the absurdity of the situation… what were the odds? I relented, added a teaspoon of sugar, and went about my morning rituals. The night of the 13th, my wife and I elected to conclude our evening’s dining with a rich cup of coffee. Again, the dispenser failed to acquiesce. My wife tried it. On the second push, the tablet dropped onto the rich crema, stayed there for a second, and sunk below the surface. She returned the dispenser, and again, dozens of attempts later, I gave up.
The next morning, I approached the coffee machine with a hint of trepidation and anticipation. The anomaly was something novel, a weird occurrence that added a bit of humour and absurdity to my otherwise normal life. I did not want it to end, If I pressed that trigger and a small white tablet dropped, it would ruin the experience. I also could not let it go, I had to press it; it was required… those were the rules. Ten presses, no tablet, I kept on pressing. I counted each attempt, imagining how I would tell people that the device finally worked after fifty, sixty, one-hundred presses.
One-hundred, I stopped. Should I go on? Would a mere one minute’s pressing with a manic smile on my face constitute an obsession? I anxiously waited for my wife to join me in the kitchen, to tell her it had happened again. She was mildly amused. I handed her the dispenser. She pressed it five times. I recall how the smile snuck up my cheeks. It would be fun if she could join me, both of us unable to release a tablet from the enigmatic plastic device. On the sixth try, it worked, releasing a white tablet in her hand.
The rest of the morning the event lingered in the back of my mind. As I sat in front of my laptop, the plastic dispenser floated around in my subconscious. During my lunch break, I went to the mall to do some grocery shopping. The shopping mall is a mere 2 kilometres from my house. One traffic light at the gate of the estate, right turn, 200 metres, next traffic light, right turn. As I sat in my truck, I watched the approaching traffic, waiting for my chance to turn. I thought about the dispenser, coincidence, odds, the random nature of the universe. The lottery, birth defects, lightning. I also recalled a traffic accident I had three years prior, an intersection newspaper seller ran in front of my car. I consider myself to be a skilful driver, above average. Before the accident, I always assumed that vigilance and skill would be enough to avoid all accidents. On that day I could not avoid the newspaper vendor, not even the most skilled driver could. He ran from one side of the road to the other, passing between the vehicles and finally colliding with my bumper in the middle lane. It was a fluke, a one in a million accident that happens every day in cities all over the world. The light turned green and I pulled into the mall parking lot. I sat in the car for a moment, thinking about the accident, the sugar dispenser, the five Rands I won in the lottery three months earlier.
I am one of “those” people, the ones who study the expiry dates on everything. I was sifting through four-packs of chicken thighs, looking for four of the freshest selections. This grocery store, like all grocery stores, places the freshest meat at the back of the shelf. I recall thinking, what if I had not checked the expiry dates, took a best before 13th instead of the 18th? I know the odds of getting sick from the chicken were slim, grocery stores would not sell chicken that could make people ill. Then again, it does happen, but what are the odds? Odds? I thought, a few hours earlier I had pressed a sugar dispenser 100 times without releasing a single tablet. I kept on looking, disrupting the neat piles of polystyrene and cling wrap, and finally finding a rich vein of best-before-18th chicken thighs. Before heading to the counter, I walked through the coffee aisle and grabbed another stevia sugar dispenser. When I got home, I placed the new dispenser, still in its packaging, next to the old one.
There are times, when you look back, that stand out as the exact moment your life went awry. At that time, it seemed like a small event, an insignificant decision made in the heat of the moment. It was early in the morning I was in a hurry and had to reply to an email. I poured myself a cup of coffee and, without thinking it through, unwrapped the new dispenser and placed the old one in the cupboard. It was that decision, made in haste, which changed my life. At that moment I acknowledged that there was indeed something strange going on. The anomaly had shattered my ingrained reliance on the laws of probability and common sense. I knew the old dispenser would not work, I believed it. The two previous day’s events were no longer just strange mathematical expressions of infinite possibilities. It had won, hidden away in my cupboard was an 8cm tall plastic item that defied the laws of nature and reality. I had never entertained thoughts of higher powers or omnipresent deities, my world was clean and cold, a sterile space filled with science and laws. At that moment I succumbed to magical thinking. It did not feel like that, in that instant, I was merely in a hurry.
It began as a subtle uneasiness. I felt unhinged but could not discern the cause. The stevia dispenser moved to the back of my mind, and there, hidden away in my subconscious it chipped away at the foundation of my being. Reality became a chaotic mess of improbable anomalies. My neighbour became ill and died at the age of 38. He had died of a heart attack, what were the odds? I saw car accidents and at each one, I realised that it was merely a matter of time before it was my turn. Cancer, I had my bloodwork checked. Aneurisms, I became aware of my heartbeat, a constant soothing thump that evolved into an ever-present reminder of my mortality. 2.5 billion beats in a lifetime, and each one drew me closer to death. A one-in-four chance that your partner will cheat on you. I questioned my wife’s every move, barely trusting her to go to the grocery store on her own. I googled the toxic effects of every substance I came in contact with. I refused to play with my dog for fear of contracting a disease. Murderers lurked in the shadows, disease festered on everything I encountered, and accidents were waiting for me around every corner. My reliance on the laws of physics and mathematics were my downfall, random chance and chaos were my comforts. I knew the universe was a chaotic and improbable thing, yet when the chaos knocked on my door, I could not reconcile it with reality as I knew it. I used to remind myself, if you flip ten coins in a row the chances of ten heads are just as likely as any other combination…this did not soothe me. For some reason, unfathomable by my primitive animal brain, the realisation chilled me to my core.
My world had begun to unravel, I lost everything. The constant analysis and paranoia, examining the minutest events. I had realised, it was all improbable, impossible, inevitable. My wife left me, and I sought comfort in drink and drugs. I lost my job and my home six months ago. I’ve been sleeping in the storage unit where I keep my meagre belongings, those I haven’t sold to pay for the opiates that are my only relief.
This morning, whilst searching through the boxes my wife sent me after the divorce, I stumbled upon the stevia dispenser. The sequence of events that led me to this place flooded my mind. The events, hundreds of unlikely and improbable occurrences that led me to this place, spread out in front of me in a timeline of malicious chaos inflicted upon me by a cruel and possibly sentient universe. I made myself a cup of coffee on the hot-plate and held the sinister plastic device over the mug. I pressed it twice, nothing. On the third press, it released a single tablet. What were the odds, after more than a hundred attempts, what were the odds that it would release a tablet on the third press?
I thank God that the tablet was released on the third and not the fifth press; if it had gone any other way the results could have been disastrous. Thanks to this fortuitous discovery I finally figured it out. The solution is simple when you think about it. I’ve loaded two bullets in my revolver and spun the cylinder four times, I intend to pull the trigger once, wait eight seconds and pull it again. You would all surely agree that this is the logical way to go about this. If this experiment happens as it should, everything will return to normal. There is only one way this could turn out.
I love you all.
Harold Hyde Harrison.
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Thank you for reading.
J.J. Jacobs
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