The Fraud Read online

  Copyright

  The Fraud, 2nd Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by H. Claire Taylor

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Penelope Scamp Publications

  Austin, Texas

  www.hclairetaylor.com

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  Part 1

  The Fraud

  He knew he was a fraud, and he knew everyone else knew he was a fraud. All the boys in his office had even chipped in to buy him a shirt with the word “Fraud” on the front. But for some reason that never stopped him from acting like he worked there and acting like he was the boss. Sometimes he wondered why, even though they knew that he was making up lingo, the others let him carry on his charade when he gave them assignments like, “Hey Bill, I’m going to need you to have that NRJ form ready and signed for me by tomorrow before my big conference in Boston.” There was no conference in Boston, and there was no NRJ form. In fact, N.R.J. was nothing more than his initials (he never was exceptionally creative). But this man, this fraud, this Mr. Notmie Reel Job, was, to say the least, an attractive man. If you were to see him, the meanest insult you might possibly throw at him would be to call him attractive, because he was more than just that; he was unearthly beautiful. Perhaps this is why all the ladies loved him and all men in the office spent five thousand dollars on his diamond-studded shirt with the word “Fraud” written across the front only the second day he showed up to work, pretending to be the boss.

  Even the real boss—a happily-married man of thirty-five years to a beautiful wife with three kids, all currently attending ivy league schools—was more than happy to let Notmie take over. In fact, this man struck a deal with Notmie saying that he would pay him three hundred dollars a day to walk around and act like he was the boss. At the time, this deal seemed to be win-win for the boss, Mr. Youngerman. However, it later became cause of a lengthy argument between him and his wife when she brought up the fact that they wouldn’t be making any money for as long as this deal continued. Fortunately, the argument was quickly resolved when she finally got the chance to meet (and see) Mr. Job herself. She apologized to her husband shortly afterwards, though she began calling him “cheap” for only offering to pay Notmie three hundred dollars a day.

  But this story isn’t about Mr. Youngerman or his nagging wife. It’s about the unearthly beautiful man known as Notmie Job. Notmie arrived at work everyday wearing his Fraud shirt and telling people to do things like fill out their NRJ forms and to be sure to send in their registration forms to corporate.

  “Registration forms for what?” was asked just once, and it was by a woman who had only heard through the grapevine that her registration forms were due. As soon as she got the order personally from Mr. Job, she felt her question might be the silliest thing she’d ever asked, always regarding it as a “blonde moment” when she was later teased about it (and that was quite often).

  But this story isn’t about her either; it’s about Notmie. Where did he come from? Why was he so gorgeous, and why didn’t he ever wash his Fraud T-shirt (it was beginning to smell)? To understand these questions, we must first go back years and years to the 1860s.

  In a small Texas town, just north of Lynchton, there sat an old man in a rocking chair. As he sat in this rocking chair, he rocked, and he also threw some rocks, and I’m sure he would have shook his fist threateningly at rock music, had it been invented at that time. He opened his mouth and stuck his pipe in, then closed his mouth and inhaled. He did this over and over again, but that’s not important. What’s important is that when a stranger walked up to his porch and asked for a smoke, this old man said, “No.”

  Feeling highly offended, the stranger cursed the old man with a curse so powerful that the words would hurt your spleen if you heard them uttered. And in fact, they did hurt the old man’s spleen.

  “Oh! My spleen!” he cried.

  Little did he realize that a little spleen pain was nothing compared to what would later ensue from the stranger’s curse.

  The stranger, not wanting to seem too rude, cursed the old man with the most unearthly beautiful offspring the world has ever seen. When the old man laughed and told the stranger that, first, that was a stupid curse, and second, he was too old to have any more offspring and already had seventeen children, the stranger reconsidered.

  The stranger then cursed the old man’s youngest daughter to have the most beautiful offspring in the world. As the old man sat there in silence, trying to comprehend how this was a bad thing, the stranger threw the old man for a loop, exclaiming the last thing the old man would have expected:

  “IT’S OPPOSITE DAY!”

  At first, this launched the old man into a panic, thinking that this would cause his youngest daughter’s child to be hideous. But then the old man began to laugh as he realized that by proclaiming it Opposite Day, it couldn’t be Opposite Day, or else you would have to say that it’s not Opposite Day, and that wouldn’t make sense because you could say that same thing any day of the year regardless of whether or not it’s Opposite Day, and people would have no way of knowing if you really meant it or you meant the opposite.

  “What are you laughing at?” demanded the stranger.

  As the old man began to explain his thoughts about Opposite Day and how it couldn’t really be Opposite Day, the stranger began to pout and wandered away, whining under his breath about how he just wanted to have a smoke and how his mommy never let him while he was at home.

  From then on, it was set.

  The old man’s daughter had the most beautiful daughter the world had ever seen. The child grew up and married quite an ugly fellow named Norman. But even still, the girl had a child who, while not as pretty as his mother, was still unearthly beautiful. This trait of unearthly beauty was passed down through generation after generation, just barely tainted by the peculiar trend of always marrying heinously hideous people, and now resided in Notmie.

  Among the quirks of that lineage was the way they determined the names of their children. The name Notmie, as I’m sure you’re wondering, is a combination of his parents’ names, following a long-standing family tradition of parental name blending. His mother was named Dammie, similar to Tammie, except it was derived from her ugly mother, whose name was simply Dammit. Notmie’s father (who had a nose the size of a melon and ears which occasionally made him airborne if he walked too quickly) was named Not.

  Had Notmie been a girl, he would have been named Damot.

  Notmie always believed he lucked out by being born a boy.

  As with all the absolutely hideous people who married Notmie’s unearthly beautiful ancestors, Not’s name was the last word that his mother said before her tragic death during his birth. All accounts from the doctors stated that Not’s mother was in
stable condition throughout the entire birthing extravaganza. She asked the doctors to see her precious little baby, and upon seeing it, she went rigid and her face twisted with horror. The only word she could get out was “NOT…” then, according to the doctor’s report, she “up and died.”

  Because of his parents’ unusual upbringings, Notmie hadn’t been afforded a particularly normal one either. Older women (and oftentimes men) were attracted to him throughout his adolescence, creating occasional bouts of confusion through most of his more impressionable years. The worst part of it was that his extremely ugly father had raised him during most of that time, his mother having died an untimely, accidental death, like all the others from that lineage of beauty, before Notmie was even a preteen. His father, having no personal experience with being physically acceptable to others, wasn’t quite sure what to do with Notmie, so he sat back and let his handsome, charming son raise himself.

  For anyone who knows anything about parenting, you know this isn’t good.

  Notmie raised himself to become a rather flawed individual.

  As soon as he turned eighteen, his father kicked him out of the house and sent him to live on his own. Notmie maintained a rough relationship with his father, only calling on special holidays like Easter and April Fools’ Day. Perhaps it was all the practical jokes he played on his father during the latter holiday that put most of the strain on their relationship; Notmie wasn’t sure. He might have asked his father about that eventually, but just a few years after Notmie had been kicked to the curb, Not died in a freakish hunting accident.

  As for Notmie’s mother, her death was caused by a sudden onslaught of people in high heals. I use “people” intentionally, because it wasn’t just women. One day, Notmie’s mother was talking with her hideously ugly husband during breakfast when she made known her desire to go to an Elton John concert. Her husband, who often forgot just how potent her looks were, agreed. It wasn’t until her last moments of life that she recognized this as the fatal mistake that it was. Hoards of men and women stampeded toward her in a fury to be first to get a good look at her visage, accidentally going overboard and trampling her to death.

  The detectives could barely make out the victim’s identity once they had reached the scene. The high heals mutilated her face beyond recognition, though the detectives were not shy to admit that it was the most attractive mutilated face they had ever seen in all their lives and made no beef about saying that they reckoned it would be the best looking one they would ever see. Odds are that you could probably find the crime scene pictures of this online, since you can find pictures of anything online and the crime scene investigators took more than the standard amount of photographs of the corpse.

  All of Notmie’s stunningly beautiful predecessors on his mother’s side had similar deaths caused by their own irresistible appearance, and Notmie felt that same fate always lurking right over his shoulder…

  Or maybe that was just the intern behind him. He turned around in his office chair and found that it was, in fact, Stacy the intern. She fluttered her eyelashes for him and asked if he wanted coffee. He accepted her offer, even though he already had plenty full coffee cups covering the entirety of his desk space. This particular intern wasn’t the only one who had offered him coffee in the past hour, and Notmie wasn’t one to say “no” to people who offered him things. So, one more cup of coffee was added to the clutter, which Notmie didn’t mind at all, since he didn’t use his desk much anyway.

  He shuffled through some NRJ forms and chuckled. No two were the same. It was quite apparent that people wanted to follow his orders, but hadn’t a clue how. On a form from a Mrs. Jane Stanley, she had listed her favorite food items followed by a list of the top ten ways she could benefit Notmie as an employee to the company. He admitted that number four made him feel a bit awkward when she mentioned her talents with chop sticks, and he decided it would be best for him not to inquire any further into that.

  The list of strange responses went on. One employee figured that a good NRJ form would include a photo of his grandma and a family tree, while another thought it might include a detailed hour-by-hour account of everything she had purchased online in the past four months. Most of her hour slots simply said no purchase.

  Notmie could only smile as he imagined what those registration forms must look like. He threw the stack of NRJ forms onto the only spot on his desk that wasn’t covered with coffee mugs, leaned back in his chair, and put his feet up on the desk. As he did so, coffee cups came crashing to the ground and the smell of coffee flooded his nostrils.

  Or maybe that was the smell of pain.

  He jumped straight out of his chair and yelped as boiling coffee soaked deep into the crotch of his pants. There was a rush of people who came to his aid. Luckily, they didn’t notice the hot coffee on his pants, or else all of them would have been more than happy to assist in soaking it up, most likely leading to something catastrophically painful for him.

  “Sir, are you all right?” one of his male workers asked upon noticing Notmie biting his fist to try to manage the pain. A high-pitch “yes” was all Notmie could manage to squeak out, and even so, the man was highly jealous of how symphonic Notmie’s voice sounded. The man went home later that night and began voice lessons the next day, all the while trying to match the quality of Notmie’s voice at that particular moment. This man even went on to be a great singing legend in years to come, but ultimately took his own life after failing to accomplish the tone and purity he remembered in Notmie’s voice that day.

  But for now, there was still chaos in the office.

  People darted in every direction and apologies flowed like wine (or hot coffee, in this case), but none of this fazed Notmie in the least; things like this happened to him all the time. He stared at his watch as everything seemed to move in slow motion around him (occasionally, that happens to unearthly beautiful people, and has been scientifically proven and diagnosed as Antihyperbeautosis, but Notmie knew nothing of this—he thought it happened to everybody).

  And now he was bored.

  He had actually been bored for a while, but had been getting some temporary amusement out of adjusting his shirt so that the fluorescent lights would reflect off of the diamonds spelling out Fraud and hit people in the eyes, temporarily blinding them as they scurried around. A man ran toward the desk with paper towels and WHAM. He was blinded by the beam of deflected light and ran headfirst into a filing cabinet.

  They drop like flies, thought Notmie.

  He’d always liked doing that sort of thing. When he was eight, one of his favorite hobbies wasn’t building soapbox cars, or playing “cops and robbers” with his friends. Instead, he could be found nearly everyday sitting on top of a nearby bridge with a large mirror, reflecting the sunlight into the faces of the drivers down below. Notmie always liked mirrors, but who could blame him? Every time he looked into one he was reminded of how especially gorgeous he happened to be. His mother had always liked mirrors, too. She taught him all he needed to know about taking the proper care of mirrors, from how to clean them to how to set them down without breaking them.

  “Never break a mirror,” Dammie had instructed him one day.

  “Why not? Does it give you bad luck?” little Notmie had asked.

  “I’m not sure, son. I’ve never broken one myself, but my mother always told me that if you break a mirror, you die.”

  Notmie was careful with mirrors from that point on.

  Not, on the other hand, had never been a fan of having mirrors around the house. He said that they brought bad luck and avoided gazing into them whenever possible.

  Where most people remember their parents fighting about money or emotions, Notmie remembered countless arguments involving the need for mirrors in each room.

  After Notmie’s mother died, there were no more mirrors in the Job house.

  But now, standing here in the office, even while he was blinding his underlings, he was bored, so he let go of his shirt and
left. All the workers stared in bewilderment as he simply wandered out, coffee dripping off of him as he went. They didn’t know what to do now that their boss wasn’t there to tell them to fill out forms. But after he had left the office and they had all regained their heads, they realized that they probably had work to be getting to since this was the Department of Public Safety office and they hadn’t really done anything in weeks except fill out NRJs and try to understand registration forms.

  Once Notmie had left, Greg, the assistant director, gathered his thoughts and rallied his employees. “This is the Texas Department of Public Safety, people! We’ve got some serious making up to do. If we don’t watch out, we might earn ourselves a reputation of taking weeks, even months, to process the simplest of paperwork. Not on my watch, folks. Not on my watch.”

  He looked down at his Timex and said, “Speaking of watches, mine says it’s already four forty-five, so let’s just go ahead and call it a day.”

  Part 2

  A Relative Situation

  Notmie didn’t have a home. He wasn’t even the owner of a nice cardboard box, yet every night without fail he slept in a nice, comfortable bed. What I haven’t told you is that the person who owned that nice, comfy bed slept outside.

  His trick was this: he would walk to an up-scale part of town and pick out the house that he liked the best. He would knock on the door and ask if he could stay the night there. They always let him stay, not even the least deterred by his Fraud shirt. All they noticed about his shirt was how nice of a touch the diamonds added to his already radiant face.

  Most of the time, Notmie would kindly ask the residents to step outside so that he could prepare a surprise for them. After an hour or so of waiting patiently, they would be too full of anticipation to bear it anymore and would try to open the door, only to find that they’d been locked out. Sometimes Notmie felt guilty about locking people out of their own homes, but he knew from experience that without this precaution, the inhabitants of the house would stare at him all night in awe of their new guest, and he had a hard time sleeping when he was being watched. Fortunately, the residents of the house hardly minded sleeping outside. They were contented by the thought of such an unearthly beautiful person inhabiting their bed.