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Samantha 53 walked cautiously through the darkened cinema, holding a bag of salted popcorn and a paper cup of sugary soda.
Suddenly her left foot collided with an unexpected barrier, and her right foot was too far behind her to balance the rest of her body. She fell on top of another audience member.
“Hey!” said a seated woman whose face was splashed with carbonated water. Her voice was identical to Samantha 53, and Samantha 53 knew the rest of the victim’s body would be identical to hers as well. 53 couldn’t see the seated woman clearly, but vividly imagined her own red hair getting wet with water and corn syrup. She imagined ice cubes sliding across her own face, freezing her skin.
“Sorry, sorry” said Samantha 53.
“You know, you are an entire 30 seconds later than everyone else?” said the seated woman. Her tone of voice was indignant, perhaps even a little disgusted.
“Well the movie doesn’t start for another 5 minutes,” said Samantha 53.
“The national anthem starts in 3. What are you, some kind of defective?” said the seated woman.
“Well, that’s a bit much,” said Samantha 53. She’d never heard another of her clan so easily agitated before.
The seated woman was struck by a sudden fear. The fear of falling outside the clan’s accepted norm. The fear she herself had tried to inspire in Samantha 53.
“Sorry for being so impolite,” said the seated woman. “By the way, I’m Samantha 65.”
Samantha 53 continued to stumble to her spot. She didn’t have a ticket or for that matter, an explicitly assigned seat. But everyone in Clan Samantha knew where to sit. It was right there in their names: 53 needed to be 12 spots away from 65.
Samantha 53 tried to feel relaxed in a seat so rigid and uncomfortable that it might as well have been made of clapboard. Not that Samantha had ever seen clapboard in her life, it wasn’t one of Clan Mark’s approved building materials.
That’s what you get for spending too much time reading the stupid old archives, thought Samantha 53. Now when I sit down I think about clapboard of all things. It felt especially ridiculous since all the Samanthas in generation 12 were too old to believe in superstitions like fairies and trees.
Samantha listened to her identical sisters drink their sodas and crunch on popcorn in the darkness. Some of them were talking about some unexpected computer errors they had encountered at work. But as planned, there was nothing on the screen. There was still 2 minutes until the national anthem would play.
The national anthem. It was one of the few things that made Samantha 53 proud of belonging to her clan. The anthem was full of mixed metaphors, it was repetitive, it was entirely about Clan Mark and it did not even mention Clan Samantha. But there was some satisfaction in knowing that Clan Samantha wrote the lyrics, back in Generation 2.
Clapboard was written in 15 minutes during a Joy of Writing meetup. These are set in the same universe as Democratize.