An Unfortunate Chain of Events Pt. IV

Francine could not believe what she was hearing. With that question, her world collapsed in on itself. Jim was staring at her with a glazed icy stare. This was not the man she fell in love with in high school behind those eyes. Finally she mustered the energy to ask the question, “Jim, who are you?”

This sent Jim into a rage. “Who am I? Who am I, you ask? I’m the guy who gave up his life to come back to the shit hole because you wanted to! I am the guy who has no friends, no career and no future, because of you! Who am I?…”

“Jim”, she said, “We made the decision together to come back here! You wanted this just as much as me. You told me you wanted kids. We agreed that it would be better to be near family.”

“You made the decision!” Jim was now on his feet, somewhat swaying rhythmically as if small breezes were holding him up from all angles. “I had nothing to do with that decision”. Jim was speaking on mental autopilot because all he could think about was the fact that his child support payments would be based on his new salary and that this would lead to a fairly miserly existent in a city as expensive as New York. He had to make this problem go away.

“Don’t think for a second that I would do anything to harm our baby! There is a life growing inside of me now. You have to decide what you are going to do with your life. But I am going to stay here and raise our baby!” she put a lot of emphasis on the word our.

Jim started for the door and Francine let out a shriek, “Where are you going?”

“Out. I need to think” was all he said. He fumbled with his keys in the driveway and opened the door to the car. Francine followed him.

“Get out of the car and talk to me! Besides, I can smell alcohol on you, you’ll get  arrested for sure!” her hand was in the frame of the door when Jim slammed it shut. Francine screamed, “Open the door! My hand is stuck” Jim did even notice. He put the car in neutral and slowly started coasting down the driveway, unbeknownst to him that Francine was being dragged. She was screaming frantically.

Finally he noticed and jerked the emergency brake and opened the door. Three of Francine’s fingers were bleeding. “Look what you did, you dumb bitch!” Jim said.

Francine was screaming in pain and crying hysterically. A few neighbors had poked their heads out to see what the commotion was.

Jim, with his head on a swivel surveyed them and yelled “Fuck you all. Go back to your stupid lives you assholes. There is nothing to see here.”

Francine started to feel feint from all of the pain and slowly sat down on the grass. At that moment, Jim slammed the door and was off.

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An Unfortunate Chain of Events Pt. II

Jim answered the phone with his usual afternoon buzz making his thoughts a little fuzzy.

“Hello”, Jim said.

“Jim, you son of a bitch!” said the voice.

“Who is this?” Jim asked, a little annoyed.

“It´s Frank. From the firm. Don’t tell me you forgot about us already! It´s only been a few months.”

“Hell no Frank! I just wasn´t expecting you. I thought it was my damn in-laws. They call all day long”, Jim said with half a smirk. It was all he could muster because his mouth muscles atrophied from months of a lack of smiling.

“Sounds like you are loving domesticated small town life”, Frank said.

“You fucking kidding me? I hate this shit”, Jim always swore more when he was drinking. He swore a lot.

“Then I have great news for you. Stan wants you back. He didn´t really specify why he wants you so bad but he does. I think it´s because it has been so hard to find decent consistent people with half a brain. Plus, Stan always liked you.” Frank said.

“That sounds great,” Jim said, with a million things flashing through his head. “What´s the offer?”, he asked.

“What you were earning plus twenty percent, some more benefits and a larger profit share”, Frank said. “Plus, all of your moving expenses paid to come back and a company rent controlled apartment with a lease for three years”.

“Oh my god! I´m in!” Jim said with wide eyes.

“You think you can convince Francine?” Frank asked.

“I don´t care if can or not. I´m going with or without her”, Jim said.

“Looks like little Jimmy has finally grown a pair! Good to hear. Look, my secretary will call you to make flight arrangements. You´ll need to come to New York ASAP to sign a few things before we get the ball rolling”, Frank said, then he added, “Hey, take it easy on Francine, will ya? She´s a good girl. Let her down easy. If you can´t convince her to go, I mean. You know, she was close to my wife and she´s convinced Francine won´t go for it. Her dream is the picket fence in small town USA with the kids and all. She hated NY.”

“Don´t worry about that. We´ve been growing apart since coming here anyway. Might even be a relief for her”, Jim said.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Francine was driving home from the supermarket when her cell phone rang. “Hello”, she said.

“Francine?” the voice asked.

“Yes, this is she”, she said.

“Francine, this is Charlotte from Dr. Spengle’s office. The results of your blood work are in. He would like you to come in to discuss a few things”, the secretary said.

“Is everything ok?” Francine asked with worry in her voice.

“Yes, but I am not at liberty to divulge information over the phone but the doctor does need to speak to you in person” the secretary said.

“If you can´t tell me, can Dr. Spengle?” Francine asked.

“Actually, he is free. I´ll transfer you over”, the secretary said.

“Thanks”, Francine said.

“Francine?”, Dr. Spengle said.

“Yes?” Francine said with her heart racing.

“Francine, you’re pregnant”, the doctor said.

After a long pause Dr. Spengle heard from a distance as if the telephone had fallen to the floor “Oh my God! Thank you lord! I am so happy!”

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An Unfortunate Chain of Events Pt. I

(note from the author: This will be a multiple part story written in 500 word sessions. Please enjoy and stay tuned.)

Francine was the motor behind her beloved husband’s success. Jim was the type of person that was very intelligent and full of potential, but left to his own devices would never see that potential realized. Until his senior year of high school he was a C+ student but without even opening a book. When Francine entered his life he almost instantly became an A Student and continued to be one through college. She never told him to do better. She made him want to do better. And it wasn´t even to impress her. It was to make him feel like he deserved her. People always wanted to be their best when they were around Francine.

Jim’s intelligence and tendency to buck the system are what attracted Francine. He never accepted the status quo. He questioned everything. The fact that he was extremely handsome did not wane Francine’s desire either. They met at a protest against the drilling of oil on a Native American reserve. Although Francine self-identified herself as African American, she still reveled in the fact that she was of Comanche ancestry. Jim was there because he could not give up an opportunity to poke the eye of the man. The fact that Jim was white brought a lot of attention. The majority of the protesters were either Comanche people or ancestors so Jim stuck out with his polo shirt clad six foot four frame.

That protest was almost 6 years, a few degrees between them and many moves around the United States ago. They decided to settle down and get married in the small Texas town where they started their relationship. Francine wanted to start making a family of their own and wanted to be closer to her parents. Jim was reluctant because this meant giving up a fledgling, yet promising, career in finance that he had started in New York. After many nights arguing, sometimes arriving on the verge of violence, Jim acquiesced. But knowledge in finance was not the only thing Jim brought to Texas from New York. His Wall Street colleges introduced him to some new vices. Some were mild, like single malt scotch and cigars and some were not so mild like cocaine and high end escorts. Of course, Francine knew nothing of this. He always showed his best face to Francine. Francine was so focused on the prospect of her new family that she didn´t notice slight changes in Jim.

In Texas, far removed from the hustle and bustle of New York Jim actually forgot about his new found fondness for cocaine but not for drink. Again, Francine unconsciously turned a blind eye with her future family the star of her thoughts. Jim started drinking more and more as Francine nested. He drowned himself in whiskey as Francine drowned herself in bags from Ikea and Tok and Stok. Jim started to resent Francine´s happiness. He started to regret coming back to Texas. One sunny afternoon, with half a buzz on, Jim answered a call that would change both of their lives forever and so did Francine.

 

The Number

As they lay in their post coitus embrace, Bruno sensed that something was awry with Alexandra.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yeah” she said without conviction.

“No, really, tell me. What´s wrong?” he insisted.

“You really wanna know?” she asked.

“Yeah, you can tell me anything” he said.

“Ok, well me and the girls were talking the other day about our boyfriends. The subject of the number came up” she said

“The number?” he asked.

“Yeah, the number. How many people you’ve been with, the number” she said almost irritated by his ignorance of the matter.

“That´s what you girls talk about when you get together” he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she said with a twisted face of anger and disgust. “It´s serious stuff.”

“Easy babe” he said while running his finger down her arm affectionately, trying to get her to calm down. With this she jerked away created a space of at least a foot between their naked bodies.

“Don’t touch me. I gotta know. You are the only guy that I have ever cared about. I need to know. What´s your number. I need to know how many girls the first guy I ever fell in love with slept with!”

Bruno’s head was spinning. Though he felt highly attracted to Alexandra and enjoyed her company, it’s only been three months that they have been seeing each other. The L word had not even entered his head.

“Slow down, babe. Where is all of this coming from?” he asked.

Alexandra was now crying. “I never loved anybody so I never cared before. It bothers me so much to know that someone I love fucked a bunch of dirty whores”

Bruno was already making plans in his head to delete Alexandra from his phone and block her from his Facebook. But first, he needed to think his way out of this very moment.

“What if I told you, that you were the only one” he trailed off and came back with “that I cared about? Huh?” he thought a little humor would lighten the mood.

“TELL ME! How many whores have you fucked, Bruno?” she screamed.

Bruno stammered, “I really don´t know, I haven’t kept a real count.”

“Oh my god! You’ve fucked so many girls you don’t even know how many there were?” she said.

“No, it’s not like that, I just don’t know. I’d have to think about it” he said.

“Get to thinking” she said.

Bruno thought of a number that he thought she would except and calm down. “I think five”.

“It can’t be only five! If it were only five you would not have to think. You would have known five without thinking!” she said.

“No, five. I just never stopped to think before, that’s all” he said.

This seemed to calm her a little. “Only five? Really?”

Bruno saw that it was working. “Really” he was frantically thinking of how he could extricate himself from her bedroom without bringing on another wave of rage.

The Alexandra said “Do you love me?”

This caught Bruno completely by surprise. He saw that she wasn’t stable and he didn’t want to raise her ire so he lied “Of course. These past months have been some of the happiest of my life”

“Do want to be with me forever?” she asked.

“Of course I do” Bruno said hoping that she couldn’t sense how far from the truth this statement was.

“Then you know what we have to do to be together?” she asked.

“No” he replied.

“We have to kill those dirty whores who you fucked” she said as she stared at the ceiling, mascara staining the sides of her face making permanent black tears.

Bruno’s mind went blank.

How much difference does it make?

How much difference does it make?

You can work out your body for years building muscles that protrude from other muscles only to have them atrophy to nothing in a few quick months of a little sloth.

You can spend years creating a fortune only to see it lost in moments due to a lapse in judgment or worse, something outside your realm of control.

You can spend years of your life and soul creating a family only to have them wiped out in the blink of an eye at the hand of a wild eyed killer or an inebriated driver.

You build relationships, they go away. You have ideas, you  forget them. You cook food, it gets eaten.

Even the tallest grandest mountains erode at the hand of wind, water and time.

Nothing is permanent not even the stain on your favorite shirt.

You’re born, you die.

I ask again, how much difference does it make?

Love in a Hopeless Place

Betty’s life had been so bad up to this point that her death sentence was almost a reprieve from life. Abuse was the only human contact she had known. Rape was the only intimacy that she had experienced. Once a victim gets marked early, other victimizers sense this with some sort of sick radar and pounce. Healthy people tend to shy away from such people. This isolates a victim and sets them up to be a victim for life.

Her marriage to Jimbo was what she thought was a chance to escape a life of abuse. He was so good to her, in the beginning. She didn´t mind the sneers that they received as this tall handsome white boy was hand in hand with a poor, yet beautiful, black girl. The comments from the women were far worse than those from the men. Women already do not deal with competition so well. Now they have to deal with another race of women, women with more curvaceous bodies than themselves.

Things worsened when they moved from Plano, Texas to Lewisville, Texas. Plano was a liberal metropolitan city in comparison to Lewisville. In Plano, they only had to deal with sneers and comments. In Lewisville, they had to deal with vandalism to their home. Jimbo almost immediately lost the factory job that brought them there. Neither wanted to go back to Plano. Jimbo’s family rejected him for his relationship with Betty and Betty didn’t really have a family to go back to. Jimbo started drinking. Jimbo changed. Betty was stuck.

Jimbo and Betty didn´t have much of a sex life before they were married. Betty had no idea how to be intimate with a man. The only men she knew sexually were her own father and his brothers whom he let have a turn with her when they got together to play cards and drink. Actually, playing cards was a ruse to drink. Drinking was the principle activity. After Betty’s mother left them, in Betty’s infancy, that is just about all he did. Jimbo was raised a fire and brimstone evangelical Christian and was so afraid of hell and the devil that he would burn his penis with a sewing needle that he held over a lit match when he felt the urge to masturbate. Even though he was now married to Betty, he was still afraid of his carnal urges. The drink erased those fears but not the shame.

When Jimbo drank, he felt the need for female companionship but had no idea about how to go about getting it in a polite way. These shameful feelings disgusted him. Betty was no better. Before Jimbo, she had never even been hugged lovingly. She didn´t know the first thing about how to coerce some loving touch from her husband. What ended up happening was that Jimbo would work himself up into a rage and start to hit Betty. Betty knew this role well and went along with it. Jimbo would beat Betty until he felt his erection pulsating through his entire body. All he could feel was a burning shortness in breath and the throbbing of his member. Then, when Betty was as limp as a cadaver entering into emotional shock, Jimbo would enter her and in a few short strokes would finish.

*Note from the author: He shall continue the story if anybody wishes. Just leave a comment that you wish to read on.

Sunday Drivers

Driving down the highway Sidney looked over to Ana to see if she was hanging in there.

“Ya’ll right?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. A million things were racing through her mind. The principle thought was jail. She didn’t want to go back. Sidney, on the other hand, never thought more than a few moments into the future. He was very animalistic in that way.

A strong chemical smell made its way into Ana’s nostrils. Her head was hurting and her stomach was already upset from the day old truck stop coffee she downed for breakfast with five sugar packets. A wave of nausea washed over her. Her hands were shaking.

“Can you roll down the window?” She practically whispered; her jaw trembling.

“Huh?” was her response.

She let it go. She felt that if she opened her mouth again, it would be more than words coming out. The windows had to be kept shut despite the extreme desert heat so the illegal chemical smell would not make its way to the olfactory system of a lawman.

Sidney lit a cigarette and that was enough to put Ana over the edge. It was almost immediate, the first waif of smoke made its way up her nose and bile started to rise from her stomach then made its way through her throat out her mouth and ended up on the sun dried and cracked pleather dashboard.

“Fuck” Sidney grunted.

Ana could not even manage a response. As a tear ran down the side of her face, she silently thought to herself, Sunday car rides with Granpa were so much better.

Note from the author: If you wish to see the story continued, please say so in the comments section and the author will kindly oblige.

Melting

Everybody knows what happens at the end of the life cycle of an ice cube. It does not die. It just retreats closer to the ground. It becomes not a different thing; it is indeed the same thing just in a different state.

If we can concur on the above, then it is true that the same is true for a cat. At the end of its life cycle, its matter retreats to the ground. A different kind of melting occurs. Some things are created, such as foul odors. However, are these odors truly created? Do they not exist the whole time only being released upon the animal’s biological demise?

These are the type of thoughts that helped Brad justify his odd hobby. He thought to himself, he is not just taking life, he is putting it back into the ground from which it came. He was like a social vulture but instead of waiting for his clean up job to die before commencing, he would just go ahead and clean up. He would take messes, deep into the woods, retire them to freshly dug holes, spread lime, cover up said mess and go home to have supper.

Society does not seem to agree with Brad so he must sit in a cage for the rest of his natural life and many more for his sentence far exceeds the years of the average human life.

One expensive cup of lemonade

While driving down the street, he was very unsure of what direction to take. He loved to make left turns, but this time he felt a right hand turn would be appropriate. He made his right turn and it felt great.

As he continued down the road, he saw something ahead that compelled him to stop. A young girl was serving lemonade. He came to a stop and got out of his car. He asked the young lady how much for a cup of her lemonade.

She replied, “$375.”

He initially thought the price asked was steep but she was so cute he felt obliged to purchase a cup from her.

“Do you take personal checks, young lady,” he asked.

“With two forms of I.D. I sure do,” she answered.

With that, the young man wrote a check, showed his driver´s license and his work I.D. badge and received his $375 cup of lemonade.

He got back into his car and slowly sipped his $375 cup of lemonade. In an instant, he felt his lips burn. He felt his mouth burn. The pain was so unbearable; his soul burned.

He then spilled his $375 cup of lemonade on his leather seats. They too started to burn. Little holes starting to appear on the cow skin upholstery.

With all this commotion, he did not realize he was driving on the sidewalk. Nor did he realize his impending doom for he was barreling down on a tree and only saw it when it was too late.

A woman who was going for her routine walk also failed to see the same tree behind her but did notice the car in front of her about to erase her from the list of the living.

It was too late for both of them to do anything and their lives ended in the same instant.

The funny part of the story was that it was the dead woman’s idea for her daughter to charge $375 for a cup of lemonade.

Killing My Reflection

As I sat by the river with my feet dangling in the water, I saw my own reflection.

It winked at me.

I hadn´t moved a muscle yet my reflection winked at me.

Then it started to say something to me. I saw my reflection’s mouth move.

A soggy unnatural voice came from the bottom of this particularly slow moving body of water.

It was telling me the names of people I wanted to kill.

It was saying names of people I didn´t even know I disliked, until the moment they were uttered.

I knew I had to do something. I thought for about one second and I grabbed a handful of rocks.

The only victim of my murderous rage that day was my own reflection.

Over and over again.