Living on a Prayer (Part 3)

Living on a Prayer (Part 1)

Living on a Prayer (Part 2)

Judge sent Saul to procure native prairie dogs from Texas. He was given the instructions to come back with at least twenty and to make sure he saw them praying before picking them. A week later he came back with 50 Texas prairies dogs. In the meantime, the community was following Mary Ann´s recommendation, holding nightly prayer vigils around the prairie dog town.

*           *          *          *          *          *

Sammy turned to Julie “What is this all about?”

“I have no idea but I kind of like the songs” she answered.

“I love it!” Timmy said “Who knows, maybe you two will change your minds after all” he trailed off and started singing along to one of the hymns. He had memorized all of them after the third day.

“I have an uneasy feeling about this. The humans up to now have pretty much left us alone. The last time they paid a lot of attention to us, they killed us off, you know” Sammy said.

*           *          *          *          *          *

The townsfolk decided to introduce the native prairie dogs during one of the nightly vigils. They were going to release them on two separate nights, 25 each night. Rick hadn´t been seen for days and the whole town was a little worried about that.

*          *          *          *         *           *

“I don´t feel well” Sammy said.

“Me neither” Julie said.

“I told you guys not to eat that stuff we found! How many others ate it?” Timmy asked.

“Almost everybody” Julie answered.

Moans were echoing through the burrows. The sounds of vomiting and lamenting were deafening. Timmy immediately started praying.

*         *          *          *          *          *

 

Rick was in his basement in front of a monitor. He had hidden game cameras all around the burrows. He was rejoicing in the prairie dogs’ agony.

“Serves them damn heathen prairie dogs right!” he said to himself. “God wanted em dead and I shall be the hand of the Lord” he paused, “That sounds perty good” he added, cracking another beer and cackling over his own wit.

  (To be continued…)

Living on a Prayer (Part 4)

Greener Grass

Rodrigo lived in a poor neighborhood in the small city of Sorocaba in Brazil. His father was a street vendor, he sold popcorn and his mother was a housekeeper. Rodrigo was never satisfied with his lot in life. He wanted more. He dreamed of one day moving to the United States.

Stan lived in an upper middle class neighborhood in New Jersey. He worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. His life consisted of a commute, work, sleep, a minuscule amount of time reserved for eating and little else. He had no family. He wanted to live more but he never turned down the firm when it needed him. He dreamed of one day moving to a tropical location and having daily adventures.

A step in Rodrigo´s dream came true at the U.S consulate in São Paulo. He was awarded his B-2 visitor visa. He could only stay six months and was not eligible to work, but as his grandmother used to say, “those are man´s laws and not God´s laws.” It was this convenient reasoning that he and his family used to skirt a lot of rules.  

Stan was called to H.R. one Friday afternoon and was given news that he wanted to hear for a long time. “Due to the negative financial climate in our great nation, we are going to have to lay you off.” With that news came a fat severance package. He immediately booked a trip to Rio de Janeiro. He was going to test the waters for a longer term move with this prolonged vacation.

After three months, Rodrigo found that the US wasn´t all he thought it would be. First of all, he arrived in the Boston metro area in December and it was already colder than his freezer back home. Secondly, he had to work. Work hard. Hard work was an even more foreign concept to him than the awful microwave dinners he was subsiding on. Lastly, he missed his friends and family.

In the same period of time, Stan was having a similar experience in Brazil. First, it was HOT. He sweated through three shirts a day. He also wasn´t learning Portuguese as fast as he thought he would. This isolated him. Lastly, he couldn´t get over how nothing worked properly. There were always lines to nowhere. Everywhere he went the system was always down and he found the workers to be unhelpful or incompetent. There was unavoidable corruption at every level of daily life.

Rodrigo decided he needed to pray. Nothing else was working and he figured it wouldn´t hurt. He walked to the nearest Catholic Church and to his surprise, they were having a mass in Portuguese. He took off his down coat and took a seat.

After repeating some sentences in a lifeless droning fashion and transitioning between kneeling, standing and sitting for what felt like fifty times minimum, Rodrigo felt better. That feeling went away quickly when he heard screams and shots. Rodrigo took five bullets from a self-proclaimed patriot who was tired of people praying to his God, in his country and in another language.

Stan realized that he was spending so much time dealing with bureaucracy of trying to get his affairs in order that he had taken very little time to go to the beach and live life. This was specifically why he chose to move to Brazil in the first place. He got his things together and went off to Copacabana Beach.

Stan sat in a chair in the sand under the sun with a delicious cold beer in his hand. He felt that he could get used to this. He watched beautiful women in bikinis walk by while he slowly rounded the corner from buzzed to drunk.

One lovely lady stopped to make small talk. It was a ruse to distract him. Her boyfriend came from the side with a knife and demanded all of Stan´s belongings. Stan refused. The thief plunged the knife into Stan´s heart with such precision he barely felt a thing. The murderous thief laughed with his girlfriend about how stupid the gringo was as they surveyed their booty while walking away from the scene.  

Unwanted Wants Pt. V (Final Chapter)

If you haven´t already, please read Part I

 

Sitting on a park bench with a beer stealthfully concealed in a paper bag, Sean passed a joint to Justin, “How we gonna play this?” he asked.

“I don´t know. She ain´t biting. How about we take the money and run?”

“That´s what I was thinking. That Amanda bitch is loaded. I saw her house. I thinking ten large and we call it a day” Sean said.

“Ten? I was thinking five. You think she´ll go for ten?”

“Hell yeah! She dropped a grand on that cable box I hooked up. People never pay more than five hundred. I said ‘a thousand’ and she was like ‘ok’” Sean continued “Ten G´s to these people ain´t like 10 G´s to us”

“Ok. Good. Let´s set this up” Justin said.

*           *          *          *          *          *

Sean nervously sipped on a bottle of water as Amanda stirred a fifteen dollar, diabetes inducing iced coffee.

“So, how much?” Amanda asked.

Sean hesitated, then asserted “Ten thousand dollars and I guarantee your problem is over”

“Ok” Amanda said, relieved. She thought it was going to cost a lot more. Sean perceived her relief and immediately regretted not asking for more. Amanda continued “One thing, Suzy insists on being present. Not by your side or anything. She´ll be hiding somewhere. Watching”

Sean choked on his water. “Why? It could get ugly. I don´t want anyone to get hurt” he lied.

“Something about her stupid therapist telling her it will give her closure to see it”

Sean´s mind raced. All he could think of saying was “Ok”

*          *          *          *          *          *

Sean and Justin rehearsed their routine a thousand times. Only yelling, no violence. That´s how it was going to go down. They both agreed to go into this drug free, as well. This was going to be professional. They were going to earn this money. They wanted so badly to deserve it.

*          *         *         *          *          *

The day came. Suzy told Sean exactly where it was to take place. There was a little park, close to the apartment, where Justin goes to smoke a joint every week night. She was going to sit in a parked car. She didn´t tell Sean, but she was concealing a five inch blade that she bought at a head shop the day before. It was for her protection if things got out of hand.

Suzy sat in the car as Sean approached Justin. Suzy figured Justin must be high already because he was not smoking at the moment. She saw some small talk, then wild hand gestures. Then they started to yell at each other. Suzy was rooting for Sean but a boiling rage washed over her.

Consciously she thought her rage was aimed at Justin but it really was at herself and all of the other guys like Justin. She felt electricity run through her body. She was trembling. She felt for the knife. It was there.

The next thing she knew she was walking towards them, knife in hand, blade exposed. Midway to them she realized she would be easily over powered by Justin. She decided to sneak up from behind.

As she came out from a bush behind the bench Sean screamed “What the fuck, Suzy?”

Justin turned around in time to see the knife plunge deep into his neck. Suzy wailed. She took it out and stuck it right back in. This time it was lodged. She couldn´t pull it out. She momentarily snapped out of her trance “What am I doing?” she said to nobody in particular.

“Get the fuck out of here, Suzy” Sean cried “We´ll touch bases later” he said, barely audible due to how much ground he had covered in his retreat from the scene.

Suzy stood over Justin. He was gurgling blood and gasping for air. She bent over and kissed his bloody lips.

“Good bye Justin” she said, emotionless. “There will be no more Justins”

Game Over!

Foot volley, which is a mixture of soccer and volley ball is a way of life in Guarã, a small city in a remote part of the Amazon valley in Brazil. Players use their legs, feet and head to get the ball over a net. It sounds like a fun way to pass the time and it can be, just not in Guarã. There, winning a game can mean you get to live another day or will be burned alive bound by old car tires and doused in gasoline. It harks back to the worst days of the Roman empire but instead of Caesars presiding over the tournaments, there are drug dealers deciding the fates of athletes.

If parents see that their child is particularly good at foot volley, they sometimes will sell all their possessions to ensure their child has a bus ticket, one way, out of Guarã. The child will sometimes grow up in the company of relatives without their parents because the parents are too poor to make the bus fare to get themselves out. In some cases, parents end up dead for sending away a good prospect.

José had no parents to care for him or to sell possessions to get him out of Guarã. José lived on the street in a pack of about 10 boys. He was the best of around 4 really good players. When they weren´t playing foot volley, training foot volley or trying to get something to eat from the trash, the pack was usually either sniffing glue or trying to get their hands on it. Not José. Some time ago, José found some text books in the trash while looking for dinner. José was taught to read by the church and he was grateful and did not want their gift to go in vain.

José had won so much that he had built himself quite the name in Guarã. He was like a local celebrity. He was forced to go to the big outdoor “funk parties” as they were called, thrown by the local drug dealers. He was paraded around like a mascot. He despised them all. He despised the drug dealers who he saw as poisoning the community. He despised the party goers and useless people lowered even further in his eyes for idolizing such horrid people. He despised the cops who were easily bribed by the drug bosses and would abuse street children in every sense of the word for their own pleasure.

One night José lay in his concrete bed, in reality a sewer tunnel opening, trying to get the images out of his head of what he saw that day. He had won a major day long tournament closed with not only the murder of every loser but their depraved torture as well. José had seen a lot up to this point but this was worse than anything he had seen. His mind went back and forth from the torture to the faces of the spectators who watched in ecstasy and cheered on the torturers. He was forced to watch from a rickety homemade throne that was spray painted gold and had worn purple pillows fixed to it to make it look like a real king´s chair.

As he laid there, tears rolling down his eyes, he smelled smoke. It was not the usual smell of bonfires which were frequent during the nights after a tournament. It had a more chemical smell. He went out from his makeshift bedroom and climbed an electrical tower. A few thatched roofed houses were on fire. There was little to no response, probably because of the level of intoxication of the people. For the most part of the population, they were passed out drunk.

José thought quick. He knew how he could help. Help himself, help his city, help his country, help the world. He made his way to the police precinct which looked no different than the front office of a land fill. He went to the patio where the few broken down vehicles were parked. He grabbed two 20 liter canisters and went running. As he approached the burning huts he poured some of the liquid from the canisters into discarded water bottles and aluminum cans. He then proceeded to throw them near the flames.

Where the bottle and cans hit, great little explosions took place and the flames quickly spread. He was throwing containers of gasoline into the flames! He then moved on to huts that were not on fire and started to throw flaming soda cans onto the roofs. When they were sufficiently ablaze he went to the only houses in the village, slipshod building decorated by what looked like by psychopathic children, and started to fling his mini Molotov cocktails over the walls. In no time they were on fire as well.

José, satisfied with his work, started for the outskirts of the village. It was getting hot as the fire was spreading rapidly. He was surprised by the lack of commotion on the street. Surely some people were not so drunk as to burn to death without waking. He didn´t care either way. He made his way to the outskirts of the village, climbed a little foot hill and watch the fire do its cleansing.

Brotherly Love

Frank and Al were competitive brothers. In fact, they were so competitive with one another that one of them would probably not be here hadn´t it been for the intervention of their dear mother on various occasions. A strange twist to their rivalry was that they could never use the same strategy the other used to succeed. It was an unspoken rule, but followed to the letter.

In high school when Frank started to excel in football, on the offensive side of the ball, Al went on to become the best defensive player. When Al took up and had success in boxing, Frank became all state in wrestling. When Frank excelled in the exact sciences, Al became the best student in the school in the liberal arts.

Their paths converged when they became adults. Both found their way into the toy business and both became the best in the industry. Frank ran the most prestigious toy company making high end luxury toys. Al led a toy company with a name no one would recognize but just about every house in the US had at least three of his products. His toys were cheap and ubiquitous.

Frank looked at Al as a junk peddler who inundated the US market with cheap Chinese trinkets. Al looked at Frank as a fraud who overcharged dopey rich people out of their money for nothing more than mere status symbols worth a fraction of the price charged.

Secretly, both wanted a little of what the other had. Frank wanted to move a little more volume and Al wanted a little more prestige for his company. Neither had the humility to ask the other for advice.

At the same time, almost to the day, both came up with what they thought was a unique, genius idea. They would send corporate spies to the other´s company to pick up a tip or two. Within a few months, both got wind of what the other was doing.

What hurt each one the most was the thought that the other copied their idea. This was a betrayal of the highest level, even though it was not true. They did in fact come up with the idea individually.

Again, both had another strike of coincidental genius at the same exact moment. They were going to have the other killed. Frank wanted Al´s killing to look like a car accident and Al wanted Frank´s killing to look like a botched robbery. Both put their unstoppable plans in motion.

A few weeks later Al´s car was ran off a cliff. The car rolled for almost a quarter mile before stopping, only to go up in flames. Frank was shot in the forehead while he withdrew money from an ATM late in the night. Miraculously, both survived.

Due to a request from their mother, their motionless bodies laid next to one another in the intensive care unit .Although their bodies were without activity, their brains were not. There was only one single thought churning through both heads: “I´m going to recover so much better than that jerk over there”

Violence A Weapon

 

Brad put his ear buds in as he boarded the subway for his daily commute home. He was lucky this day. There was a seat for the forty minute ride out to the suburbs. This was rare so he felt pretty good about himself. Among the usual commuters there was a group of young men speaking very loudly making the other passengers uncomfortable. He saw they were passing around a bottle and were taking turns looking up from the conversation they were engulfed in. They seemed to be looking over the passengers. Something about them made Brad feel uneasy.

After ten minutes into his podcast Brad had practically forgot about the young men. He was so involved in his program he barely noticed one of them standing right in front of him with his back to him. The youth turned around and motioned for him to take out an ear bud.

Brad obliged. “Yeah?” he asked.

“You got the time?” The youth asked.

With an icy feeling in his stomach Brad looked at his watch. “5:45” he answered.

“That´s a nice watch, man. You don´t worry about anyone taking from you?” the youth asked.

“Not a bit” Brad answered feeling negative electricity in the air. He was being honest. Brad was an amateur fighter with at least ten fights under his belt and endless hours of sparring with trained athletes.

Brad went to put the ear bud back into his ear when the youth said “Not so fast, man. I´m not done talking to you”

“Well, I´m done talking to you” Brad said as he continued to put the ear bud back into his aural cavity.

The youth smacked the hand sending the ear bud flying as far as the cable would allow. Brad instantly stood up. The youth was considerably bigger than him. “I don´t want any problems. I am just trying to get home” Brad said.

“I don´t want any problems either” the youth said. “Just that watch”

Brad was a small man. He looked like an easy target to intimidate, especially in his work attire which was a button shirt with a sweater pulled over and some khaki Dockers. The youth was banking on the fact he could scare the watch off of Brad’s arm.

“Please, buddy, just go back to your friends. We can pretend this never happened” Brad said almost whispering as to let the youth save face.

The youth dropped his right arm and Brad instinctively knew what was coming. It did. A very sloppy right hand slowly made its way towards his face. Brad easily avoided it by barely slipping it and followed the movement with a short elbow to the youth’s neck. This dropped the kid on the crowded train forcing people to cram to the sides to avoid the hulking, falling body. Brad remembered the friends. How would he handle them was his only thought. The kid was down and probably out of the fight because the wind was completely knocked out of him.

As he saw the youth on the floor of the train struggling to breath he made a decision. Passengers were on their phones frantically calling the police. Brad promptly mounted the youth´s chest and started pounding his face into a pulp with an avalanche of elbows. He looked towards the kid’s friends and realized his plan was working. They were paralyzed with fear. They saw his technical ferocity and did not want any of it. Thankfully the train came to a stop and the doors opened.

As the terrified passengers flooded out of the car, a mix of police and subway security burst in. It was a horrible sight. A scrawny business man was on top of a thugged out kid whose face was not even recognizable as human. The police cuffed a protesting Brad. “Tell it to the judge” was their only retort as they read him his rights.

Because it was Friday night, Brad had to spend the weekend in jail. He could only see the judge on Monday. Due to the severity and violence involved, Brad was kept in a cell to himself. He was without human contact, save the brief moments a tray of food was passed through the door.

Monday finally came and Brad was led down the corridor to see the judge. He was disoriented and disheveled. His sweater was thrown over his arm and crunchy with the dried blood of the youth he had beaten.

As he stood in front of the judge he asked what he was being held for.

“For now, attempted murder, possibly murder. The kid is not doing so well” the judge informed him. “Tell me your side of the story”

Brad told him every minute detail. The judge nodded the whole time.

“Well, I tend to believe you, son. Two others in that kid’s group ripped off a couple of wallets. One even smacked an old lady because she had nothing to hand over. I just have one question. Why did you beat the kid so badly?”

“Your honor, I was afraid of his friends attacking me. I felt if I scared them it would keep them at bay. It did. I saw the terror in their eyes and it kept them back” Brad answered. “The same way the kid tried to use fear to get my watch, I used fear to protect myself from his friends”

“Fair enough” the judge said. “You´ll have to go to court regardless”

“I understand” Brad said as his heart sank.

A few months later Brad had his trial. He hired a good lawyer. The charge was manslaughter. The youth did not make it. After a highly publicized trial Brad was exonerated of any wrong doing. It was ruled self defense. After the trial Brad decided to take his life savings and start a martial arts gym. It specialized in self defense.

 

One More Life

A crowd gathered around the fallen motorcyclist. Rumors and conjecture of what had happened flowed through the crowd like a current of electricity. The people furthest from the injured man were transmitting the most fantastic stories while those closest were most concerned with the actual well being of the man. The screech of sirens filled the air as the ambulance made its way towards the scene.
“Please make way for the paramedics” a deep voice shouted. The people in the back of the crowd were too busy gossiping about the incident to hear the command.
“Make way for the paramedics, now!” the voice shouted, this time even more forceful. There was no response from the back of the crowd.
The chief paramedic, whose disdain for humanity has grown and festered inside of him from two decades on the job, reached for his .380 auto sidearm he carried in his waist band. He aimed it at the sky and pulled the trigger three times.
A few people in the back looked back to see what was making it difficult to hear the fabricated story of what happened by the person beside them. One had the audacity to say “What´s the big idea?”
The paramedic went numb. A single thought went through his mind. Why should I help this victim for him to recover and become one of these people in the back of another crowd around another tragedy. He thought of the drunk drivers he fixed up only to see them again, in another accidents, drunk. He thought of the gang bangers that he patched up only to find them another time with another bullet lodged in them. He thought of the pedophile he saved after having being lynched by furious neighbors only to read about him being caught red handed destroying another young life.
He felt invisible. He felt powerless. He felt insignificant.
He raised the tiny pistol to his temple. He shook his head. Not this way, he thought. He then raised to pistol towards the man who questioned what he was doing. NO, he thought. He tucked the pistol back into his waistband. Not yet.
He decided to do what he knew how to do. He pushed through the crowed and saved another worthless life.

What’s in the Egg?

 

It was a normal school day and Brian and Chris were in the kitchen having breakfast as their mother was getting ready for work upstairs. They each had a bowl of cereal, a glass of juice and a hardboiled egg. This was normal school day morning fare.

Brian was his usually quiet self. He was taking their parents separation much harder. It was him, after all, who caught his mother felating his father’s best friend in a parked car at the supermarket and told anybody who would listen. He still felt guilty for breaking them up. Chris, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. If ignorance is bliss, Chris passed through life in ecstasy. He was a probably just an I.Q. point or two higher from being deemed a clinical moron.

Chris might not be that bright, but he was warm and lived off of human contact. He was always trying to engage his brother Brian. He would ask nonstop mundane questions just to feel a connection. He looked over at Brian and noticed a peculiar look on his face. Brian had somehow managed to break a perfectly circular opening in his hardboiled egg and was intensely staring into it. His face looked almost as if it were in a trance.

“What’s in the egg” Chris asked. There was no answer. Chris didn’t think much of it as Brian usually is stingy with answers. He went back to crunching away his cereal. A few moments past and he noticed that Brian had not moved and was with the same exact expression, staring into the egg.

“Hey man, what’s so interesting about that egg?” Chris asked again. Brian didn’t even sway. His muscles were locked into place as his stare was pulled into the small circle on the top of the egg. Chris’s tone changed a little. There was a little worry in it this time. “Brian. What’s going on? What’s in the egg?” No response. Chris started to get a weird feeling and goose bumps chased each other up and down his legs and arms as he looked at the face of his brother.

“Let me see” Chris said as he started to lean over Brian’s egg. Whack. The bottom of Brian’s palm struck his forehead before he got even close enough to get a peak. Brian did not take his stare away from the head the whole time. His eyes remained fixed on the contents of the egg.

“You’re freaking me out” Chris said. “I am going to tell mom”

Chris was confused as he walked up the steps. He heard the blow dryer going in the bathroom. He banged on the door. “Mom” he said. No answer. He banged again. “Mom” he repeated. Just more blow drying, but no answer. There was something odd about the sound of the blow dryer. It was steady. As if it was on but not moving around. Chris was getting really freaked out. He opened the door.

He could have never been prepared for what he saw. Not in a million years. His mother was lying naked on the floor with the cord of the hair dryer around her neck. Her face was blue. Chris did not need to check to know that she was dead. He ran back down to the kitchen screaming for Brian.

When he got to the kitchen, Brian was gone. But the egg remained on the table. Chris had the wherewithal to take a look inside. He slowly walked over to the table. Each step was laborious; his feet seemed to weigh a ton. As he leaned over the table and his eye sight was fixed into the perfect circle of the egg, his world went black.

 

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. III

Francine raced home to tell Jim the good news. Jim was already celebrating his good news by opening an expensive bottle that was given to him as a going away present when he left the firm in New York. His usual afternoon buzz was about to be taken up a notch.

Jim kept going over in his head the details of his new life in New York and how great it was going to be again. The Thursday nights going out to the clubs and hitting on NYU students much younger than himself were racing through his head. And this time he would be single. No one to check in to and make up stories to about his whereabouts. He was already convinced that he was going without Francine.

Francine was thinking of baby names if it were a girl because if it were a boy, she´ll let Jim name him. That´s how her family has named babies for two generations. She was already imaging how the baby’s room would look. Of course, they would have to remodel the room that Jim calls an office but uses as his internet porn viewing room.

Francine pulled into the driveway and Jim started to prepare himself about what he was going to say. How would he break this to her? Francine opened the door and with a huge smile threw her arms around Jim. “Honey, I have great news,” she said.

“I have news, too,” he said.

“Of course you can go first honey, but I am sure mine is bigger!” she said with such a smile that Jim was now very curious as to learn what she had to say.

“Go ahead, Fran, you go first” he said.

“We’re pregnant, love!” tears rolled down her face as these words came from her mouth.

“What do you mean WE?!” he said with a twisted look on his face.

A puzzled look came upon Francine’s face. Jim took notice and realized how awful he just sounded but his thoughts were spinning so far out of control he could not rectify the situation.

Francine stammered a little, “I am pregnant. Dr. Spengler just told me over the phone”.

Jim couldn´t help himself. The booze had lubed his tongue and the words just slipped out “Weren´t you taking the pill for Christ sake? And, hell, are you sure it´s even mine?” he was getting louder “It´s been months since we last fucked.”

Francine was shocked. She didn´t know what to say or think. She was certain he would be just as happy as she would. Her tears of joy turned to tears of sadness. Now it was her thoughts that were spinning.

Jim realized how harsh he had been and apologized. He told her that he had been stressed out about a few things. Then Francine asked, “What about your news? Didn´t you have something to tell me?”

Jim wasn’t even listening. All he was doing was calculating child support payments based on his new salary and if he would have enough at the end of the week to go out.

With almost no life in his eyes, he looked at Francine and asked, “Have you thought about an abortion?”

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