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Waiting For Death- A Short Story

 
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Jason Tandro
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PostJason Tandro Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:43 am   Post subject: Waiting For Death- A Short Story Reply with quote

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Found this little gem while perusing some old files. Wrote this last year.

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Waiting For Death
By: Micah Rodney

Charles was waiting for death. He figured it would be coming by to pick him up any minute now. It was ten degrees, not counting for the wind chill, and he was alone in the middle of the field where he played as a kid. It was an appropriate place for his life to end.
Charles was not a do-it-yourself kind of man; the thought of suicide never crossed his mind. This was different. He would let nature kill him; for liability purposes. He had been told that shooting yourself was a one-way ticket to hell, but if God in his infinite wisdom couldn’t pick up the temperature to save him, then that was by no means Charles’ problem.
The problem with waiting for death was that it left your mind free to wander. One would think that given the impending knowledge of the certainty of your death, your mind would be focused like a laser beam. You would take the last moments of your life to pray forgiveness for every mistake you made and every deliberate action against the Almighty, but that was not the case with Charles.
Charles first thought upon coming to this decision was on where he should die. There was a sort of gallows humor about it. He thought about sleeping on the home base of the nearby baseball diamond and scare the old caretaker, but then he thought about the trauma it would cause if one of the children were to find him, and he decided against it.
He thought about going down the road to the bank that had trumped up thousands of dollars of credit card debt in “interest”. That would be an interesting morning encounter; the corpse of their former client with a deposit slip clutched in his cold, dead hand.
But then he really couldn’t blame the people who worked there. It wasn’t their fault, but rather the corporate policies that they had been forced to abide by. And he wasn’t about to drive to Chicago. It was that thought that sent him on his next line of reasoning. His reason for wanting his life to end was not because the deck had been stacked against him.
All his problems were his own damn fault.
He had broken the bank and had spent the past two years of his life in debt for purchases that seemed important at the time. In the economic fallout, all he had been able to do was the same dead-end job he’d had for four years, but really if he had tried hard enough, he could have gotten a job somewhere better.
He lacked the motivation though. And finally here he was, preparing to punch the great time card in the sky. And that’s where his mind traveled to next. Would anybody mourn him? Sure they would make a scene of it for fear of receiving the wrath of a just and loving God, but they would surely recognize his end as the act of cowardice that it was.
They would not feel sorry for him, because he did this all to himself. They would tell their children: “Do better in school or you’ll end up like Charlie Baker.” His final lasting imprint on the world would be a fourteen word obituary, read by no one of relevance: “Charles Kirk Baker, born 1979- died alone from severe frostbite on October 22, 2008.”
And speaking of God, Charles didn’t blame God either. Charles may be desperate, but he wasn’t an idiot. He had heard people before in his same situation blame God. They had made the mistakes themselves, but they had the audacity to blame an all-powerful entity, which had tried to give them a fair shake to begin with.
Perhaps they expected that God should appear before them in a beam of light and solve all their problems even though he certainly didn’t do that for other people (aside from old Prophets). They thought that they were special and when the shit hit the proverbial fan, it was God’s fault, not their own.
Charles couldn’t understand it. Why did people insist on blaming their wrong-doings on somebody else? Did that honestly make it easier? Charles had owned up to everything he had done, and in the end… well perhaps his story wasn’t the best example. To his credit he had known that this was his own fault and never tried to blame it on God, his parents or anybody else.
Charles knees were numb now, but he didn’t care. That meant that they would stop chattering at him to get inside to a warm blanket and stop being an idiot. Maybe he was being an idiot. Maybe he would look back on this moment when he was sitting in a bed in the hospital psych ward, thinking about how stupid he was.
Or maybe God, not being amused by Charles attempt to circumvent the laws and ordinances he had laid forth, would punish him by sending him to suffer for eternity in fire and brimstone. He would look back and realize how pointless it was.
Pointlessness was Charles’ curse. He did a mental overview of his life; counting his mistakes, against his blessings. The ratio of good news to bad was a depressing thought in and of itself, but maybe that was the way it was supposed to work. Maybe God only blessed those who had no real need of it, and if that was the case, maybe Charles could be a little mad at God. Not that it made any difference now; soon enough he’d be able to ask him first hand.
Charles hands went numb and he realized that the wait was almost over. He decided it was time to summarize his key question: How do you feel sorry for an unsympathetic character like Charles Baker? How can you mourn the loss of somebody who contributed so little and took so much? Would somebody be sad to see him die, and beyond that phony “every time somebody dies, we all die a little” nonsense.
Out of nowhere Charles got up. There was no real epiphany, no sudden knowledge of great truth, no spiritual moment of divine transcendence: it was completely physical. He simply decided that it was too cold and that he would try again tomorrow. Death knew where he lived.

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I wrote this when I was in a low point in my own life, but I did so with that same annoying "tongue-in-cheek" quality I have. What do you think?
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EverPhoenix
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PostEverPhoenix Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 2:15 am   Post subject: Reply with quote

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quite philosophical. it is written well - i like it. well, not so much the theme, but the style of it
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PostNoZKeY Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 10:32 am   Post subject: Reply with quote

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I liked it, though its depressing...
Well, i see you can write things like that even when you feel bad... i have written things like that but when i write my feelings makes me write with no order and it ends up like an abstract poem or something...

I liked your style so I'll read some of your fanfictions then Very Happy
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PostBlade Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 10:57 am   Post subject: Reply with quote

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It transported some cold pictures! Like it!
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Jason Tandro
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PostJason Tandro Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 11:30 pm   Post subject: Reply with quote

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NoZKeY wrote:
I liked it, though its depressing...
Well, i see you can write things like that even when you feel bad... i have written things like that but when i write my feelings makes me write with no order and it ends up like an abstract poem or something...

I liked your style so I'll read some of your fanfictions then Very Happy


That quality of writing is reserved for my top projects. Read Score, SeeD, Limit Break, Wanted, or the novelization of Final Fantasy VII.
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