Good Things
Good things come to good people who work for them.
Now there's a lie if there ever was one.
He had heard it often growing up, he had heard it from the father who worked himself to the bone ten hours a day to keep food on the table in a small house that the family could barely afford.
He had heard it from his mother, working as a secretary for an insurance company that treated their employees even worse than the customers they screwed over.
He heard it from most of his teachers all his life in one form or another, except for one that hated everything with a penis, and one who was too bitter to sooth his students with sweet-sweet lies.
But he had put in the work, graduated with an athletic scholarship to a big university that would open doors to a good life, a life he had worked for diligently all his life.
Just like everyone had told him.
But then a few torn ligaments later all of it was gone, he couldn't play ball anymore, the scholarship was gone, the good grades didn't matter, his parents couldn't pay for any college since the economy tanked and they had lost their jobs.
Now here he was, being walked out of a dead-end factory because he hadn't picked up the job fast enough to suit the mid-level asshole with a Napoleon complex.
Silently he handed over the parking pass to the indifferent security guard and drove on out without a word to anyone.
He breezed past the gate in the beat-up clunker he had found on Craigslist, he flew on down the Highway at a hundred miles per hour, time slipped away from him, he ignored the cop car with it's lights, all that mattered was the bridge with the low-guardrails that was coming up.
"This is it then..." he said to himself, disturbingly quiet considering the circumstances, "Nothing to work for anymore..."
The bridge came up, the traffic was already being cleared away by the police but it didn't matter.
He had only one last thing to do.
He twisted the wheel of the car hard to the left and breached the rails, for a brief moment he was flying in the clear blue sky and a hint of a smile began to emerge on his defeated face.
Then gravity did the work for him and sent the clunker down, down, down to the river.
When they managed to dredge the wreck up from the water, no one understood why Mack looked so serene in death.
He had been such a good person, who had worked hard all his life, so why would death make a man like that happy?
The person who knew the answer never said a word on the subject to anyone, since for her it hit way to close to home for comfort.
"It could just as easily be me in that casket." Jodie Landon whispered to herself during the funeral service, a grunt from her current lover revealed that he heard her say something, but she brushed it aside.
Instead she focused on the face that would occasionally emerge in her dreams, the face of the boy she had loved as a girl, the broken man she had seen leaving Vance U, and the final face of the serene man in the nice suit heading towards his final resting place.
"Better him than you." Something whispered to her and Jodie shuddered.
As her lover put a comforting arm around her and the minister began the eulogy and saying things that bore no relation to who Mack had been, Jodie felt tears fall down her face again, wondering if maybe she deserved to be the dead one after all.
She never found an answer to that question.
FIN