The Almost Man
He was an almost man.
People had been saying it for as long as he could remember. Not to his face of course, but it had always been there, like a mosquito whining in your ear that won't go away. He was always aware of it, yet could do nothing about it, no matter what he tried. It wasn't like he was a bad student, nor that he had suffered a terrible childhood. In fact one could quite easily say (and people often did) that his life was stupendously average, and indeed, forgettable. He came from a middle class family in Indiana. He achieved well in school, but never well enough to get noticed. The man had no defining features, no interesting aspects to speak of. He had joined the military, and then later moved to New York to become a mechanic who earned an average wage as an average man.
He almost won the school award for economics, but lost it to the class genius, he had almost been captain of the hockey team, but at the last moment someone better had taken his place; he couldn't remember his name now, but he had hated him with a passion. And everywhere he went, he would receive a clap on the back and a 'job well done. Better luck next time' he was good, just never good enough. His name was John, and his fast approaching death would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him.
In any other circumstances, the day would have been like any other, as forgettable as John's own mundane existence. However, due to a series of unrelated coincidences accumulating into one nasty event, the fifteenth of August 1994 was about to become the most memorable date of John Winchester's short life. People would later put it down to bad luck-'that's life init?'-and if John had been around, he probably would have agreed with them.
It was precisely six in the evening when John left his garage to take the short walk home, this was nothing unusual; he did it every day and if nothing else, Mr. Winchester was a creature of habit. Besides, everybody walked in New York, it was simply how things were done, and who was he to argue.
John walked home with the prospects of cooking himself dinner in his small apartment with the screaming of the couple halfway through their divorce filtering through the ceiling; it had become a daily occurrence. His parents had died a few years before; he was an only child and had no girlfriend to speak of. He would leave no-one behind, make no mark upon his small world; in fact, he would not be missed at all.
Had John stopped for coffee, taken a minute longer to lock up his garage, or even paused to tie his shoelace, he could have avoided the whole fiasco. Instead, as he did every other evening, John walked home at a steady pace with every intention of arriving at his home at quarter past six.
He would never reach it.
In one of the tall steel apartment blocks that so epitomised New York, thirty floors up from the bustling street, two other insignificant lives were about to impact upon another with detrimental consequences. Mary Campbell had married a broker because she had thought he would make her happy, giving her the normal life she had always dreamed of; that dream had soon shattered and their relationship had gone downhill from there. Now with the loss of his job, after four years of her own private hell, the intelligent and passionate woman that made up the now Mary Stewart lost control. In the midst of a blazing row with her soon to be penniless husband, she threw the nearest kitchen implement near to her at his head. The toaster missed her husband's skull and smashed through the window instead, landing on John Winchester's head as he passed below. Instantly knocking him out, he stumbled to the side and collapsed, missing the pavement and falling down the manhole which an oblivious road worker had just pulled open. Crashing headfirst down into it, he died instantly. It would have been comical had it not been so horrific. It was a series of unfortunate events; wrong place, wrong time and John Winchester had paid the consequence.
It seems a strange fate to suffer, perhaps even amusing to read about, but there was nothing funny about this death; of course, there was little fuss either, a few police cars, a funeral home, a short court case. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary in the lives we lead, for we see as much death as we do life, and after all, it's just a matter of equilibrium.
The murder was of course concluded as a homicide, however Mary Stewart would still see jail time, for if the toaster had hit her husband as she had intended, she would have been in jail not for assault with the intention to kill, but cold hard murder. As for the broker, he, like many other things in this world, would simply fade into oblivion.
Life hadn't been very fair to Mr. Winchester, it's true, but then again, he had never done much for life either. He had at one time in his existence had people who he considered friends, but after high school he had lost contact with all of them. John had never met Mary Campbell, and thus had never become the man he was meant to be. All John was left with was a few work mates, and they were little better than acquaintances anyway. Of course at his funeral they all spoke of what a good man he had been, his boss even paid for the drinks afterwards, but none of them had really ever gotten to know him, nor bothered enough to try. In a city of eighteen million, people didn't much care about the loss of a single life; it just meant more space on the pavement to walk on.
A small column in the newspaper the next day hailed it as 'one of New York's most bizarre death to date'. The man himself of course, would not be remembered.
It somehow just popped into my head :) how different things could have been.