He could hardly believe it had been thirty years. He sat and watched the candle burn, a ritual he’d done as long as she’d been dead. When his wife left him she claimed it was his inability to let go of the past. He doubted that she had loved their daughter, and barely fought as she took everything. He had already lost everything with Claire. The candle was half gone and his eyes were wet with tears when the doorbell rang. He got up and answered the door. And there he was, he could never have forgotten the face. The drunk driver who killed his little girl.
“Excuse me sir, I’m trying to sell some magazines to raise money for a halfway home back in town, I was wondering if you were interested,” the murderer said, oblivious to the churning anger of the father’s stomach.
“Sure, why don’t you come in, and I’ll make you some tea?”
The driver sat down in the living room and prepared his shpeel, excited to be finally selling a subscription. In the kitchen the father gathered what he needed for tea and vengeance. The father brought out the tea, poured some for himself and his guest and set the gun on the table.
“I understand you were put in jail for manslaughter and driving under the influence?” the father inquired.
“Yes how did you…” and the face was recognized.
“Do you remember what the father of the girl you killed told you on your first day in prison?”
The prisoner gulped and nodded, eying his tea.
“I told you that I would not seek you out for vengeance, but if I ever saw you again I would take it,” the father picked up his tea and sipped it. The prisoner seized his opportunity and threw his cup at the father, to no avail. The tea was cold. “That’s just plain rude,” the father remarked, lifting the gun and aiming it at the prisoner, “Now let’s go outside.”
The father led him to the back yard and picked up a shovel. “Dig,” he barked. “What?” “Dig!” The prisoner saw no other option but to run. He heard the crack of the gunshot before he had turned around. The father looked at him, tear-filled eye to tear-filled eye. “Now I’ve got to bury you alive.” And he began digging.
Everything was spinning, but not like he was drunk. He couldn’t keep enough in his head to do anything but react. Anything but react and worry about what was happening to him. He started running hoping it would clear his head. He reached the docks and looked down to see what he was carrying. A knife. Covered in blood. He couldn’t remember what happened, and then gunshots. “Over here!” a voice called from the shadows, he ran towards it, figuring bullets were sure death but with strangers he had some chance of living. Entering the shadows he felt a prick in the arm. Not a large chance he wondered as he blacked out. “Did he get the target?”, a voice whispered.
He laughed heartily before sniffing another pickle and drinking more vodka. He was very happy to see his grandson turn 16. He had always believed that a boy needs a firm right of passage at 16, and the only way to do it was by drinking vodka after the Banya with a father figure. His daughter’s ex-husband had run off, and so he happily took over the duty. “Let me tell you a story, grandson,” he began chomping on some rye bread. “I worked as a scientist in Turkmenistan. We had been drilling for gas when the drill hit a pocket of natural gas, and the ground collapsed. It sadly swallowed up 127 men that day.” He looked at the boy carefully, “But that wasn’t the real danger. The real danger was the gas leaking out and smothering the near by villagers, so do you know what we did? We set the hole on fire. The locals began to call it ‘The Gates of Hell,’ but we expected it to go out quickly. I had been on site, and wanted to return to Novgorod with your mother (she was born hours after the incident). But the hole has burned for the past 35 years. You should visit it sometime.”
The Wall - June 14, 2009 -
Every time it happened he made a mark on an index card that he kept with himself at all times. Every week he would drive to Home Depot and purchase the bricks, one for each mark, and drive out to the country. He secretly owned a one acre patch of land, and he was walling it in. Over the course of the past seven years he had managed to grow his wall up to 5 feet. He now needed a ladder to lay bricks, but he knew that he wouldn’t ever be able to stop, because he would never be able to contain the thoughts. He hoped that someday someone would find the message in the first brick that this wall represented his need to contain his own violent nature.
The bunker was flooded with light through it’s narrow slit. As he stared at the nimbus agaricus he could hardly feel anything but pride. As an engineer he was impressed that he was able to build it, and as a scientist he was impressed that he was able to enrich the uranium. Despite being in the absolute middle of nowhere, he knew that by the end of the hour every news station would be discussing the explosion, which is why he sent them e-mails explaining exactly what he had done. He had always dreamed of his own independence and respect, and now with his very own nuke he had it.
Sunlight crept across the empty room onto his face. He woke up and realized that everything was gone except for the bed. He walked around the house in his white pajamas surrounded by bare white walls, wondering how she pulled it off. He wasn’t upset, his sister had given him fair warning, he just hadn’t expected her to be so thorough. He walked into the kitchen, and found a thermos of coffee, an unexpected gift. He sipped it quietly and looked outside the curtainless windows. The day was warm and the sky a light clear blue, but he had to get into town by nightfall.
Ademola was happy. He was watching television in his home, smoking his own home grown ‘dagga’ (as the South Africans would call it). He had just been fired from his job as a bus boy at a local hotel, but all he wanted was for his worries to go up in smoke. The clock ticked forward, and then the commercial came on:
‘How would you like to make thousands of dollars working from home? All you need is an internet connection and the motivation to SELL! We provide you with a template for contacting rich westerners, and swindling out of money! What’s more, our anonymization network will fully protect you from the government!’
It was in that moment Ademola thought he saw the clock move back a minute.
We needed drugs. We needed them yesterday, because yesterday we finished our finals. But Vanya wasn’t able to drive us until today. You see, back in the day the Russians had allowed ‘rehabilitated’ prisoners to return from the taiga, but they could not return to a city. They needed to say at least 1000 kilometers out from the city, and so criminal towns arose. An arrogant American might liken these towns to something like the Wild West. But the conditions in these towns was worse than that, they were in Russia. Unlike the Australians, we Russians knew how to set up a penal colony, which is why we needed to travel 1001 kilometers for our fix.
They had finally infiltrated Wal-Mart. The organization had been trying for years to get someone into the position of ‘Shopping-Cart Engineer.’ Now, at first it may not seem like this is the logical place to really hurt a corporate behemoth. If you do a bad job, you’d just get fired, and someone else takes over. But the organization had a plan. Michael had just completed an engineering degree at Brown, when his girlfriend (a sophomore psychology major) took him to his first secret meeting. There she suggested that if the organization could train Americans not to shop at Wal-Mart, they could finally take Wal-Mart down. She suggested something like an electric shock every time they shopped. Up until that point Michael had just been looking forward to the spacecake that followed the meeting, but then he realized he knew exactly how to make his girlfriend’s dream come true. Make the carts generate static electricity and shock people!
(Have you guys noticed the theme of stoners/hippies/liberals getting revenge against someone? I have too, and it makes me wonder about my subconscious. Also, this was inspired by a true story, sort of: link)
The air was thick with smoke, and so Charles started coughing. Even though Charles, David, and Albert had been smoking up for four years together, Charles still coughed every time. “Listen,” he said voice deepened by the smoke. “We need to figure out a way to make as much money, with as little effort as possible.” David looked at him, “What do you have planned?” Charles smiled, coughed, and started explaining, “We need to find a way to separate rich dumb people from their money… And the simplest way to do that is to con them.” He looked wryly at Albert, “I looked up the top donors in the Republican party and sent them this…” He handed them each an envelope. Blazoned across the top was “Guaranteed Admission with donations of $50,000 or more!” David looked quickly at Charles, “What, we can’t do this, the check’s will be written out to Princeton!” Charles coughed and said, “That’s why I’ve opened a shell company called Princetoon, and they include a mailer saying they intend to donate to us. The card will be proof enough that there were misspellings involved.”
