Have you ever thought about why there are only two major political parties? why religion is generally looked at as believers and nonbelievers? Why coins only have two sides? Why there are only two side to any major issue? I’ll tell you why. Somebody has programmed us, as humans, to create potential conflict at every turn. I don’t know if this was God’s plan, society, genetics, or some little happy bunny’s goal for world domination, but it is there.
By only having two side to choose from you potentially get the maximum number of people against the other. It is easier to aggress upon one party than upon two. Hitler learned that the hard way when he decided to attack the
Currently there are two sides forming. Those who believe the doomsday tales of Armageddon, and those who don’t. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I do have the feeling that I am going to have to soon. I think that when the clouds start raining down blood I will be convinced. Hopefully I never get to see that wonderful, disturbing, phenomenon, but who knows. Might be just around the corner. Might be years away. Might be never. Meanwhile, when a choir of angels comes down with a heavenly glow, and I hear the full symphony playing their praises, I might be persuaded to believe something. Until then people can back off of my ass about it.
3.
Martial law… They haven’t declared it yet, but they are starting to play like they have all the power. Some big general decided that everyone would be safer with a curfew. If you are out past ten pm, or 20 hundred hours, you will get reprimanded. Get reprimanded 3 times and you will be shot. Not just shot, but shot on sight. I don’t know if they are actually following the three strikes rule, but one could always hope. I know I’ve heard the crack of automatic weapons fire late at night, but I can’t tell with any certainty if it is the military doing the shooting. There are other factions at work here who have been trying to fight the rules and orders that have been placed upon them. They really do believe that the military does not own this country and they are dead set on showing it.
Here is the part that makes the least sense. The news has been talking about a record number of fatalities recently, but the streets are not lined with bodies. The morgues are not overflowing. The cemeteries are not running at capacity. Even the crematoriums are hurting for business. With such a high mortality rate wouldn’t all of these places be booming with new clients? It just doesn’t add up although I have seen a larger number of ownerless shoes thrown around in the streets and alleys. I don’t think it could be those things from the other night, could it? No, that would be pretty stupid for me to assume that it could be, but... It really could be.
What the hell were those things anyway? I mentioned before that they looked like moving death. Well, they did. There is more to it though. When they aren’t moving they look just like ordinary shadows. When they start to swirl and slide towards their targets, they definitely start looking like a walking version of death. Think of the scariest boogey man, or monster, that you imagined from your childhood. You got it? Good. Now take that image and make it 100 times scarier. Now picture it an understand that it still scares the shit out of you, even more so now that you know it is real. That is how evil these things seem to be. I just wonder when the lotto will draw my number and they will take me away. Hopefully they can’t find me up here. We’ll see how it goes. Until we meet again, remember to walk in the light.
The Note
1.
Nobody has any clue. People, as a group, are losing motivation. With so many lost being lost like loose change, who can blame them. If my number was up, or I thought it might be, what would you expect? I would curl up and ignore everything. Or I would just go kill myself and get it out of the way early. In fact, maybe that is exactly what I should do. Take care of it, make it easier on the big guy. Take all of the mystery of my own death. I would go and get my personal affairs in order, but there are two reasons I just don’t care. One is that I have no family to leave anything to. Two is the fact that even if I did, they will probably be dead soon as well. So I will leave this note for anyone who cares to read it. Don’t know if they will find my body, but I think the piece of paper will survive. Well, it should for a little while at least.
Let me explain what has taken me to this point. I know I mentioned that I have no family. That is not to say that I’ve never had one, but that they are all gone now. My parent’s died while I was young. They died two days before my 16th birthday. Ad timing, but such is life. I’m not bitter about it anymore. Either way, it was a pretty shitty end for them.
Dad and Mom went out to find me a car for my birthday. I had a hunch that I would get my own shiny, well at least drivable, vehicle for my b-day, but I wasn’t really too sure. They played it off so well. After weeks of searching they had finally found a little Japanese piece. It was older, the paint was faded, but I’m assuming that it at least ran. They took it to out mechanic to have a once over done on it. Make sure it was safe. Make sure it was a good buy. I’m not sure if he gave them the OK or not, but as they were on their way back to the owners house, some things started to happen. Not paranormal things, or anything like that. I think it was just a case of bad luck. At least that is what I want to believe.
So they were driving when the car in front of them suddenly decided to slam on it’s brakes. Dad crammed the pedal and prayed. They were going way to fast to avoid an accident. The bumpers started to close in on each other. Closer and closer. Just as they were just about to touch, the car in front floored it, and in doing so, narrowly avoided an anal reaming. With all parties unharmed, but likely a little bit shaken, everyone continued their predefined journeys.
Dad didn’t like the almost accident, but it wasn’t like it was the first time or anything. Shit happens and life moves on, he would’ve said. They continued their trip, I’m assuming here, to purchase my new car. He wanted to get on the interstate to cross the city a little but faster than the side streets were offering, so he did. He was never on to go 35 miles an hour when he could go 70. He was also the kind of guy who didn’t really care if the interstate was backed up because he believed that it would still be faster, even if it was only moving at a snails pace.
So accelerating through the onramp, he floored it to narrowly miss a semi. Satisfied with his driving skills he looked forward to suddenly find that traffic was stopped. He needed to slow his car from70 down to 15 or so. There was no time for this maneuver. He never even touched the brakes. Flying toward the truck in front of him, he swerved violently to he right. He rode the shoulder straight for a bridge embankment. Scanning for a way to right this major situation, he came up short. There were no openings. There were no outs. Mom was screaming in the passenger seat. The concrete restriction lay ahead and there was nowhere to go.
Dad was never considered stupid. With Mom screaming, he managed to scoot over a few feet to the left, almost brushing the cars on the side of him. If there had been a passenger in a convertible, he could have reached out and touched someone. He decided not to, not that he had time to even think about it. Mirrors were flying off of the stopped vehicles as Dad glided past them.
The concrete was coming up. He tucked the car even closer. I know he was thinking about a famous quote. “Rubbing is racing.” I know it crossed his mind as he turned the drivers door into a Technicolor rainbow of factory paint colors. It probably would’ve been a revoltingly beautiful thing to see. I never got the chance. He managed to narrowly scrape between the barrier and the other automobiles and promptly removed himself from the interstate.
Dad was still going to buy the car because it was just the right thing to do. That was my Dad. Mr. upstanding citizen. So as they neared the owners house, he needed to negotiate a sharp right hand turn. As he hit the brakes to slow the 1-ton mass of metal they decided not to do any such thing. The brakes were happy staying cool in the breeze and refused to do any actual work. There was that, and the fact that some debris from the shoulder had managed to sever both the drivers front and rear brake lines. There was no pressure to be built.
He took the turn way too wide and narrowly missed a minivan full of soccer kids. He did, however, run straight over a fire hydrant which caught on the transmission housing. As he was leaking gear oil and the associated gears all over the ground, he did look back to notice the enormous spray that the now missing hydrant had been holding back. I’m sure all he thought was “Oh shit,” as he impacted the flat reinforcement of a brick retaining wall.
Mom and Dad did not walk away from that incident. I don’t know if anything I actually described is accurate, but that did all come out of the police report that I received after the major inquiry and associated investigation. This was way too many years ago. I can’t believe that the first time I am actually explaining what happened to my parents is in a suicide note. Not just a suicide note, but my final suicide note.
You see, I’ve written a few of these before. I’m one of those melancholy people you see at the supermarket. At the bank. Everywhere you go. You may not notice us, but we’ve decided that life sucks and there is nothing left for us, but lack the balls to just end it all. The only reason I think I can actually do it this time is that there is nothing left for me, or anyone else anymore. That’s not entirely true, we are all just waiting to die. Not in the sense of just waiting to die of old age, or cancer, or any number of other things that happen, but a definite end to life that is not in the distant future. Everyone is going to die sooner, rather than later.
I used to be married a long time ago. I had a beautiful son who was just starting his life. He wasn’t even six years old when he was taken from me. There is very little drama to that sad part of my life though. My wife and son were going out of town and I was going to be flying out a few days later to catch up with them.
My wife woke up late for her flight, like two hours late. By the time she got to the airport, her plane had already left and they decided to move her to a later flight, but that meant she would miss her connection. She decided to fly anyway. If it had been my choice I would have just tried for the next day, but she insisted on getting to her destination as soon as possible.
Everything else was going ok when she boarded her flight. My son was being very well behaved, the plane was pretty empty, and life was looking pretty good. The pilot powered on the engines and taxied to the runway. As he accelerated there was a thud, which felt odd, but he figured it was just a piece of debris or something. He was correct in that assumption, but the debris happened to be the port side flap. It had decided to dislodge itself from the plane. I think that the flap knew there was something wrong so it jumped as soon as it could, because it wanted to survive the impeding catastrophe. It was a little bashed up, but over all would survive.
The tower radioed the pilot right as he started to raise the front wheel gently from the ground. It was too late. The pilot cleared the tires and immediately started to roll. There was not enough time to compensate for the decreased lift on the wing. He drug it into the ground and performed a spectacular cartwheel with an object that was never designed to be a gymnast. The flight deck kissed the ground like a long lost lover and killed both pilots and the navigator instantly. All of the passengers, while buckled in, flew around the cabin. The seats were ripped from the ground.
As the plane slowed to a stop the rescue crew was on it’s tail, or what was left of it anyway. All 72 passengers, and 10 flight crew members were pronounced dead on the scene. 35 families were destroyed that day. 35, now single, parents suddenly had nothing to live for. 11 husbands had lost their lives, while only nine really mourned the loss. Three wives were now widows. And the flap that had survived the crash made it into the pile of wreckage when it was placed in the crash assessment warehouse. They could never figure out how it managed to detach itself from the airframe so he lost his dream of a real life that day as well.
So I sit alone in this house. The house that used to be our home. Now it is just a place to keep my shit and to sleep. Over the past 10 years I have spent as little time here as possible. I’m not sure why I never sold the place, but I just didn’t feel right forgetting about my family. I would be going to by my son his first car soon if he had made it. If only they had left the next day. My wife never did like taking my advice. That was the one time I truly wish that she would have.
So now I am left with a few decisions. How do I carry out my plans? Should I use a rope? I could always go messy with a firearm. I have an axe that could be fashioned into a guillotine. I could fashion a catapult and go thundering over the city. Those all seem easy enough, but somehow complicated. The first two would only need a slight miscalculation and I would be left as a cripple until my time is up. The last two would take more effort than I really want to put into it. I need something quick, foolproof, and if possible, painless.
What to do… What to do. I need to solve this dilemma soon, otherwise it might be solved for me and that would defeat the whole purpose.
To anyone who actually reads this, if I dies by my own volition, great. If somehow they got to me first, then I’d probably be pretty pissed if I wasn’t dead anyway. If you are the first to find this note, then you can have anything that is in my house. You want to know the real trick? Figuring out where I live. You’ll notice that even if you find my body, there is no ID, wallet, or any other piece of identifiable information. Well, my teeth could be used if you are a dentist, but that is probably pretty unlikely.
Good luck and God Speed.
-Your, hopefully now deceased, friendly neighborhood jumper
The Jumper
1.
The news reports would have come screaming in if anybody had actually cared. There had been so many suicides. So many deaths. The news had finally just stopped reporting on them. Everyone knew the situation so there was no point in reiterating how bad things really were for so many. Not only would it take more time than there were hours, but it also depressed the people that cared. The jumper did not know any of this. He could see a few lights below him. It is a tragedy that he did not know that everyone below him was entirely oblivious to his intentions. The lights were just from tourists cameras taking pictures of the historic building. There was a spot light that kept frequenting his location, but the police in the helicopter were trying to find the man responsible for the robbery of a stop light located in the congested down town area.
None of this would have really mattered to the Jumper, but since he believed that they were focused on him, it did manage to give him the additional courage he would need to actually go through with the grim task. He thought he was ready, but not really. It would happen tonight, but he still needed some additional time to psych himself up. He had never done this before. He had always wanted to skydive, but even then he would have a parachute. Right now he was going to live on the edge for the few seconds that it took to become one with the sidewalk, or asphalt if he could jump that far out. There was a fountain that could make for a goo target. Not only could he flatten himself, but possibly impale himself on the copper tube that stuck straight out of the top. It would make for some great pictures if he managed to pull it off.
The time was rapidly approaching. The second hand kept ticking and drove him mad with anticipation. This was his final statement. His final act of control on his otherwise uncontrollable life. The last decision he knew he could actually make. Time wound on, but to him it seemed like it was standing still. The hours he had already spent on the roof seemed like days. He tried to estimate the time it would take for his epic descent. The best he could guess, based on random things thrown off the roof, was about four and a half seconds. It didn’t seem like long, but he figured one of two things would happen. Either it would seem like less than the blink of an eye, or that it would take forever.
There were thuds coming from inside the building. Whether they were heavy footsteps, or reports from a gun, was unclear, but they were definitely resonating in the stairwell. He figured that they could just as easily be a guy with a baseball bat in one hand and a trashcan lid in the other. An aluminum trashcan lid, not one of those plastic ones. Since the volume seemed to increase over time he figured either it would stop, or he would find out about the commotion first hand in relatively short order.
The stairwell door burst open. The noise was so loud that it temporarily deafened the jumper. There was a blaring ringing, which could only be associated with absolute silence, in his ears. He became unbalanced and started to fall. The only problem was that he fell toward the inside instead of out. He landed hard on the ledge of the roof and rolled toward some flashing. He came to rest against the lip which separated him from life and death.
He watched in awe as am apparently crazy teenager swung a nightstick into what looked like the hubcap for an 18-wheeler. It would have looked like that if 18-wheelers had hub caps. The jumper was not really sure what it was, but he did know that it was loud. The teenager just seemed to enjoy being a nuisance anywhere that being a nuisance was discouraged.
The jumper regained his composure and reclaimed his footing. He rose slowly and decided that it was finally time to do what he came here to do. With a few last breaths he prepared himself for the final plunge. The teenager stopped making the racket, stepped closer, and stared at the jumper suspiciously. Just as he was preparing to jump the teenager forced him, violently, off of the roof and toward the fountain.
During the 4.3 second descent, the jumper went from confusion, to fear, to wonderment, to peace, to anger. He wondered how this moment, his moment, could have been taken away so swiftly and easily. This was the time for him to decide his own end, not for a stupid kid to murder him. He thought about this all the way down. He could do nothing but stare back up at the leering adolescent. He flipped him off quickly before attacking the fountain.
The corroded copper tubing pierced the jumpers left bicep, and abruptly slowed his descent. As it ripped his muscle clean from the bone, he continued toward the pavement. The impact with the fountain threw him completely off of his original target and sent him flipping through the air. His right leg was the first to hit the cement. It shattered all of the bones in his leg and foot except for the bones in his small toe. The other leg followed suit and shattered with a blistering, searing pain. His hip decided to join the party and forcefully removed itself from the tendons. His chest was next, followed by his head.
With his lungs punctured, chest collapsed, skull cracked in multiple places, and his heart beating faintly, all he could do was think. It no longer hurt, but he was still alive. As he lay there dying all he could do was wallow in self pity. His one last decision had been taken from him. His one last stand to take control of his life. His final action amounted to nothing because of one stupid kid.
“Fuck,” he tried to say, but before the words could leave his mouth, his world had faded to black.
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