Notable Last Words

Author's note:

I did not expect I was going to post my short stories on this site. They tend to be tragic, and Notable last words is no exception.

It's strange, I want my short stories to be powerful enough to punch someone in the gut. They probably aren't, not yet, but I'm quite sure that there's a glimmer of profoundness in each one of them. At least that what I tell myself.

I want to make you think when you read this. Write your thoughts in the comments. Gift your insights and perhaps even personal experiences to me and anyone else who reads this.

Voting is something I leave up to you, but I will say that if you enjoyed it, then giving it a good score will make it likely for others to find something you found worth your time. It can be your little gift to a random stranger. And with that, the world becomes a slightly better place.

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Notable Last Words

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'Hello?'

"I'm calling to say I'm doing it right now, tonight is the last I'm taking of this. I'm going to kill myself."

'Please Sir, wait. Don't do it, let me help you.'

"Help me? How are you going to help me? What possible good could you do to me?"

'I want you to tell me your story. I want to be there for you when you tell it, allow me to do at least that much.'

"And why would I let you?"

'Don't you want to tell why? Don't you want somebody to understand, to have an inkling of the why of it all?'

"No, I don't."

'Are you sure?'

"I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to distract me so you can make me reconsider. Well it's not going to work, I'm calling to say goodbye and damned if I won't."

'I'm not trying to change your mind, Sir.'

"Oh really? I must've misdialed somehow."

'You dialed correctly, Sir. We get a lot of calls here, some people just want someone to talk to but those who call to say goodbye we usually can't help. We're told to stall, but I know better. I want to hear your story so that there is someone out there that knows about you when you're gone. I want to look in your eyes and tell you as one person to another that you were brave at the end.'

"What is your name?"

'My name is Tom Franklin, Sir.'

"How soon can you get to Brooklyn Street?"

'I could get there in half an hour.'

"Come then, it's in apartment block 124, apartment D."

'Sir? Do you mean now? Sir?'

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The apartment was non-descript, a concrete box filled with lives insignificant to the grand scheme of things. It was the kind of place where you were incognito, forgotten. Tom rang the bell for apartment D and was startled by the shrill buzzer. A note was attached to the elevator "Out of order. Repairs scheduled for November 2012". Today was the fifth of December 2013. He reached the man's hallway and almost stumbled over a broken children's stool that lay discarded behind the door, covered in dust. Tom stopped in front of door D. He knocked and heard the soft creaking of the latch covering the eagle eye. "Are you Tom Franklin?"

"I am Sir."

Tom waited patiently in the musty hallway, the sounds of happy chattering coming from a TV set further down the hallway seemed strangely out of place. After a series of clanking and turning noises, the door swung open. An older man with a scruffy beard stood in the dim light coming from within the room. His clothes were outdated and crumpled, judging by the stains he must have been wearing them for days.

"Hello S -"

The old man put up his hand and said, "Cut it with the Sir, I'm Rich. Just shut up for now and come in. Do you take Scotch?"

"Whiskey's fine."

He stuck a Collin's glass filled with Scotch and ice cubes in Tom's hands and offered him a chair in front of his worn leather armchair. His face pulled at the invigorating burn of his drink but he closed his eyes to savor it. "I always liked a good blended Scotch. But the times I could afford stuff like this were rare in my life. It's worth my last 100 dollar bill."

He pulled a magnum from beneath the pillow supporting his back and nestled it in his lap. "I bought this with what was left of my savings so I can go out with a bang. I guess I do want somebody to know."

"I hope you don't expect me to stay here and watch you kill yourself?"

"No, no I don't expect you to. There's no need for that. Where should I start?"

"Start at where you think things started leading you up to this."

Rich stared at Tom and then shrugged. "You're a cold one aren't you? Not even trying to comfort me? Fine, I'll tell you what you want to know so I can kick your ass out of here and do what I have to. Do you know the story of Job?"

"About the bet between God and the Devil? Yes, why?"

"If I were Job I might've pulled through this but it's too much for me. I have nothing to fall back on, I can't be as blind as he was. I lost my wife, then my job, then my knee, then my only son and now even my damn cat is gone. We'd always been a small family and we couldn't afford much but we had enough. I worked as a waiter all my life, my wife was a seamstress.

"We tried to raise our son well and maybe we did too good of a job. He enlisted. Left a proud young man and came back with the life wrung from him. He had been discharged and never told us why, just slipped further and further away from us. My wife..."

He stopped and gulped down the rest of his glass, it seemed to give him a push. Tom topped his glass again, his own was still as full as it had been at the start. "It devastated my wife, she tried to reach him every day. She would cook him his favorites from before and he would eat but I doubt he ever tasted anything. Every time he went to sleep the nightmares ate up a little bit more of him."

A little smile curled the corner of his mouth, his eye were looking straight through Tom as he reminisced. "She remembered one day that he used to love the pinball machines in the arcade, he would beg us for any quarters we had in our pockets. She saved up and bought one of them in a second hand store, had it delivered to the front. She didn't tell anybody, she wanted it to be a surprise. The night before they delivered it the elevator broke, she hadn't called up front about needing assistance so the movers didn't have the time scheduled to help out. Now my wife was a woman who did what needed doing so she started carefully dragging and pushing the thing up the stairs by herself. People don't help in this building. I wish she'd asked somebody, anybody. She slipped and fell. The fall didn't hurt her much, but the pinball machine... It broke her neck and smashed her jaw. She was dead when my son found her."

Rich discarded his glass and drank straight from the bottle now, his knuckles white from the force he was gripping it with. "It destroyed what was left of my boy. He escaped death in some backwards country, he ran from it every night in his dreams and now it had followed him back in real life again. And he knew. He knew why she died. It was because of him that his sweet mother died. Accidents do happen, I told him this over and over in all the words I could find. He wouldn't hear me."

Tears ran down his cheeks, but he didn't seem to realize. His eyes were looking far off in the distance, back in time. He probably never even realized he was lovingly stroking the magnum in his lap. "One day he was gone, he had reenlisted. I never saw him again until his coffin arrived back in the States last month. They gave me a flag, I burned it. Some stupid war cost me my family, it cost me my job. And now I have bronchitis but no money for treatment, I get by with whatever pills come cheap. Tell me Tom, give it your best shot as to why I should keep going."

Tom shook his head and said, "I'm not here to tell you that Rich. Anything I say would sound hollow."

"Then why are you here Tom? You don't want to help me so what's in it for you?"

"I just want to know your story."

Rich threw the bottle at Tom, narrowly missing his head. The crash as it hit the wall boomed through the quiet room. Startled, Tom jumped up and dodged the spray of shards and whiskey. He bumped into the kitchen table, knocking something out of his pocket. The brief clanging noise ushered in a renewed silence. Rich stared at the thing Tom had dropped. "Is that a recorder? Are you recording this?"

Slowly backing away, Tom answered "Yes, I'm recording. Now please calm down Rich."

"You shut up! Why are you recording this? Why? Tell me!"

"I'm... I'm a reporter, I'm working on a story..."

"Really now? Are you being serious? Play it back to me, now."

He pointed the gun at Tom's belly, he knew he was a bad shot but with a magnum he didn't need skill from such a short distance. The agitation he felt made him have a coughing fit. Tom made for the door but stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the gun being cocked. Rich spoke, "I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'm going to die here and I wouldn't care if I took a slick fuck like you with me. Pick up the damn recorder and play it back to me."

Tom shuffled back to his seat and picked up the little device, he fumbled with the controls for a while until it started playing.

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November Sixteenth, young woman in New Jersey called to the suicide line. This is only the third one since early October that I have been able to convince to meet me. Deadline is early January, I need more interviews.

...

*Knock*

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Rich knocked the recorder out of Tom's hand and stomped on it with his boot. Tom tried to pick it back up but he couldn't stop Rich's foot stomping down on the recorder again and again until there were only bits and pieces left.

"This is what you do, why you wanted to help me? Why you wanted to listen to me and be there for me? So you could write yourself a shocking article? You make me sick."

Tom looked up at him, his eyes filled with a strange mixture of fear and anger. "I listened to you didn't I? I'm here aren't I? What does it matter why I'm here, you're going to kill yourself anyway. What do you care what happens with your story!"

Rich swung the gun and the impact of the barrel against his temple snapped his head to the side. He crumpled to the floor, dazed. Rich said something to him, but he couldn't understand, bleary eyed he said "What?"

Rich's voice rose, he was shouting now."I asked you, are any of these people you went to still alive? Did you help even one of them?"

Tom groaned and reached for his temple, there was blood on his hand. Why was there blood on his hand?

"Answer me! Are any of them still alive? Did you help anybody that called you on that number?"

"No, they all did it."

Rich fell back on his chair and stared off in the distance. "My boy, he was such a good man. I was proud of him. He's dead now while garbage like you lives on to ruin other people's lives. I won't allow it."

He dragged Tom's half limp body on top off the chair and settled in front of him with a glass of whiskey. "Do you understand what is going to happen to you Tom?"

He shook his head.

"It would seem that you killed yourself today. You see, I'm not sober right now and I hate being alive. Another thing I hate is parasites like you. In the past I couldn't do anything about it because consequences still meant something to me. Now that I have nothing I don't mind doing some dirty work. In a way you were right, it feels good to have somebody with me before the end."

Tom tried to get up but Rich beat his knee with the barrel, a sickening crunch sounded through the room. Tom screamed and fell out of the chair, grabbing his shattered knee in his hands.

"I've lived here for ten years now and I don't know the names of any of my neighbors. Everybody keeps to themselves in this block. They don't know me, they won't miss me. It would be the smell that makes them call the cops. And I don't want that. If I do it, I want to be found with at least a little dignity. That's why I bought this ridiculous gun. I tested it on the shooting range, no earmuffs. My ears were ringing for two hours. Have you ever heard a gun going off, Tom?"

Frightened, Tom shook his head again and crawled back from Rich. Tears streamed down his face, his thoughts were fixed on escaping.

BOOM!

The magnum exploded inches away from his ear, shattering any semblance of a coherent thought that Tom might've had. His own screams sounded muffled to him, as if they were echoes of someone else's suffering.

"Well, you've certainly heard now, haven't you Tom? I'm sure you listened very well."

Rich pressed his knee down on Tom's chest and put the barrel dead center to his forehead. Fear lit a fire in Tom, and he tried to struggle and escape but he couldn't. Rich's full weight was painfully leaning on him, restricting his breathing. There was nowhere to go. He tried to claw his hands into the floor, tried to find the door from the corner of his eye. But the painful pressure on his forehead forced him to look at the man he'd wronged.

"Look into my eyes Tom! The place you're in now is what I've been living for the past month. Maybe now you'll be able to write down what it's really like. I didn't want any of this but I can't seem to escape. You didn't want to watch, but believe me you'll see now!"

In one fluid motion Rich swung the gun to his own mouth and pulled the trigger. The life was ripped out of him in one instant and splattered across his old leather arm chair. His blood soaked in the dry, chipped surface of the leather, reinvigorating it. It had served him well in his final, lonely days. It was a gift from his wife, a wonderful woman who he would no longer have to miss.