Sunset on the Overpass_Selcouth_The Deadly Debate_Eleven Minutes Past Nine
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Sunset on the Overpass
Bystander #1The concrete vibrated softly underneath us, like being on a lily pad in a pond. A sea of lights flowed toward us before disappearing beneath our feet. Vroom! The boy stood on the wall, holding onto the rusted fence and watching the parade of lights. I looked to the stars for answers.I had been on my way to the convenience store down the road. My friends were expecting me to come back quickly. It was cool outside. I came upon this boy on the overpass, blonde in a grey hoodie, scanning the traffic, the hills in the distance, the opal sunset. He was glued to the chain link fence that ...
Selcouth
SELCOUTHHe said he was from France but there were a lot of French words he couldn’t quite pronounce. Take for example, on his first visit to the fancy restaurant down the street, he asked for le yaourt and cringed when the waitress frowned. He asked for tea instead, his voice low to the point of a whisper. To describe him would be to momentarily describe the afterlife: chimerical and dull. He had the most unremarkable face: a beard too rough to touch; lips, small and pink; green eyes like the lake Carezza and messy brown hair. He wasn’t much of anything anyway. His mother’s mother had left him...
The Deadly Debate
I keep telling myself, “Please, don’t do it,” but I find my voice falling on deaf ears. What’s so bad about suicide? People kill themselves every day, so why shouldn’t I? I have a happy life. A home, a lovely wife, two children, and financially well off. It’s the American dream come true. Why shouldn’t I be living it? Who am I trying to kid? I may have all that, but what does it really matter? That’s all the American Dream is. A dream. What’s real is I’m not happy and I haven’t been for several years. My thoughts about suicide aren’t spontaneous or even a secret. On occasion, I would tell my ...
Eleven Minutes Past Nine
Four minutes past nine.“Would you stand over here, Mr. Paige? That’s right, just here, thank you, Mr. Paige.”It had never occurred to Andrew Paige that his wife would give birth as late in the day as past nine o’clock at night and, until Lisa, his wife, had gone into labor only several hours prior, he had always thought of childbirth as the sort of thing that happens only in the morning, or perhaps in the middle of the day, leaving plenty of time for tea and supper after the baby had been delivered. At odds with this strange notion, though, was the very scene in before him, comprising a bustli...