Short Story / These people who walk amongst us
There are four young men sitting in a circle. Perhaps they are at a table. Perhaps they are around a fire-pit. It doesn’t really matter. Each takes a turn…
- “If I had been courageous, I’d be married to the most attractive woman I’ve ever met.”
- “If I had been honest with myself, I would be engaged to my best friend.”
- “If I had been confident, I’d be living with the smartest girl I know”
- “If I hadn’t changed my mind so much, I’d be in love with my soulmate”
The men rise from the circle, and go about their business.
The first man veers off the road in a blizzard, smashing into an embankment on the side of the road. The second is hit by a bus. The third, electrocuted. The fourth, if you hadn’t assumed as much, is crushed in a stampede of drunks.
All of them die, and are whisked away to their own personal heavens, which, strangely enough, fit the exact description that each of them would have given for their own personal hells. That is, they watch the lives of the attractive woman, the best friend, the smart girl and the soulmate unfold in front of them. They are unable to close their eyes, unable to turn away.
In each man’s personal heaven, when they get to the part where the object of their failed pursuit is given the news of their untimely demise, they are once again whisked away, only this time they are whisked into the very mind of the woman. They read the letter informing her of their death with her vision, journeying outward through her eyes and down her face as part of the solitary tear she sheds in their memory.
They travel downward over her cheeks and her chin, pausing momentarily before plummeting towards the floor in a salty parachute of sorts. The tear — having reached whatever the terminal velocity for a bizzaro personal-heaven-inhabited tear might be — is shattered at ground level into thousands of tiny tear droplets as it crashes into a fortune cookie left behind by the woman’s current significant other earlier in the day.
Confused about their surroundings, the men turn to read their fortune cookies, each of which says: You can not improve the past, but you can make the future work right the first time around.
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