Fed Up With You
Well, the old witch from the fair told Jack he was ill-fated. Being a gullible man, he was really worried when he left with us. No matter how educated one may be, some things never change.
I know I’m going to digress here, but look: I can’t understand it. Jack was on his way to become an engineer. How could he really believe in all that crap? He checked his horoscope every morning. Hell, he had downloaded an app exactly to do that. I often teased him about it, asking him whether his grasp on reality was really that tenuous that he needed to be reassured by such idiocies.
But Jack didn’t mind. Point of fact, he made me furious: he patronized me, dismissing my efforts to explain to him what a fool he was, as if he was the only one in possession of the truth, leaving me an ignorant. An ignorant of his ridiculous ideas. Can you imagine?
So I decided not to pay him any attention and let the others try and chat him out of his misery. I started humming a song, but Jack yelled at me to stop. I asked him why and he said it was “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths, and I was reaching the part where the ten-ton truck kills the characters. Having just been doomed at the fair, he wanted to avoid all risks. He was sure that that night he wouldn’t even notice the vehicle approaching.
I swear I felt like I needed no truck. For a second, all I desired was to grab a branch from a tree and smash his head. Instead, I just stayed there, dumbfounded, staring at him.
Then I took a decisive step: I turned around and walked away. No more Jack. Look, I know what you’re going to say, that I was exaggerating, but let me tell you, enough is enough. It’s one thing to check your horoscope from time to time, or use it for flirting (believe me, I’ve seen it done. Still. AMazing as it is). Another different thing is to let all those absurd superstitions govern your life.
It reminded me of another song from the eighties, Such a Shame, by Talk Talk, where the character lets his life be governed by the roll of dice. So useless all of it was. Jack had reached a point where he was like that. He needed professional help, something I couldn’t give.
I heard him shout behind me. I heard his footsteps, and then the others coming after him. I didn’t understand him at first, but I was tired. All I wanted was to get home and forget the moron.
The guy had the nerve to spin me around, if you can believe me. And then he said we made a neat package. That the witch had also told him so, ill-fated or not.
I despise violence, anyone who knows me will attest to it. But, right then and there, I felt the need to unite my thoughts with actions. A punch to the nose was the least I could gift him. And I also broke my hand in the process. The crunch was satisfactory, at least. Seeing him fall on his bum was as well.
I’d bet a copper he got the message. But who knows. Maybe some seer will tell him to pursue his dreams, or a lucky cookie will tell him not to forget what was lost, and he’ll call me again.
Lousy fool.
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This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: July 24–30, 2017 at the Writer’s Discussion Group on Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.
This week I decided to create a word cloud for the participant writers, and the challenge resides in integrating them into your story. When I sat down to write I had just a faint idea, based off “ill-fated”, and decided to let go and see what happened. This is the result.
