The Juggler And His Rose (2 page)

Stan couldn’t believe that Tammy had done this to him. And what did she mean by “Have fun swimming?” Although he had never really loved her, he always imagined being able to, and tried to show her affection so that he could stay with her for her looks and money. Tammy wasn’t the only shiny gem in the treasure chest, he realized, when he met Monica. How could he value Tammy over Monica when they both gave him what he wanted? He stood back up and ran to his room, his leg suddenly healed. He should have known that she would have done something like this. Ever since the day he met her, he sensed a strange aura of wild frustration that she always seemed to release through him one way or another. All the talks of the men that she had killed because they either tried to rape her, or plot something against her because she was wealthy and “vulnerable.” “Goddamn it!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. His heart rate skyrocketed, and his adrenaline complicated the serum in the device. “I knew you were just like me!”  He heard the neighbors running up the stairs, and he slammed his door and locked it. “I loved you, Tammy, why’d you have to end it like this? I thought we understood each other, why’d you have to take it this far? Why can’t you give me another chance?” Stan sobbed as he grabbed his Colt .45 revolver out of his nightstand in time to pull three shots on the disemboweled mess of two people who had broken through the door, which made them drop and cease to live. “Because, Stan, the world is a cruel place, and people don’t change, they just realize what they had never realized before, for instance, that the both of us were never meant for this world.” A gunshot then rang out in the recording, and Stan slumped against the wall, knees weak and barely able to stand. The Colt in his hand was suddenly pointing at a white cushioned wall, and Stan was standing in a white, padded seven-foot by seven-foot room with one barred window that he looked out of, only lit by the small hole in the manhole that seemed to be delusionally twirling above his head and the LED lamp hanging too high above him to reach. He had a ball and chain attached to his ankle, and he appeared to be underground, in a sewer. “I’ve been hallucinating this whole scenario!” screamed Stan. He fell on his butt and started crying on his arms and knees with the gun pointing sideways in his right hand. Stan closed his eyes and tried to calm his breathing, but then looked up and saw what he least understood and most feared in his dreams.

The same old Sunday school priest dressed in baby blue attire from his nightmares was standing a few feet in front of him with a blank expression, calmly folding his arms. He asked his grueling question from the past: “Why did you do it, Stan?” Stan froze with the gun in his hand like he had in his dream. “Why did I do what? Why do you keep following me!” He started glowing red in the face as he pointed the gun at the priest. “Why did you kill the boy when you knew you didn’t have to, when he was already knocked unconscious, and now cheat on the girl that matters to you the most?” the priest replied. Stan dropped the gun on the floor and stared the priest in the eyes for a few seconds. He asked the priest: “What difference does it make?” The priest told him: “The fact that you are going to go to hell instead of heaven, that’s the difference.” Stan picked up the gun shakily, and replied to the priest: “I’d rather be doing what I want with who I wish than to live for all eternity with people who would give everything they want for a god that they don’t even know exists!” Stan closed his eyes, put the gun to his head, and opened them one last time. He saw Tammy’s beautiful blond hair and face, the same one he had seen the night he had met her. She was dressed in the same shiny red dress and gold and diamond earrings she was wearing when he had met her at the movie theater. Her sparkling eyes put him in a brief trance that made him think of the short-lived golden time of his life.

She was so attractive, just as he had remembered her. Her face then became distorted with her head very tall and very narrow, then shifting to wide and short, like a rotating oval; her eyes and face turned black, smiling wickedly, and she whispered: “I can’t wait until you go to hell.” Stan replied: “I can’t wait either.” He pulled the trigger, and his body fell to the ground, his last words rebounding off of the walls of the sewer. The white padded room and the ball-and-chain disappeared as the LED lamp dimly lit the scene of how Stan’s body fell sideways and he died the second he touched the water, the blood splatter blocking the light for a fraction of a second, his body gently floating downstream until it disappeared under the monstrous, endless river that went under the giant concrete cylinders where the sewage made its way to wherever it was going.

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