The Ex-Widower

The Ex-Widower

He heard screaming and opened his eyes.  He was tied to a chair.  Andy knew this was all a dream; Andy knew that he would wake up.  He sat horrified watching the groups of men encircle the woman he loved and the cameras encircling the men.  Christine begged and cried while she was conscious.  After that the vultures left nothing but the gnawed bones of her memory.  The last scream he heard was his own.

***

Andy Liggins opened his eyes again, only this time it was to face the sun shining brightly enough through his windows to jerk him from the memory of Christine, his ex-wife.  Sure, her vast fortune sustained his existence, but that same existence had recently become so much of a torturous chore consisting of no more than boring mornings followed by equally distasteful, similarly lonely times of day.  The only reprieve from his misery was death.

He realized that at least for him, if he wasn't buying something, then no one really cared.  Just last month he had tried to bond with his stock broker, and it seemed to have gone well, but like so many others to whom Andy had reached out, Andy never heard a word back for anything other than business.

Night after night, the nightmares came.  There was no avoiding them.  There was no one knocking at his door to make sure he hadn't lost his sanity, but he didn't believe he had.

Then his birthday came.  He waited patiently for the first call, text or e-mail to roll in- Facebook doesn't count, it clues people in, and that's cheating.  But no real communique came through.  Andy took it hard.  All the money in the world can't make a real friend for you.  He looked up at the sky and felt the nothingness of something, or perhaps the somethingness of nothing, but it didn't matter.  Andy gave up in that moment.

As Andy faced his last day, which had also been his first, thirty-nine years ago, opaqueness in his mind numbed all of his faculties.  He pushed forward, like an unfeeling being already partially dead.

He didn't notice the waitress at the diner wink at him or the bellhop to his building trying to strike up a conversation.  After he had made it back to his apartment, when the phone rang, Andy assumed it must have been a telemarketer.  It seemed to ring for hours.  Andy wondered if that ringing would be the last sound he would ever hear.

He had affixed a rope to the chandelier that morning and was staring at it this evening.  No thoughts assaulted his mind.  It was easy to stand on the table.  Only after he had pulled the noose tight around his throat did he wonder again if he should have written a note.  With a final negative thought, No one would care anyway, he kicked the table away.

The two foot fall seemed to last longer than his whole day.  He saw the waitresses wink then, heard the bellhop speak, and wondered who might have actually been on the phone.  The rope snapped taut and Andy Liggins prepared for the darkness.

The light fixture creaked, snapped, tore away plaster from the ceiling and followed Andy for the short fall to the floor.  He managed to roll partially out of the way of the mass tied to the other end of the rope.  When the chandelier landed, it broke two of Andy's ribs. 

He tugged at his neck to loosen the rope and began coughing.  His head was pounding.  His injured torso throbbed in pain.  As he coughed, wincing, he pulled the rope off and let it fall to the carpeted floor.  His vision came back to him then.  At the sight of the wreckage beside him, like a manmade cat looping its tail, he laughed. 

He wanted to ridicule himself for being careless with his choice, but some incessant hilarity gnawed at him.  He had believed that it was preordained that he would die in that moment.  That all of the mundaneness would cease.  But it hadn't.  He had been wrong, partially anyway.  He wasn't dead, and as he looked at his mess, he knew that the next few days weren't going to be dull.  He wondered if the last few had been as ordinary as he had thought.

Then, he couldn't stop laughing.  Thinking of explaining what had happened to the superintendent made it worse.  Soon Andy Liggins was holding his injured side, laughing uncontrollably, because he had been wrong.

He still had life to live.