FicWad

-Derek woke up early in the morning, coughing like he had lung cancer. After hawking up something that looked like it should have come out the other end of him, he walked over to his computer to check his email. He hadn’t been able to get on the night before due to a bad storm which had also made it hard for him to get to sleep. The computer booted up, and Derek tried to sign in, but he got an error message saying that he wasn’t connected to the internet.

-“You butt-fucker,” Derek mumbled as he turned on the TV to pass the time. He was greeted with static. Derek rapped his fingers on his leg as he let out an agitated sigh. TV was out, and the internet was down, so his next option was to read; unless his books were somehow not working either. As he walked through the kitchen to his room to find a book worth reading, Derek looked out the window and got a pretty good guess as to the cause of his problems. Lightning had struck the tree in his back yard and a very large branch had fallen onto the shed and garage, and it looked like it had taken out the cable lines.

-“Well that sucks,” Derek said, stopping at the counter to get a piece of his dad‘s birthday cake. He hadn‘t gotten to enjoy any at the party, so he figured he at least deserved some leftovers. He noticed that someone had failed to seal the Tupperware container, but didn‘t think anything of it. He got a knife and was cutting himself a piece when he saw the furry layer of mold growing on it. “And that sucks more.”

-Derek took out the garbage and while he was out, he spotted a small bird hiding under his dad’s truck. Derek figured that the little thing had been thrown out of the fallen branch and had probably broken its wing. He went into the garage and got the helpless critter a small bowl of birdseed which he set out for it. “You’re lucky you fell in my driveway, buddy,” Derek said. He had seen several of his classmates torture defenseless animals before. One of them had even shoved a bb gun up a stray cat’s ass and fired, so Derek had no doubt that they would have made short work of a flightless bird.

-He went back into the house to find his mom sitting at the kitchen table. “Your father wants you to finish up the deck today,” she said without even looking at him as she lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke in his direction. His parents had never really cared that he was allergic to tobacco. “And you need to sweep up the dog pen and I want you to mow the lawn. Last night’s rain will make it grow like crazy.”

-“Is now a bad time to tell you that a tree branch fell on the shed?” Derek asked.

-His mother stared at him blankly for several moments before she jumped out of her chair and ran out to the back yard. A few seconds, and a loud scream later, Derek’s dad was running out in his underwear. Derek grabbed himself some pop tarts and went to his room; he didn’t want to hear the screaming his parents were about to do.

-A few minutes later he heard the truck rev up and pull out of the driveway. No doubt his dad going to the hardware store. Shortly after that, his mother called to him, and he reluctantly got up to find her. For some reason Derek’s mother seemed to think that he always knew where she was. Of course Derek had no idea where she was, so he was forced to engage in another game of marco-popolo while searching the house for her. He eventually realized she was outside, though not where he expected.

-Derek walked up to his mother to find her crouched down looking under his car. Apparently she had discovered the little bird and, being the animal lover that she was, wanted him to help her catch it.

-Derek found that catching a wounded bird, without harming it, was a very tricky task. His mothers hysterical gasps whenever he made a move didn’t help the matter either. Eventually, Derek wrapped the little creature in a towel and put it in a terrarium with some dirt on the bottom. The bird was surprisingly calm once he got it inside, so Derek left it alone.

-Two hours later, Derek was drenched in sweat, but he had discovered an animal skeleton under the section of the deck he had managed to rip up whose skull would make a neat wall hanging. The sound of thunder and rain drops told him it was time to turn in.

-Derek entered the house and found his mom sitting on the couch looking through a photo album. When she saw him, she called Derek over to sit with her. “I was just looking at your baby pictures,” she explained. “This is the hospital where you were born.” Derek looked at the picture and blinked in surprise when he saw the baby room burned and charred.

-“Yes, there was a fire that night. You sure were lucky, didn’t even get a singed hair. And of course the fact that you came four weeks early didn’t help…and then you were born with a cord around your neck so that scared me too. You sure were a nerve-wracking baby.”

-“…I was born with my cord around my neck?” Derek asked, wondering why he had never been told any of this before.

-“Oh yes dear,” his mother said casually. “And then you got stuck coming out; the doctors were afraid you weren’t going to make it.”

-“Well I guess I proved them wrong,” Derek said with a fake smile. He walked away from his mother wondering if someone had tried to put him out of his misery early on, or if it had just been a taste of things to come. Either way, another storm was coming down hard, and Derek had to drive to work in it.

-Derek got in his car and headed for work. The rain started coming down harder, and he turned on his window wipers to improve his visibility. The wipers moved, but didn’t even touch the countless droplets on the glass. “…Well that’s not good.” said Derek as he tried the wipers again, and again they failed to improve his vision as he approached a busy intersection. The lights from a car going in the opposite direction virtually blinded Derek, so he had no idea if the stop light was red or green. He knew the safe bet was to stop the car, wait for the other car to drive by, and stick his head out the window to get a better look. Instead, Derek unbuckled his seat belt and kept going.

-Derek made it to work without incident, despite driving blindly through three more intersections. He made his way into a building, after being splashed by another car, and began the arduous task of “Pick up the box. Move the box.” a task that any trained monkey could do.

-As he unloaded a truck that had been packed so full it had taken three people to open the door, the belt turned off. Derek and Ryan waited, neither one really saying anything to the other, until boredom got the better of Ryan, and he removed another box from the six-foot tall wall. Instantly the middle section fell forward, creating a mess. Fortunately, both Derek and Ryan were standing off to the side when it happened. Unfortunately, when they moved in to pick up the mess, the next three walls of boxes fell forward as well.

-Ryan managed to yell a warning and move out of the way. Derek only had enough time to look up at the packages falling towards him and put up his arms to shield his face, and say, “Shit,” just before they hit him.

-When Derek opened his eyes, he was buried up to his chest in boxes, and he hurt everywhere. “Well this sucks,” he said as he tried to move but found that he was stuck. Ryan moved to help him, but their boss came by and told him to go to another truck.

-“Can I at least help dig him out first?” Ryan asked.

-“No, he’s fine,” Becky said in a testy voice as she quickly walked off to do whatever it was that supervisors did. Ryan offered an apologetic shrug before walking away, leaving Derek to figure out how to get himself out. The belt turned on, but Derek was still too pinned to really do much about it. Then the fulltime supervisor, Lurch, as everyone called him, came over.

-Lurch was tall, had a long face, and a big scar on his face along with a glass eye. He always looked pissed off, even on the rare occasion that he paid someone a compliment or tried to make small talk. He made everyone very uncomfortable. He nodded to Derek, not seeming to notice his predicament, and said, “Lets get a move on ok buddy.”

-Derek just stared at him blankly as Lurch walked away. “Fuck it,” he said as he punched, shoved, and kicked his way out of the mess. Several of the boxes tore open and he tossed them to the side to be taped up later on. Once he was free he began throwing packages carelessly onto the conveyor belt.

-Not long after his temper tantrum, one of the managers came up to Derek and said, “Son, I saw that little display a moment ago. Don’t you care that you could have damaged other peoples’ property?”

-Derek looked at the man for a moment as he considered his response. He thought back on how his mom had always told him that honesty was the best policy, and this seemed like an excellent time to prove just how bad that advice was. “There was a time that I would have felt guilt at the thought of destroying the belongings of a stranger,” Derek said, “but after working here and enduring the misery’s of an uncaring world, I have become completely devoid of compassion, consideration, or empathy. In fact I am so bitter at this point, that I actually hope Tiny Tim’s new crutches were in one of those boxes, and that they are now shattered.”

-Derek expected to be fired for such a statement, but he didn’t really care. The two of them looked at each other in silence and after a moment the man said, “Ever consider a position in management?”

-Derek raised his eye brows at the question; it wasn’t what he expected to hear. The man chuckled and walked away, leaving Derek to his work. “Well,” Derek said to himself, “That was unexpected.”

-A few minutes later, Terry came into the truck to work with Derek. when he asked Derek how he was doing, Derek gave an answer that he hoped would kill the conversation before it got started. “well, I tried to kill myself, so I would have to say life sucks.”

-“Then why are you here?” Terry asked with a look of genuine confusion on his face.

-Derek sighed with frustration. Terry wasn’t getting the hint. “Because I obviously failed the attempt.”

-“So why didn’t you just try again?” Terry asked with a bemused grin. “Anybody can kill themselves. It’s easy. You could do it in your sleep.”

-Derek just stared at him blankly. The conversation wasn’t going the way he had imagined. He wasn’t sure how he should feel about being encouraged to end his life. In the end he decided against continuing to encourage Terry to talk and spent his time trying very hard to ignore terry’s constant yammering. Every now and then, Terry said something so stupid that Derek’s brain had no choice but to register it. He nearly laughed out loud when Terry said, “My daughter’s a girl.” declaring it as though it were some great epiphany.

-At long last the night came to an end, and Derek walked out to his car. He started it up and turned on the heater since it was cold enough to see his own breath, only to discover that his heater was broken. “…Fucking crack-whore Christ,” Derek mumbled to himself as he pulled out of the parking lot. He was eager to get home and go to bed, so when he came up to a train crossing to find the lights flashing, Derek became so angry he tried to rip the steering wheel out of his car. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!? All I want to do is go home, eat something, and go to fucking sleep. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?”

-Derek’s gritted teeth and deranged snarl slowly turned into a smile as a solution to his problem dawned on him. He let his foot off the brake, and his car crept forward onto the train tracks where it stopped and waited. Derek removed his seatbelt and began to chuckle as he watched the train come closer and closer. At the sound of its horn, Derek’s chuckled turned into a maniacal laugh. “let’s see you get me out of this one, you fucking cock-munching PRICK!!”

-Derek’s victory was soured by a motorist honking behind him. Derek shook his head, thinking the person was some good Samaritan warning him of a train that was blaring a horn as it rushed at him with a large, bright light. This notion was proven false, however, when the driver yelled out, “Get the fuck out of the way asshole!”

-Derek held up his middle finger to the car behind him. He couldn’t wait to be removed from a world filled with such irksome individuals. As Derek watched the bright light come closer, he didn’t notice the car behind him revving its engine, but he did notice when it slammed into his back end and pushed his car forward.

-“What the fuck!” said Derek, too startled to think to apply the brake as his car rolled off the tracks, narrowly avoiding the train which slammed into the impatient asshole behind him. Derek sat in stunned silence, staring at his rearview mirror with his mouth open. He honestly didn’t know whether to be pissed off about being cheated out of death yet again, or amused that some prick had died in his place while inadvertently saving his life. He began laughing hysterically.