Blog of a crazy man

Something had gone horribly wrong. It was an amateur bank robbery. He had handled these before. The clerk pushes the button. He shows up. The robber gets scared and eventually gives up. That’s not what happened today. He showed up, like always, but the robber was not scared. It was as if the robber had been waiting for him to show up, just so he could shoot him.

He found himself lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Somewhere else in the room someone was screaming. He stared up at the ceiling with his hand on his chest, feeling the hole, just to be sure that it had actually happened. His eyes began to unfocus as his body became weaker. Through his blurry vision he made out the shape of a woman as she leaned down over him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t see well enough to be sure, but he thought she was smiling. She leaned down closer to his ear and whispered quietly, “I’m not here for you. You’re going to be alright.” His vision went black as he passed out. The last thing he heard was another gun shot.

When he awoke, he was lying on a hospital bed. He could feel the pressure of the bandages wrapped around his chest. His partner was sitting in the chair next to him.

“How ya doin’?” his partner asked with a fake happiness that people always use when trying to cheer up somebody in a hospital bed.

He was too weak to voice a reply.

“You got pretty lucky. The bastard missed your heart. He would have shot you again if I hadn’t shot him first, but He won’t be causing us anymore trouble.”

He stood over a sink with tears running down the sides of his face. In one hand, he held a razor. On the wrist of the other was a dotted line marking out, with careful precision, the exact path of an artery in his arm.

She stood nearby. She was unable to keep her eyes on the man. Her face was full of sadness. Of all the people that she had to take, suicides were always the worst. She could never understand why someone, given such a great gift of life, would willingly kill themselves. She heard the man release a grunt of pain at what he had just done.

The man was standing now, looking at the body that had been his home on earth. He turned and saw the woman. Her beautiful face was not smiling this time, but instead her eyes were filled with tears. She knew that this man would have had many happy years left on earth, but in his moment of sadness he thought that death would end his pain. She wished he had realized that his death was only the beginning of his pain.

She reached out and took his hand with a gentle kindness, probably the last kindness he would ever know. She led him slowly into the darkness.

It was just after midnight when she crept through the quiet house into the bedroom where a man and his wife were sleeping. She looked closely at the man, her first client of the day. He was only fifty and in good heath, but what he didn’t know, as he lay there sleeping quietly with a smile on his face, was that he had a brain aneurysm that was going to rupture in just a few moments. She leaned over him and watched as the man sucked in his last breath and slowly exhaled it.

The man found himself standing awake, at the end of his bead, looking at the smiling face of the beautiful woman. Her dark hair contrasted her pale skin, which despite its white color, still had a warm and inviting appearance. He felt calm and content as he looked into her welcoming eyes. She held out her hand and he took it gently. She guided him toward the circle of light on the other side of the room. As he entered, he vanished along with the light.

She stood silently for a few moments looking at where the man had been, and then she looked back at the bed where the man’s sleeping wife lay. The wife had another ten years. Some of those years would be filled with sorrow at the loss of her husband, but in the end, she would have more happy years.

The woman wanted to stay longer and enjoy this happy home before it was tarnished by the sadness of the man’s death, but she had other clients waiting. She wished all of her clients could have as peaceful a transition as this man, but she knew most would have much more pain in dying. But it was the pain that some faced after death that saddened her. So many souls would not be escorted into heaven as this man had, but be escorted, instead, to much more sinister place.