• Published 13th Aug 2015
  • 622 Views, 5 Comments

Stupor - Regina Wright



Only a fool could catch the attention of the Lady of The Night and think very little of the chaos he wrought.

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The Lingering Last Testament of Stuart McKinney, Idiot

Once upon a time ago, before the ponies, before her and all of her baggage that I got caught in, I used to be a man with priorities. You know, responsibilities. Things that make nobodies into somebodies.

That was me: a nobody trying to be a somebody. A desperate second-hand suit wearing, ramen-cup gulping desk monkey. My working hours were spent kissing ass and bending over when directed, all for chump change and cheap promises that went nowhere.

And I loved every moment of it.

A real contrast to Princess Loony, that soft-spoken tyrant. She may put in the hours and do all the leg-work but if things don't pan out the way she wants for them, let's just say I'm glad she fucked up her 'rule the world in eternal darkness' plan when she did. And had one thousand years to cool off. If we met back then, back when she was tripping on power and I was that same living nobody, I can't decide whether she would have vaporized me on the spot or hired me as her court jester to vaporize later.

But this is all about me, not her.

You'll meet her later and get to decide whether I'm being too harsh. Prison changes a dream, you know.

But back to me, you should have seen how I was, flinging myself into that pool of unpaid labor. Working overtime when Carl fucked up the system files and they needed a stooge to dig through the paperwork, manually typing in all of the missing information for three days straight.

Remember that day I drove like the devil was on my heels. Taking Heather's, one of our top representative, place because she wanted a sick day right before the annual conference. You know, that same conference that we needed some good PR for the unfinished product we were pushing? To save our bottom line? Yeah, so they sent this coffee-moving grunt and gave me the wrong stage notes. On purpose. Just to see how I'd do under pressure and save their collective asses by being a sincere-sounding fall guy.

God, I was such a freaking knucklehead. I was taking one for the team, even as they tore me a new one right after. Beau-ti-ful.

I was dumb enough to think they were chances, that they were proof that I could make it. I just had to take my lumps and one day, that one stupid day, I'd be up there. The big times, the important work. Promotion after promotion, me moving to the top, and all the perks that would come with it; my own office, a chance to move out of my tiny apartment and fix the clunker I'd had since high school.

Sense? I had no sense, common or rare.

But I lived off the nickles and dimes from my second job, scrubbing the floor of a restaurant that reeked of cigar blunts and old liquor. Praying low and hard that none of my co-workers would see me on my knees.

What I could put together —in savings, in bank accounts, in loans—, I reinvested. I beefed my portfolio, made bad deals with co-workers, colleagues, acquaintances and I did anything that made me seem like I had an edge. Insider information. Friends in high places. I didn't know who I was trying to fool. Myself, maybe. None of it ever worked but still, I kept trying. There was a part of me that was insistent; promising me a future that would make my present seem nothing more but the unhappy start of a fairy tale.

I struggled, long endless nights in the office. I worked, a single panic attack away from a mental breakdown.

As long as I believed, truly believed, then that 'one day' would come. But it was as if there was this great looming wall between me and my destiny, the reward I would receive for all of my hard work. Impossible to overcome. If I'd been smarter, maybe I could have took that as a sign that it was time to thrown in the towel. To admit things I never wanted to. That maybe everything I believed in was wrong. But it didn't matter how my knuckles bled, attempting to climb over it —it being every single thing I hated about myself, it that was the wall— or how bleak my circumstances got. I did it anyway, over and over until tomorrow and yesterday became bill papers and pharmacy visits.

And what was my dream, my reason for starting in the first place? I hardly remember now.

I could tell you why I did it. I could tell you any of the reasons why I had to do it. But now, these days, I couldn't tell you why I would have done any of those things.

It just doesn't make sense anymore.

Back then, 'two plus two equals fish' would have made sense if I'd tried hard enough, but now all I have is a fish that came from nowhere. Stinking up all the sweet and rose-scented memories I had of my life.

Because you see, I, Stuart McKinney, was dead.

Deader than the fly I smashed with my right hand that late afternoon, picking up my boss's dry cleaning. Deader than that bloated animal carcass I drove by, as I wondered where all my tax dollars went if people couldn't keep the road clean. Deader than my car's engine, My faithful Delilah bought under a dreary summer noon, as she drowned in the river water, purring as she sputtered into machine hell.

But I'm kidding. Really. I'm just kidding.

McKinney's dead. But I'm not.

Seriously, don't confuse him with me. I'm better than him in almost every observable way. I just don't have a body to prove it.
I've spent so much time thinking this over and over in my head. If McKinney's dead, then who am I? What am I? Since he's dead, I'm bound to follow him into death. Into the next world after this. But as of now, I'm just dying, wasting away in that hospital room. My own personal hell.

Right now, the only man the news reporters keeps chanting as the media circus gives him his fifteen minutes of fame, Stuart McKinney, is in a coma. He's brain dead in every sense of the word, hooked up to various machines. A shiny tube keeps air flowing into his shuttering lungs. Little wires and IV bags pump nutrients into his withered form. A larger tube for feeding was implanted in his stomach. There's no chance of recovery from the accident. Can't be. There's no chance of surgery with the shrapnel that shot through the back of his skull, making a pin cushion of his brain either. He wouldn't last a second on the operating table. What isn't stuck in his brain is moving through his blood, little knives slitting his skin.

And so he sleeps, forever.

But McKinney did something useful, something you wouldn't think such a unimaginative blockhead could do. He dreamed. He hoped. Every earnest drop in his coffin of a body, every muddy speck: Fear and faith. Terror and temperance. Death and diligence. Any and all he could spare, —the sum of all he was— McKinney crafted a somebody. He made me.

Stuart McKinney, the dying dream of a lingering man.

I call that man dead, not only to differentiate him from me, but because it was the truth of it all. Soon, very soon, his family would have to consider pulling the plug on his care. Such a hard-working man like him, he wouldn't want to be tied to machines and stuck in bed all day. Wouldn't McKinney, their littlest brother, deserve to be put out of his misery?

It's not something I can argue with. I'd do it too if I didn't know better.

I can't even make our eyes blink to make them reconsider.

They don't know that I can hear them. Or that their little brother, the one who avoided them out of shame, regretted every moment of his life up to the accident. Faint memories of his youth bubbled over, the days chasing after his older siblings in a motor home parked in the middle of nowhere. That dreary summer, unexpected snow creeping down a July high noon and the money he held in his hands. Then the fresh blood spilling out under Delilah's rims, Ave Maria screeching in the speakers, "Ave, ave dominus... Dominus tecum...-" and that body going thump in that frost dipped road.

McKinney couldn't stop himself, stuffing all of his sticky, stagnant sins, rotting rancid guilt and a desire, into me.

He gave me his soul. He made me into a real boy.

In a way, I am him but in all the ways that counted, I wasn't. I could never be. But I was born with a duty, a final promise that I was obligated to see out, for the sake of that untamed desire he put inside of me. Six months in, July coming again, I am ready.

I would not end here.

Not in that little hospital room surrounded by his family, sympathy and pity that wouldn't reach his ears. There was so much he could have done and I would find a way to fulfill them, all my idle pleasures, no matter what. Wouldn't it be nice to become eternal, a never-ending dream? I have to secure my survival beyond all things. And then, who knows?

Maybe, that wasn't right... But who could stop me? McKinney?

Yet, of all I know of that man —then and now, now and dead—, I don't know what drove him to such actions. What was his last words, McKinney uttered as he was carved to pieces, glass gutting his face, the water rising over his head? It was a plea, a ode to the heavens but the wording escapes me.

Only the memory of pain lingers and soon, not even that. What need do I have for physical sensations, echos of agony?

I should know, shouldn't I? What do you think of me, McKinney?