Short story 4: Pound; Part One

The pound is a place that dogs and cats are sent to. They are always either stray or taken away from their owners.

Dogs, in particular, that are sent there may have children. In this case, the children of this animal will be raised inside of the pound, not permitted to leave. The entire time that they are in the pound, they are up for adoption. However, if they are not adopted by the time of their first birthday, they will have that last day to celebrate, until they are put down, because, at this time, the city will see them as more of a liability than an asset.

This particular dog is scarily close to his first birthday. He was born inside of the walls of this particular pound. He will, if not adopted within the next 48 hours, be put down at 8 a.m of the day after tomorrow.

This is his story from here:

"I hate my life. I have seen this happen to my closest friends. They get to their first birthday without being adopted, then they go through that door right over there, and they don't come back. I know very well what happens in there, and I swear it is going to happen to me. They get killed. I have no idea how, but they die."

The pup was trembling in fear after hearing this person rambling for the seemingly longest while. He seemed as though he was born in the pound himself, but that might just have been his breed.

"Oh, but you'll probably be fine, though. It's just me that's screwed."

He seemed calmer, But he was still scared further than I could tell.

I don't have a name. They don't name you in the pound. It makes you too personal to the person that names you, makes them feel bad knowing that you're gonna die.

I think that I deserve a name, you know. All these rich chihuahuas get them, why shouldn't I? I want a name, a good one, too. Maybe James, or John. Or something less generic. I don't know. I just want one, alright?

Anyways, this pound is where I was born, and where I'm gonna die. It seems silly like I'm talking about Texas. Not that I would know what Texas is because they never let me go outside. I have to crap in a litter box like some stupid cat. Not that I would know any alternative because they never let me outside.

There is a small cage window on the wall in my cell, though. I can always imagine.

They taunt you with that mirror, too. I think that they know exactly what they're doing. They have the nicest looking patch of grass, right outside my window. I just want to get more exercise. I want to smell some air that doesn't have the stench of dog piss on it.

The outside seemed amazing. Everything was fresh, there were dogs that looked healthy. People would take them outside to poop.

I seriously hate my litter box. I think I would be better off just going in the corner.

The food is crap. It's always dry, like they don't want us to have a good last meal.

Short Story Two: Jennifer

Jennifer

Jennifer woke up at her desk with her face laying on her keyboard. She had an imprint of a key on her left cheek that she could see in a mirror that she kept near her screen. Her tiny cubicle was full of various bobble heads, papers, folders, and everything else that she could keep tabletop. She looked around at what she owned. Pictures of her family scattered the wall, put up without care. A poem she wrote in second grade. A calendar with cats on it. She was a sad person. 40 pounds overweight. Nobody waiting for her when she got home. Nobody caring about her at work. Nobody caring about her outside.

She was just a forty-two year old girl with a sad job, a sad house, a horrible body, and a horrible mind.

She thought back to before she was like this. The last time she was thin was back before her divorce. Her and her husband were happy. But she was a bitch. She would nag him. She would act stupid, and get mad at him for it. He turned into a pushover. She decided she could do what she wanted, and started to eat anything and everything. Ice cream, chocolate, anything. She gained weight. Her husband started drinking in order to cope with the relationship. She felt like a queen, and he was just her servant, ready to revoke herself from the kingdom whenever she wanted. She would ask, and she would receive.

In her youth, she had affairs with her boss, rather than having sex with her husband. She was hot. Was. he liked her, and she got plenty of raises. Her husband wasn’t a provider. Wasn’t important to her. She didn’t care about him, and he just had to deal with it. What was he supposed to do about it? Leave? No. he had everything he needed. He knew that she was cheating on him, but he was getting food, money, and most luxuries that people don’t normally get.

He started cheating on her, returning the favor. She didn’t care. It was bound to happen. Their relationship was shallow, up until it started thinning out. They started to talk less. Whenever they did talk, it was mean, sarcastic and rude.

Once she started to gain more and more weight, she lost her boss’ attention. She wasn’t the hot person she was when he started to have an affair with her. She didn’t care. She had the promotions. She only started to care when he started to take them away from her. Making demotions. She was unable to stop him as her pay wage dropped all the way from 35 dollars back to 8.50 an hour. She was depressed.

Her husband decided it wasn’t worth it. He divorced her, and she was on her own. She got a small, sad apartment, as she started gaining more weight.

Once she got to a certain weight, she went to a doctor about it, and she was diagnosed with type two diabetes. This was horrible. The only thing that she had to keep her happy in life was food, alcohol, and drugs. Since the food was taken out of the equation, the drugs and alcohol increased.

She stopped caring for her life. She got up at 7 am, got out of bed, put on clothes, and she went to work. No makeup. Nothing that would make her look good. She stopped. She stopped acting like she cared.

And then she stopped anything else. Today at work, she planned to get her job done, then go home and kill herself. There was nothing in her life that was worth living. She had a bad job that hardly ever paid. She had nothing to live for. Her husband divorced her. She was fat. She had nothing. Nothing. Not even a nice home to come to after a day of crunching numbers.

When she was sitting there at her desk, she thought about the schedule all over again. She finishes work, asks all men in the office if they are interested in sleeping with her. If yes, she goes back to her place with them. If no, then she ties the noose.

She finished her work at about 5:30. It was just starting to get dark outside, and she was getting ready to ask every man. Starting with the ones she absolutely knew would say no. Her boss was number one on her list. Ending with the intern boy that was eyeing her down the last week when he first joined.

She walked into her boss’ office. He was sitting on his desk. “Hey. What’s up.”

“Oh, I was just ending my shift.” she said, getting ready to ask him. “What are you doing?”

“The normal. Crunching numbers. Reviewing the health plan. Something tells me you didn’t come to hear me talk about that though.”

“Well, I was just thinking about old times.” she walked closer to him and rested her fat, disgusting sweaty palms on his desk and let most of her weight on it.

“Yeah, and what?” he said, looking at her hands and then the rest of her with a worried face on.

“Maybe we could, you know, try again.” she told him, as her fingers of her right hand climbed up his arm.

“Okay.” he stood up, “I know that you’re a little bit sad after your divorce and everything, but I don’t think that that would be the best idea.”

“Oh, it’s just a bit of harmless fun between us.”

“Not harmless. Once you started gaining weight, you broke my leg. And that was still twenty pounds ago.”

“Fine.”

“Really. Just fine and you think that will be it. I know you don’t give up that easily.”

“Well, I don’t need you.”

“Nobody else is gonna want a middle aged fat woman who just yells at them all day.”

“Yeah, well you don’t know that.”

“If you ask anybody else, you’re fired.”

“Fine.”

She had to skip all the way down the list. She went to the person at the bottom. The person that would most likely want to have sex with her. The new intern. He was only eighteen.

He stood next to the coffee pot. He had recently poured himself a cup, and he was taking a break in order to try and mentally prepare himself for the all nighter he was going to pull with most of the other people in the office. When she walked into the room looking for him, he said “oh, hey Jennifer,” before she pressed her fat disgusting lips against his.he immediately resisted.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I thought you loved me.”

“No. you’re fucking disgusting. Who the fuck loves you?”

Her heart dropped. Even the person at the top of the list of people who could possibly want to fuck her wanted her. She was hopeless. If she didn’t want to kill herself before, she did now. She looked down at her body, at her various fat folds. She thought about everything that has happened in her life. Her divorce. Her marriage. Her affair. She was putting an end to it.

She rode the public transport home. She sat next to nobody. She was a miserable person that nobody would want to sit next to. It would just depress them. She never had any company. At work, people made fun of her. Made her feel bad. Either that, or they avoided her. Tried to not feel as bad for knowing this girl.

When she walked out of the office, she had one thought running through her mind. Death. Death. She needed the release of it. She needed to feel fulfilled. She had three options at home. Either overdose, bullet or suffocation. The three most likely cases of suicide. She walked out to her car, a straight face on. She didn’t care anymore. She cared less than when she got a divorce. She cared less than when her boss ended their affair. She cared less than before she walked outside of these doors alone. She was done with her life. She wasn’t fulfilled. She had regrets. Bu she didn’t care to fix anything. She made no goodbyes, no long, exasperated suicide note. She would die, and nobody would care. Not even her.

She drove, with no expression, driving straight home. No stops. No dinner. No liquor. Nothing. She was going into this with no stimulate rushing dopamine through her brain. She was going to die, and nothing was going to be the blame but her.

She walked into her house and turned on music, played it as loud as she could. She only played it so that someone would at least come over and see her body to dispose of it before it got more disgusting than it was when she was alive. Before she started to decompose.

She set up a chair with a small wooden backing on it. She tied a noose, and she nailed it into the highest point on the wall. She slipped her neck in and let herself say something out loud before she kicked the chair over. Even though it was for nobody. “Goodbye.”

She could hear her neighbor outside of her door yelling for her to turn down her music, getting more and more angry before walking away to get the landlord to come up and unlock her door.

She kicked over the chair into instant regret. She could feel the rope tightening around her neck, and she gripped it trying to stop it.

She was in luck. The rope snapped, and she fell down to the ground, just before crying. She bawled her eyes out as the front door opened and the landlord alongside her neighbor walked in to see her holding the rope in her hands.

The end.

I won't be posting the next few weeks because I'm working on a new book that should be out early February. I want to get a good start before school comes back into the equation.

Short Story One: Chemo

Chemo

Jimmy paced in the hot room as his mother received surgery in the next one over.  She’s had cancer for the past four years. It shouldn't surprise him as much as it does, but something’s getting to him today. There’s this feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. It’s something that he has had for the past month. A feeling that something will go wrong. He finally sat down in the waiting room outside the operating room. He was determined to think well about the situation.

It’s all fine he thought she’ll be fine.

After sitting down in the room, he took out his phone to try and kill time. The nurse had said that the operation might take four hours. It seemed like forever. His mother on the other side of these walls, struggling to live. Finally having the cancer in her liver be taken out after four years of chemo, radiation, and other forms of medicine that seemed to never work. The cancer was under control. It was staying in the same place. She kept working. He picked up extra shifts waiting tables at Chili's, which just barely helped them scrape by the skin of their necks.

He kept changing seats. There were no other people in the room. No one to comfort him. To tell him it will be alright. Not even anybody who is going through the same pain of having somebody under the knife. He decides to call his friend. His mom went under surgery a few months ago, just a minor blood clot by her ankle. But they wanted it out. So they got it removed.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jimmy said as soon as his friend Philip answered the phone.

“Not much, just out shopping for food.”

“Can you just tell me that everything is going to be okay?”

“Why, what’s going on?”

“My mom is having her liver cancer removed.”

“Dude, that’s great.”

“Yeah, well we don’t know if the operation is successful yet, she’s still under the knife.”

“Oh, well I hope it goes well.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He hung up the phone. His friend might have been enthusiastic about the situation, but it isn’t what he needed.

His father had already been dead for about three years. Shot himself after he found out about everything with his mom. He had come back home from a work retreat that everybody was taking. He had no cell service for six months, and didn’t even call or text home for the whole six months he was there. When he got back, he felt like shit. He was out having fun in Fiji while his mom was undergoing cancer treatments that costed more than they could afford. He was really shaken up, especially the first time he saw Jimmy’s mom’s bald head.

He shot himself in their car, using the shotgun that they kept around for protection. After all that, they had to fend for themselves.

His mom was becoming more and more weak as the chemo treatments continued. The cancer was eating away at her. They tried everything that they could to stop her from working, but they couldn’t. His job didn’t pay enough that he could pay the hospital bills and their basic bills every month, with medication costing $10,000 or more every month. He could only pay one. That meant that his mom had to keep her job.

For a good portion of his life, she worked at Walmart. She would count and stack cans of beans. His dad had a nice office job. When he got home from school, he would be home alone for 15 minutes, and his mom would show up, and take care of him. Starting middle school, he had more freedom. The middle school was closer, so he would spend more time there alone. This meant that his mom could take more shifts at Walmart. So she did. From 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock every afternoon, he would be home alone.

The announcement of his dad going on a work retreat was big. Everybody was excited for him. It was only a few weeks after he had left when Jimmy’s mom got cancer. It was tragic. She started coughing up blood, so they took her to the doctor. They said it had already progressed to stage three. That meant that it was just starting to spread in her body. Using certain veins, the cancer was starting to take over their lives. They had to start paying lots of bills as they tried to get it treated. When his mom asked for a bonus, they greeted her at Walmart with a “demotion” to the management department. She was getting paid three dollars less than she was before, which was a problem because they needed her to make three dollars more an hour.

When it got even worse, after his dad killed himself, they had to take more action. Jimmy was already working at full capacity, so he started to ask around to his friends. Begging, really. Philip started to give them money that he didn’t need from his job. He worked and got paid plenty, so he gave plenty to them. After two more years, here he was. Standing outside the operating room getting ready to either have really good or really bad news thrown at him. Either the cancer has spread even more than it already has, or they were able to remove it.

He was pacing again. He started to think of anything to do. He didn’t want to leave the room, because the operation might finish while he’s gone. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital because hospitals show death and overall suffering. He was completely torn. All he could do was sit.

He started thinking again. What if this hadn’t happened? What if she didn’t get cancer? Would they all just be a big happy family? How was he supposed to know? He was a little speck in the grand scheme of things. There are seven billion people on this earth. Are him and his mother really worth it at all? If they’re so insignificant, then why would they be there in the first place? But there was one question. One that has been eating away at him for the entire time his mother has had cancer.

Why does God hate us?

If god is real, then why would he let his mother get cancer, his father to kill himself, and his family to be put through the pain it has been put through for the past four years?

If god is real then why is his mother in the other room with her stomach open so that she can have god’s mistake fixed inside her?

If god is real, then why shouldn’t I hate him?

His head was spinning. He felt like he was going to throw up. He rushed to the bathroom across the hall from where he was. Opening the door, he threw himself at the toilet, and started right away, no hesitation. No holding it back. He was in fear for his mother’s life. She was only forty years old, and she could die today, leaving a 17 year old to keep her house and pay her hospital bills.

Then what? He spends the rest of his life in mourning of his mother who died of cancer too early in her life. He leaves his friends alone, lives in a small apartment, gets a little bit hurt, only gets disability checks for the rest of his life, drinking his life away. That isn’t the Jimmy she raised. That isn’t the Jimmy he wanted to be. He wanted to be a doctor when he got to the age. He wanted to help people. He wanted to make the world a better place. He wanted to be able to go to any office and know more than any person their. When he walked into the room, he wanted people to think, that’s the guy who saved my daughter. Or he’s had three successful brain surgeries last month.

He was just scared that his mom’s death would interfere with this. He didn’t want to have to subconsciously think about his mother every time he was putting someone else under the knife.

He sat back down in this room, wiping more throw up off of his chin. He wasn’t drinking anything, so he had a disgusting taste in his mouth. The burning in the back of his throat went away after a little while, and he was just looking around again.

Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into sleep.

When he woke up, there was a nurse in front of him, tapping his shoulder. She had the results.

“Well then, what are they.” Jimmy said, scared but excited at the same time.

“Well, I have good news and bad news.”

“Give the good news first.”

“Well, we have taken the cancer out. All tumors have been removed from her liver.”

“Well, that’s great news, but what could be bad about that?”

“The cancer has actually spread to her kidney, and has reached stage four.”

Jimmy’s heart dropped. He thought that this was it. Either she lived for a long time, or she dies a young death. But it feels like she is in purgatory. A stage between the two. Between life and death. She’s been there for four years, and she isn’t leaving now. They had two options. Number one: they gave up and let his mother die just around the age of forty; Number two: they continue to fight and keep their fingers crossed that eventually something will work.

Number one means accepting death. Letting his mother die. Letting her, hypothetically, go to a better place. No more pain. No more suffering. She would just die.

Number two means that they would have to work harder. Spend more money than they did before on chemo and other drugs that they need to save her life. Have more and more surgeries. Be in debt for a long time.

They decided number one.

Six months later, his mother died, in her normal bed, in her normal house, when she layed down to take a nap. Jimmy cried at her bedside for ten minutes before he called anybody to come over. First, he called nine-one-one. Then his friend Philip. They both showed up about the same time. They both asked the same questions about his mother. When they were done, they went inside and looked at the body. She was peaceful. Serene. Despite the pain that she had been in in the last four years, she finally seemed to not have any.

In the last six months, Jimmy and his mother had bonded more than they had the rest of his life. She had told him her life stories. They were like open books with each other.

He was depressed for months after she died. He lived in the same home, went to school on his own, and paid taxes every month. He had already turned 18 before she died. He stayed in the home to take care of her. Now that she’s dead it’s the only thing that reminds him of her.

The end.

The point of this story was to see if I could write a short story that told a message, made sense, and had character development all in just five pages. It took me about 45 minutes to write this story, which happened around 11 o'clock. Here it si for your viewing pleasure.