Short Stories

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“This is the last time I work!” the man said. “Not for you, not for anyone, you hear! No you don’t do you!” the man said. Of course, the man said a lot of things but like all good mirrors, this one did not talk back. Large panes of reflective glass always behaved better for the man, at least better than people. However, in spite of all the clawing shouts of his conscience, the man still recalled the unrepentant sins of that pitiful race, their murder, adultery, and the opportunistic lies that shoveled rubble upon the oppressed. The man saw that God’s arm had lost its reach, that in its evil, mankind had killed Him in order to impose its imperfect judgment upon a cowering world. He could no longer serve such a beast. Thus the man shattered his glassy friend with a shameless, baseball bat rendered blow and left his razor-like reflection on the wooden floor as he calmly knotted his neck-tie and drove to work.

He arrived about lunch-time and urgently invited his boss to an outside picnic table where he gave his mandate: “I will no longer work for you.”

His boss acted surprised. But he could have been lying. He could always be lying; that’s what mankind does. In his fit of rage against this unrepentant liar, the man beat his boss until blood ran.

As the violence subsided, the man was confused. His boss was one of them, part of the evil mass of men. However, despite his best efforts the conditioning of childhood broke through his feeble will. If humanity had sinned, by virtue of his mere existence as a member of that damned race, so had he. Such was the horror of this thought that he stopped his car in the middle of the intersection in order to think things over. A chorus of car horns uncovered the inexplicable impulse to find a church, any church. He did not know why he wanted to go there, nor where the urge came from, but he HAD to go.

The man pulled up to the first church he saw ran in and told the young minister that he had to speak to him alone. The minister smiled at his opportunity, incriminating his manipulative motives as lion comes upon fresh meat. The fight was on.

“All is relative, there is no truth!” the man said, his blood-stained sleeves refusing to take a seat. The minister only smiled.

“Oh, but there IS truth,” the minister said, “Love your neighbor as yourself. Is that not the golden rule?

The maxim floated through his disintegrated mind twisting and turning until he had turned the phrase upon its head. He hated mankind and thus hated himself, untangling the proverb to read “Hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.” For all he despised his own soul he piled his hatred upon the minister flying into a manic rage that soon ended in additional blood.

Again confused, the man quietly found the nearest door and walked the steps down to a bench at the side of the road. He sat there quietly, unsure of anything other than the certainty of his own death written across his chest in the scarlet letters of foreign blood. He could not think nor feel, nor even feel the weight of the bench shift as a middle-aged, African-American woman sat down beside him.

“Are you hurt, son?” she asked in a kind yet serious tone.

“No, no, I…I’m a butcher.” It was a good excuse for bloody clothing. The woman was unmoved.

“Who do you work for?” she asked.
“I work for myself,” he said, refusing to see the kind face of his bench-mate. As if reading his machinations perfectly, the woman asked, “For how long?”

The man had just destroyed all power over himself, giving him only one answer: “I started today. I killed my first animal today.”

The woman was unimpressed. “You know, it isn’t good to be so happy about killing something,” she said. He was convinced that she could read his mind. He knew where she was going so the man spared himself the formalities, and yelled at the woman.

“Good? You mean right, don’t you? Of course you do. You know it isn’t right at all is it? But it isn’t wrong either. There is no truth in it, no truth anyplace. The only truth, I know this now, is that THERE IS NO TRUTH!”

The woman smiled a gently. “Is that true?”

“YES! YES IT IS…” He trailed off. She had gotten him. The statement “there is no truth” was a true or false statement. How could he have been so short-sighted! His whole supposition began to collapse and his mind dissolved into insanity. He stood up.

“Jesus loves you , you know. That’s true. You really ought to stop working for yourself and start working for him.” said the voice behind him. He knew she was right but she was two murders too late. The dead God and now had just arisen before his eyes and oh, how they burned in His presence. No one had ever shown him the truth before, nor would they ever again.

The woman could not stop him as he stepped off the curb, nor could the drivers stop their cars. Damnable creature that he was, his steps refused to work for any other.

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