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1954

time and time again.

As a general rule of thumb, fate doesn't exist in the same way that winning lottery tickets don't exist.

It exists, but statistically not for you.

 

Or it might be for you, but for many others it won't be. Nobody will intervene in a car crash killing many, somewhere out there a child continues to die of leukaemia, the caped crusader doesn't make it out of the burning building and nobody stops the bomb detonating and killing everyone in Times Square. And that's life, unfortunately.

Everyone's always going: "Oh Charlie, you're always such a misery guts. Why can't you write something happy?" and I have to shrug and explain that I'm a statistical writer. One protagonist out of every ten get a happy ending, with the other three dying and the other six learning some valuable lesson or ending up in a worse position that they were at the beginning of the story.

Let me make myself clear, I am not in the business of making you happy. If you wish to be sated and comforted, please do peruse the fiction chart at your chain bookstore where lukewarm garbage dribbles down from the shelves in a fashion reminiscent of a chocolate fountain filled with liquified shit.

 

But of course, everyone likes to think that their shit smells so much better than the shit of others. And of course, there's always that winning ticket.

The corner of Smith and Mays was bustling with traders selling their goods in the afternoon sun.

 

"Rock Around The Clock" floated out from one of the redbrick window houses. A boxcar swerved around the corner, clipping the pavement and causing a man in a black trilby to drop his copy of The New Yorker and exclaim "Hey pal, I'm walkin' here!"

Logan Iggy, a small young boy of twelve with masses of blond curls was walking to the cornerstore with his pocket money tightly gripped in his hot sweaty right hand. He opened his palm to look down at the stoic face of Benjamin Franklin glaring away on the fifty cent piece before clutching again, just in case someone walking by got any smart ideas.

Logan was feeling good. The sun was out, the birds were singing, fifty cents was at least a paperbag of gummy worms and milk bottles and maybe even a little woven string bag of marbles from good old Mr Gringer in his paisley apron.

Mrs Jannette, two stories above him in a living room filled with a fair few beer cans, used needles, rot stains and a cradle filled with a crying baby, was not.

 

Jess Jannette was not the best mother there was. Her situation had been pretty dire. A runaway husband and a drug habit even before Emily came into the world of shellshock and confusion, the first sounds upon entering the world being the potential threat of the Vietcong screaming from the TV, the first smells being the fug of unfiltered cigarettes and air freshener that covered up any other dominant scents. In fact, the air freshener smelled slightly of Mescaline. Which was okay, because the landlord had many tenants on Mescaline but didn't allow the other recreational drugs that Jess used.

That particular day, Jess Jannette had enough of Emily's incessant sobbing and pushed open the bedroom window before picking her daughter up as if she were a stray badger or animal that has somehow managed to end up in her apartment. The dirty lace curtains swept back and forth.

She was a bad mother. Off her face. With a screaming child. With a dirty apartment and a parental absentee.

But mostly, just a bad mother.

And that's why Jess Jannette, on that sunny afternoon on January 23rd 1954, decided to throw three month old Emily Jannette out of the window.

The child plummeted towards the ground, where a twelve year old happened to hear screaming from above him and opened his arms, palms skyward.

The child dropped into Logan's arms and he dropped the fifty cents in his hands which rolled down the gutter and fell through a nearby drain.

 

Bewildered, he marched home with his arms outstretched. It was only three blocks away, but Emily was no longer mewling when he got home but had curled up and gone to sleep from all the excitement.

When his mother opened the door, she almost fainted at the sight of him. She'd expected her son to bring home grandkids, but that was in about twenty years.

After some talks with the local authorities, the baby was taken into care. Logan Iggy appeared in the local gazette for saving a young girl. When an interviewer asked him for a comment, he sadly stated that he was sad to have lost his fifty cents of pocket money.

1974

Author's Note

About
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Gallery
Representation

The young nurse was very flustered. At the age of twenty she was having to deal with hundreds of civilian casualties every single day. Some were people injured in traffic accidents, some were people who were the victims of a mugging gone wrong and a great handful were from Vietnam. Nixon had just signed the peace treaty and the casualties of a dishonest war (If there could ever be an honest war, in her opinion.) were stymying, but the last trickle of injured men were still coming through.

Emily was never short of patients. She checked the fob watch on the front of her scrubs as a number of new patients were wheeled in. Sometimes it was quicker to check the watch first before operating. Just to get an idea. A timeframe. In case she got distracted by another fresh batch of the dying.

A little morbid, perhaps, but it's just the way the world works sometimes. Emily Jannette was something of a realist.

There was another patient wheeled through to the emergency ward and she managed to catch a quick glance at his face. He was awake, but seemed to be in a morphine-haze. Apart from his doped up eyes, he looked almost familiar. But then again, all patients seemed to blend into each other.

Just another face in the crowd. Early thirties, blond hair matted with blood. Light damage to the front of his head, but the real problem was the laceration going down most of his right leg. Oh, he'd never walk again. There was no question of that.

"Infection?" she queried to the head nurse.

"Most of the exposed flesh has given way to bacterial infection which has entered his bloodstream. It's unlikely he'll survive the night."

The man on the gurney groaned as the head nurse walked away. 

Emily worked for three nights on him from a rainy February 23rd night to a misted morning day of February 26th when she no longer needed to help the wounded solider. And she had no idea who he was.

2016

It was a cold March.

Logan Iggy pulled the tartan blanket up his wheelchair at the top of one of Climick Park's steepest hills. His blond locks had given way to a small nest of grey hairs nestled on top of his balding head. His wrinkled hands lost their grip on the blanket and it fell to the iced-up earth. He was old. A fifty eight year old veteran enjoying his twilight years.

The rotund thirty year old woman, Marissa, who acted as his carer laughed menacingly and slapped the back of his head. Logan lurched forward in his wheelchair.

"Stupid old fool." she muttered.

She was a bad carer. Just bad. An alcoholic through and through, as well as a person who stole from other older folks at the rest home. But mostly, just a bad carer. 

The lake in Climick Park had a soft sheet of ice over the top of it and Logan realised what his horrible carer of the past year was about to do, even before she did it. 

He felt the click as the brake disconnected, even before the chair started rolling. His carer began laughing as the wheelchair began to roll over the tartan blanket and start down the hill.

Logan closed his eyes and accepted his fate as the cold air rushed past his face. He felt he'd had a good, long, life. So there were small mercies, he supposed. There'd been the war, yes, but he'd generally been happy with the cards he'd been dealt. He smiled.

The wheelchair hit the ice and it cracked instantaneously. A woman walking with her son screamed as a man crushed underneath his own wheelchair began to drown in the freezing lake.

She had no time to think, and reacted without thinking, diving into the lake and pushing her arms down. The man was sinking into the darkness of the murky waters, sinking, sinking.

She reached out a hand to grab his only for it to slip through. She pumped her arms, diving further and further and managed to lock her arms around him. 

She began to swim up, towards the dull light, only to find a solid wall of ice confronting her. She panicked, hitting her hands against the impenetrable ice. In her fading vision, she spotted a floating black mass just to her left.

 

Emily pushed aside the wheelchair that was floating in the ice hole and pulled herself and Logan out of the lake.

He lay motionless as she desperately tried to revive him. But the resuscitation wouldn't work and Emily almost gave in.

Her twelve year old son approached her with something shiny clasped in his hot and sweaty little palm. Without saying a word, he dropped the fifty cents onto Logan's still chest.

He coughed.

He coughed again.

He let out a hacking wheeze and water trickled out of his open mouth. He looked up and in his blurred vision spotted Emily. When he looked at her, he saw the falling baby. When she looked at him, she saw the injured solider. And somehow, in some way, they both knew that everything was going to be okay.

And the two of them, along with everyone else, hopefully lived happily ever after.

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