Victim - fiction by David M. Crampton

"I don't want to die."

"What's that?"  The old man, wrinkled, grizzled, and spotted with age, leaned close to the younger man, straining to hear.

The younger man coughed, trying to clear the wetness from this throat. "I don't want to die."  His voice broke; it was more of a plea than a statement.

"Oh, ho, you ungrateful bastard.  What I wouldn't give to be dying right now."  He jabbed the younger man, lying broken and bleeding, with the end of his cane.  The younger man screamed and trees shook.  Leaves fell to the ground.  "That's right!  Feel that pain, compressed into these few moments!"  A sneer spread across the old man's toothless maw. "Stretch that hell over decades, and that's my due.  You don't want that, do ya, boy!"

The young man felt something wet on his face.  Was he bleeding or
crying?  "I don't..."  A fit of coughing overwhelmed him, and the pain
threatened to make him pass out.  He fought for consciousness, spending his precious strength of will to fight the ornery geriatric.  "I don't want to die."

The old man cleared the phlegm out of his throat and spat it onto the
ground next to the young man.  "You don't have a choice, you ungrateful prat.  It's happening, and you ain't going to stop it this time."  He waved his cane over the young man's chest again, threatening more pain.  "Just accept it."

"I don't..."  The cane came down again, and it felt like a cinder block.
This time, the pain won, and the young man passed out.

"God, I hate you."  The old man walked away from the broken form,
limping through the rain of leaves falling from the tree branches.

##

The doctor pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch.  "I'm calling it.   Time of death is 3:28 am."  She pulled the sheet up over the young man's face, and sighed.

David M. Crampton is the author of The Remembrance

ISBN: 978-1-4116-1174-0
http://www.davidmcrampton.com/

It's Them or Us.

Yesterday, while on the road to pick up my wife from work, I took time to watch and admire how kids coming out of a high school were playing, smiling and having fun while waiting for the bus. I mused that it must take years to learn to stop doing that, comparing it to how grown men stand twenty feet apart around perfectly good sheltered bus stops up in Pontiac, instead of under them together. I wished that we could be so carefree.

A block up the road, traffic on Evergreen suddenly went bad and I had to make a detour. And then, only a little afterward, helicopters and police cars were everywhere. Someone had just jumped out of a car right here and shot four of these kids, and I found out later that one's now dead. You probably saw it on the news, and I was there.

I don't know how disturbing I can make it sound, that I was surrounded by smiling faces who are now crying for the loss of one of our own. I want you to be disturbed.

Everybody out there with a kid in school, do me a big favor and be a little more family to them. Be a little more real to them than their friends for a moment, because some of their friends are bad friends who will eventually get them killed.

The news is now full of this story, which gives you images of troubled
neighborhood, troubled school, troubled city police system, and troubled streets.

These killings are not taking 'their kids' away from us. They are taking our kids away from us. You just have to be there to see how much all kids deserve to live and learn in peace, just like people who watch the news, not those who make it.

We're living here with the threat, and this isn't happening 'somewhere else'. Your kids need to know they belong with family first, and gangs
last - if at all. Even the mayor isn't a role model. You are. Own up.

If your kid is in or near a posse right now, sit him or her down and tell them you don't want to see them dead someday over something as stupid as wanting to 'belong' in a gang. Our 'us' has always been and always should be more important than THEIR 'us'.

Take a little time, okay? For me?

 

f [Detroit, Oct 17]