My daily routine is simple.
Every day I wake up at 6:45am, I take a shower and use the shampoo that never seems to empty, I brush my teeth starting from top left and finishing with the bottom right, I get dressed in my business apparel: dress shirt, tie, shoes (left foot first, of course), then I walk outside, get the paper, and I drive off to work. My life has begun this way every day, all of course but today. Today was different.
The routine followed suit, but when I approached my car I saw what I believed to be a silhouette of a man wearing a dark colored derby, and the blackest raincoat, sitting in the back of my 1950 Ford Two-Door Sedan. Of course I simply brushed it off as my imagination, seeing as how it was still rather dark out, and my mind was still recovering from the sleep I was deprived of the night before. So slowly I approached the back of my car, but this shadow of a man-unwavering-sat still ever present in the back of my car. Thoughts raced through my head like a steed at the Kentucky Derby. Thoughts full of advice, but none with a solution. Bravery prattled with my curiosity, but eventually my cowardice gave in and I turned to the house door.
Yet I mused the concept, "Really," I began, "who could've gotten into my car at this hour merely to wait? What vocation would that become to a man's credentials? Surely it's a play from the morning lights in accord with the lamps on the street. Yes, a clever trick! Einstein himself possibly never saw such a wonder as this!" So, I turned towards the car, slowly, and approached it as such. I came along the side of my car, opened the driver’s side door, and sat down on my leather upholstery. To my surprise nothing happened. I felt as if the shadow was still behind me, but my spine was clinched so tight I didn’t have the nerve to turn and look. So I drove, it’s the only thing I knew to do. After all, what outlandish turn of events has so befuddled my average day of living to leave me at this point? My normality has been tossed, flipped onto its head, and the blunt force trauma simply caused nothing more than an accentuated light headedness. Every noise became like a siren, every movement like an oncoming bullet, every person became an enemy, and every light seemed to be accusing me of the darkest wrongs. My mind so titillated with this onslaught of abnormalities that I began to burst into a mad laughter—a cackle. One which rivaled all of the lights, sounds, people, and movements that wished for my very demise. The ever present feeling of the shadow behind me grew like a cancer in my brain. Pulsing and pounding, growing with every second of silence that passed by, yet he remained quiet. My fingers gripped the steering wheel so tightly without restraint, I began to feel the rubber seep in-between my fingers, the sweat of my palms welded the two together making it impossible for me to turn back.
The road became like a never ending treadmill. There was no hope for me, no grace found at this point. I felt trapped. I was enclosed in this speeding metal trap with a demon whose presence clawed at my skin. My foot fell harder and harder upon the pedal, it seemed the only thing I could do was go faster in hopes to escape this nightmarish fantasy. Louder my laugh became, as the insanity wrought deeper and deeper into my bones. Fury filled my eyes because of this man’s silence. “Surely,” I thought, “this man is attempting to make me lose my mind by giving me some sort of silent attack, but oh, how alive I feel now. How awake are my senses, and hot is the blood in my veins!”
“Speak, villain!” I yelled to the man in the back of my racing death train, “Speak now, and name your desire for me. For I can tell you now with all the alacrity in my mind your goal shall fail. Demon speak! Tell me why you have brought upon such wretched torment to such an undeserving person as myself!” Yet still, still, the creature remained quiet. Yet, the volume of his silence broke over my best attempts to rattle him through my harsh commands. His stillness haunted me, and my heart was filled with the most darkest of revelations.
“So… you are death, yes? Death, unexpected, and never called upon a time at our choosing. You wish to rattle the life out of me through this hell train and then take my soulless corpse down with you to the pit. Well, fiend I can tell you now your efforts are in vain, your turmoil this night will not simply cost me my life, but yours as well. For tonight death, you will dine with the finest of your trophies, you yourself shall taste what it’s like to have the cold blade of death plunged into your heart. If I am to die tonight it shall not be by your hand but by my own. What abnormality you have brought upon me this day!”
And with that final cry I turned my speeding car towards the docks, where my tires raced to meet my watery grave. This is the end; I face my villain in the blackest pits of despair. Death shall be taken by me, and not I by him! As I approached the docks the sun began to rise over the horizon casting a blinding light into my vision. But it was not just my face that was revealed from the star’s ominous light, but the demon’s as well. I pressed my foot hard against my brakes, and the car stopped but forty-three feet short of the waters. I, mused at my own ignorance, got out of my car, opened the back door, and pulled out my brown derby and darkened raincoat from the night before. Apparently my day had been so demanding that I had forgotten to take my hat and coat inside, and left them in the Sedan because of ease.
“What an abnormality… well, I best be off to work now..."