love, read, write

It was his first time.

The sky bloomed into an uncomfortably ripe purple and rose, spilling blue-black at the fringes. It looked down at him, a small man in a small car driving at a relatively small speed.

The steering wheel was sweaty in his hands. His pants stuck to his legs and his foot felt like a rock, sinking into the accelerator reluctantly.

Cars, in their ephemeral colors and youthful speeds, rushed by and by, as if he were still, a lone driver sitting alone. But stillness was an illusion; stagnation was simply impossible. He was moving, alright.

He broke the silence with a curse, soft, to himself. He pulled off to the side.

“Foolish,” he said, leaning his forehead carefully against the cool glass of his window. It landed with a soft thud. “Foolish.”

Contemplation. And then he started the car again and left through the next exit. The car veered reluctantly into the parking lot behind Wendy’s, where neglected soda bottles and burger wrappers danced quietly between the painted lines.

More contemplation ensued over a bite of sandwich and fries. People continued to slosh around him in their daily lives.

“Foolish,” he said while swallowing a dry lump of beef and bread with ketchup. He stared emptily at the vending machine at the opposite side of the cafeteria. The coke was cold in his hands, and even cooler washing down his throat.

“You’ll know when you see him.”

His thoughts flew back to the days splayed across various walls and streets, a montage of cardboard signs and tin cans and begs for donations and dirty rags. The money—of course it was worth the money.

As if suddenly hit with an idea, his hand reached for his pocket. Rummaging produced a haphazardly folded manila envelope, creased unevenly along the left. His dirt-crusted fingers unfolded the flap and pressed the envelope’s hips inwards to see the inner contents.


Crisp bills, freshly printed. Five hundred dollars. A down payment and a sign that they meant business.

Five hundred was enough. He could make good use of it, he knew. He could buy a gun. A knife. Set up a scheme, hire someone. Something. Or he could, hypothetically, run off with the money, since five hundred was certainly enough to find a hiding place. Enough to stay low for a bit.

At the very bottom of the envelope, illuminated in the eerie, sick-colored yellow of the envelope sat the piece of paper with two words. Stephen McLaughlin.

Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin.

A bit of French fry got caught in his throat and he swallowed more coke, slowly and pensively. Stephen McLaughlin.

He imagined a white male in his forties, an architect that received little to no recognition, lived in an apartment, had a wife and one daughter who secretly smoked with her friends on the weekends. Slightly balding, protruding stomach. Raspy voice, good humor, a kindhearted smile. That kind of Stephen McLaughlin. He thought of this image hollowly.

This would be harder than he thought. Five hundred might not even be enough. Of course, they’d meant it to be an endorsement on the line—making it too easy would have just made it all a giveaway. Kill a man, get free money. No, it wasn’t as easy as that. You had to work for it. Nathan knew that. He knew that from the days behind that great wall of failure he’d hit in his twenties, when he was a tryhard teenager working for grades at school. School. He scoffed and a snort escaped his nose. His teeth sunk spitefully into the burger. School. People liked making respect and triumph sit with a raised chin on a tantalizingly high pedestal. Then when you got it, you realized it didn’t mean as much as you thought it did. School. He laughed bitterly.

He could start with phone books. Find all Stephen McLaughlins in the state.

But who knew where they came from? Perhaps it was international. Maybe Stephen McLaughlin wasn’t in New York. He could be in Washington. Five hundred would become a daily ration of $3 per day, then. Or what if Stephen McLaughlin was overseas, in China? Or Ireland?

The hamburger settled uneasily at the bottom of Nathan’s stomach. They hadn’t given him a due date. There was a reason for that. Nothing was easy when you made a deal with the devil. Signing up was the equivalent of writing down your own expiration date. It wasn’t a matter of staying alive—it was a matter of whether you were used to maximum capacity before your eventual demise. Nathan had signed up knowing this—he was very well in danger of being killed himself, but that meant very little. After a life of emptiness, he needed the million dollars.

By the time the soda cup fell into the garbage bin (lonely ice cubes rattling softly within), he was set on his next destination.