Weekly Writing – July 8 2023

Mitch had expected toasting the bastard’s death to go down sweeter. After all, he’d been waiting twenty years to do it.
But maybe that was the problem. Wait that long for someone to die, and they became a part of your life. Even if it was a part you cursed every morning, they still became a tiny part of your reason for getting out of bed. Someone had to hate them the way they deserved, after all.
Or maybe it was just that the bastard had died so badly. Falling off a ladder? That was nothing. It was the sort of death that made you shake your head thinking of how fragile and senseless life really was – write all the poems you wanted about it, have kids, work for decades to pay off a house, and you could still end up lying with your head cracked open in that house’s freshly-paved driveway, twitching and shitting your drawers the same way whether you’d been a bastard or saint.
Why couldn’t he have been struck by lightning or something? Or lost control of his car and crashed into one of his own re-election billboards, burning on a hatchback pyre under the come-to-Jesus smile he’d paid to have plastered across half the county? That would have been something to drink to.
This just left Mitch thinking of how, whether he was a bastard or a saint, it would be him someday. That wasn’t anything to toast. All it was, was one more reason to hate the neighbour who’d gotten him up in the morning for twenty years. For dying the way Mitch always should have known he would – in a way that made the world just that much more miserable than he’d ever managed to alive.