When The Time Comes

chapter 23; Ben

I haven't talked to Michael in, three days? I've lost count miserably. All I know is that I have an unsettling feeling in my stomach. Sitting alone in my apartment, half-expecting to see Omar breaking down my front door all night, has me rethinking my last days on earth. I'm not going to lie, a part of me wonders if they ever found anything else about our mystery guy Charles. If they made it back to Georgia, I'm surprised they haven't tracked me down yet and beat me up for whatever is sitting in the bank. It shouldn't be a problem for Liberty. After all, she stabbed a guy.

Oh yeah, that guy. I saw him on my Facebook feed today, making me pause and scroll back up. It was one of those local news publications, the kind that makes you pay a fee to read the whole article which I didn't, obviously.

But I read enough to know that the guy managed to cough up Liberty's name in the hospital. He was alive for that much. After 300 words of the article though, I'm not too sure what followed.

I'd hoped, for her sake, she'd be able to manage it until her stag date. In a perfect world maybe. Not this one. No. This world has been against people like us from the start. Fucked up things happening to people who don't deserve it.

  Tonight, I'm shamelessly calling Michael even though my calls probably aren't going through. The phone sits on the corner of my table. I watch the call drop and the screen turn black again. I've lost track of how many missed calls I've spammed him with.

I wonder if Michael even notices how long it's been since we've talked. If he has friends to chat with. A better way to kill his time than I do. I don't have anyone other than Michael, if truth be told. In a demented kind of way, he even has the Douglas's which is more than what I can say about myself.

It stinks but at least he'll have them after I'm gone. Them and the money I'll leave behind for him.

  I get myself a cup of water. In the window, sits my wilted pothos plant. It's one of the few things I have left that doesn't let the apartment look like a complete wasteland. I thought it stood a chance when I strapped it on the passenger seat, not scrapping it like I did most things at the time.

As humans, we like to hoard things like it matters when it doesn't. None of my TopMan jackets that have been collecting dust in my closet since I came back are going to help me. They'll be in a Goodwill donation bin before the end of this year, being sold to someone for seven dollars.

A fair amount of time passes me by. I realize this when my body begins to sway a little. The pothos still droops, leaves soft and waxy. I've heard that plants tend to move towards the sun. Then why does mine lean the other way?