Wish Resign

Re: Wish Resign


I thought she was all I wanted. I really did, but the more I thought... The less I was sure. Perhaps it was the idea of her that had so strongly enchanted me. Could she provide the happiness, the full feeling I was so often looking after?

I kept the Buffalo penny on the mantle, above the fire place at my father’s house. I considered it a lucky charm, as I had found that flower so soon after I had found the coin. My arms and hands healed up quite nicely as well, but Rosa...

Soon, the penny found a better home in my pocket. It would bounce as I would walk about town or drive the movies. It was a constant, silent companion. It would not disagree with me, it would not shun my ideas. I was not stymied by it.

As my mind began to wander about the way I would like my life, I grew to clutching the coin impulsively in my hands. My thoughts were always rapid. I grew angry so often, it was hard to control myself. The coin seemed to be the only thing that could keep me calm.

Perhaps I had spent too much time alienating myself from my companions, because in the course of a month, Rosa grew away from me. It came as no shock one day when she told me she had found someone else.

Again, I was angry. Not at the thought of Rosa leaving me... I could live with the void where her love should go, but the thought of someone else having her sickened me. The thought of losing seemed too much. And the man, Randolph Branson. His name was Randolph, for God’s sake. I had seen him before at the grocery store. He was not good looking, he was not charming, or enigmatic, he would not break his wrists trying to find a flower.

He was wealthy. He had the money, the money I thought I deserved. And now he was about to have my girl.

No.

I prayed for the next few nights, but God never seems to listen. He turns a deaf ear to the pleas of man.

So I offered up a bribe. I prayed with the coin, my lucky coin, pressed firmly between my hands.

“Dear Lord, please hear me. I’m about to lose something, about to lose my prized possession. Please, do not let her leave me. I just wish you would strike down Branson and give me the money it would take to keep Rosa at my side. This is not too much to ask. Branson is egotistical, his money comes from his father. I have so much more to give than he does. Even his moustache, given the chance, I could do it... I could do it better.”

I felt fulfilled after that prayer and fell asleep.

-

“You prayed for his death?” she asked, turning and looking at me.

I nodded. I had been such an idiot. I had been such a fool. The only thing I needed had been in front of me the entire time.

I didn’t need to write anything. She began to read faster.

-

Branson died a few days later, crushed by a log falling off a truck. It rolled down a hill and struck the back of his house, teetering dangerously over his porch. He called me to help him remove it, and as I was pulling up, he was motioning for me to stop.

The log fell onto his back. Branson died.

I couldn’t help but feel responsible. When you pray for death upon anyone, be prepared to shoulder the guild when they die. Death is an inevitable processes, and to want it upon someone like that, to hasten the only true end, it’s despicable.

But I did not feel bad. I did not feel horrendous. I felt... I felt vindicated, after the nausea incurred from seeing a man crushed to death passed.

And she did come back to me. Rosa came to me, crying, crying out that poor Randolph had been killed, poor Randolph had been crushed, and I frowned, and I told her how sorry I was, but I was anything but sorry. She was in my arms, crying, moaning into my shoulder, and Branson was nowhere to be seen. I had won. I was the victor.

Imagine my shock when I found how little friends Branson had, and how much money he left his “one true friend in the world”.

And it was shock. Branson and I had always gotten along, to be sure, but to be left that sum? It was enough so I would never have to work again. So that my children would never have to work again. So that I could buy anything – and everything I had ever wanted.

I didn’t need to buy Rosa. It was the money and the depression that brought her to me, but I did not have to spend a single cent to keep her around.

I did purchase a mansion that sat upon the ridge of a mountain, overlooking the town. It became my perch. It was one hundred square feet, but a great deal upwards, away from where Branson’s house had been. I bought an oak dresser – the first of my many purchases, to adorn my bedroom.

I had my own mantle now, where I could place the penny if the desire overcame me and I felt it weighing in my pocket.

I took on servants, people looking for work, to keep up with my 30 room house. There would be days that would go by where I knew Rosa was in the house somewhere, because her car was still parked outside, but I would never see her. I took to wearing robes around constantly, and letting my hair grow out.

I awoke one night to find Rosa over me, a pair of sheers in her hand, furiously clipping away at my overgrowth.

“What’s this,” I said groggily.

“Just cutting your hair,” she said, her eyes sad. The death of Branson had almost killed her inside. She was completely broken, completely committed to me. I didn’t love her, but I loved the power I had.

“Thank you,” I whispered. She nodded, her hair filthy.

-

There is only so much time a person can spend in the company of his employees before he goes completely mad from isolation. Rosa was no longer a person to speak of, as she just kept to herself for most of the day, talking to no one in particular, playing games with shadows.

The servants were afraid to talk back to me, as they should be. They depended upon me. Everyone depended upon me. It was beautiful.

But termites began gnawing at the foundation of my brain. They were whispering deadly thoughts into my ear. Perhaps the people in town hated me, loathed me, reviled me. If they did, what of it? Was it enough to have the respect and undying love of that shell of a woman in the corner, or did I want more?

I did want more. I did not have to think long upon this. But I hadn’t the means, short of giving my fortune away, of acquiring friends. The years spent in solitude had done little for my personal skills, and I had no one to try them on. I found myself hard nosed when it came to talking to my servants, even short when it came to talking with Rosa.

It began to sneak into my mind that perhaps the coin was more than just a coin. Perhaps it had been given to me as a tool of God to carry out his work... And his work was to ensure my happiness. I was the alpha and the omega. I had already demonstrated my power over life by praying Branson to death, and wealth by acquiring his stocks, bonds, gold.

Uncle Finney passed shortly after. I thought briefly about bringing him back, but I didn’t know how much power the coin had left, if any. I did not want to risk it on bringing back my dead uncle, may he rest in peace.

Instead, I wished for popularity. For the friends I now so longed to have. Not just friends, but more pawns to control.

After a few days, nothing happened, and I tried again, in my foyer, gripping the coin. It was not masked as a prayer this time.

“I wish for the friends I long for, the popularity I crave. The limelight.”

A day later, I was served notice that I was to be enlisted in the army.

Oh, the cruel fate! How the coin had lied to me. It led me to believe everything I could want was within my grasp, and now it was sending me into the bowels of hell, to fight in a conflict I did not agree with, that I did not want.

In frustration, I threw the coin. It clattered in the fireplace.

A few days later, I packed my bag.

-

“Jesus,” Rosa said. “You’re insane, do you know that? Are you planning to off yourself? Are you repenting by having me read this? What are you trying to do?”

I wrote, “To make you understand. I was outside myself.”

“Because of that coin?” she smirked. “It’s so easy to blame something else for your shortcomings.”

I must look remorseful, because she took it back. “But you can’t be all bad,” she said. “After what you did... after what you gave up. There’s a man here that I still love,” she said, pushing the hair out of my eyes.

“I was in love with you back in the field, before you brought me that flower. I was only afraid that you wouldn’t love me the same way... And you didn’t. Not with the way you kept me here after Randolph died. You weren’t the same.”

I underlined and tapped ‘outside myself’ for emphasis.

“You don’t go outside yourself for fifteen years. You just don’t. That makes you certifiably insane.”

I sigh, and write, “Please, understand.”

“Understand what?”

I wanted to write the three words that would bring her back to me, but I did not deserve it. I asked her to come for a reason yet unfulfilled.

“Keep reading,” I scribble.

Re: Wish Resign


My first deployment was nothing special. I fought with the rest of the grunts after three expedited weeks of basic training. They were training me to be a foot soldier, but found that I had a particular knack for cutting wires and put me on mine duty. As if you cut wires when traversing mine fields. I didn’t even get a rifle, just a small side arm. I carried a large metal detector on my back, but the amount of shrapnel that covered most of the fields made it next to useless.

Two years went by before I saw any substantial action. I was stationed, for the most part, in an outpost in Poland that sat at the base of the High Tatras. Fog would roll off the crags in the early morning and blanket the base. We were nothing but a way station for other soldiers who were shipping out to the front line. A civilian town, Podbanske, was full of our troops. It had been abandoned near the start of the war, as it was originally a tourist town where guides would lead hard working people would attempt to scale the western peak.

Two years I spent in that base, counting out ammo and loading up magazines for people that would be using them to fight. I was useless. I was a bean counter while people on the other side of the mountains, far away in Russia, were fighting a growing superpower of evil. It saddened me that I was part of the lower half that made the top half possible.

In my time away from home, my mind seemed to clear. It could have been the mountain air or the change in scenery, but I began to regret decisions I had made. I questioned what love was, what it really meant. If it could be unconditional. If Rosa had loved me all along, if she had ever stopped.

Two years is a long time to wait. I had the benefit of being unchanged by the war. I would go home the same person, save for the thousands upon thousands of magazines I had hand loaded and helped ship out.

What I saw of the soldiers passing through or on leave was the same. Podbanske was a rustic town, and it was beautiful. I could only imagine it in its true time, bustling with activity. Now it was a hole for cheap sex and escapism. It made me somewhat sick to think that all the history of that town was being diluted, distorted, by our presence. My presence.

At the start of my third year, I heard of an advancement by the Allied troops through Russia. We had taken a fair amount, but insurgencies were springing up like weeds. They did not need me at the front, rather, they moved me and my squad, along with 3 others, to Diomede Island. The powers that be, my CO, requested that I set up station there, and we would, once again, provide supplies to other troops during the summer months. During the winter months the sea became impossible to navigate.

Big Diomede Island, on the southern tip, is where we began construction of a make through way point, and boatloads of soldiers would disembark before heading out to the mainland. It seemed futile, expensive, to have this post set up, to transport soldiers via boat instead of plane. Word came through that the opposition had incredible antiaircraft guns stationed along the western shores of England and Italy made coming in by plane all but useless. They were still running soldiers up from Africa, but through the Bering Strait was faster. Amphibious landings were becoming normal.

During the winter, the soldiers and I came up with games to stave off boredom and madness. Target practice with excess shells that we would inventory as having fallen off Sharday Cliff, named after Franklin Sharday, my commanding officer, at trees. We would hunt whatever small game was left on the island. It wasn’t much. Most of the god forsaken rock was covered in trees. If we were lucky, we had birds.

-

I saw action at the beginning of my fourth year, the last year of my mandated service. I landed at Magadan and was promptly shot through the leg. I was crawling on the snow covered sand towards God knows what with only my pistol at my side, and I managed to kill four soldiers, all wearing the Russian colors. I knew my wound wasn’t fatal and traded in my mine detector for an M48, and killed three more. They weren’t expecting a full amphibious attack. It landed me and upwards of 20,000 soldiers at the feet of a small group of patrolling Russians.

And I was shot through the leg as soon as I set foot off the boat.

I was carried for 2 weeks, delirious as my leg grew an infection, to Khabarovsk on the Chinese border, and was treated for gangrene. I almost lost my leg.

They asked me if I wanted to return home.

I told them to put me back in the machine.

I changed platoons from Sharday to a man named Fallow, who was a bit of a prat. I only ever spoke to him once – McLenehan was the man I reported to directly, a small mouse of a man that allegedly overtook a bunker by himself after his lucky pistol was shot out of his hand.

McLenehan and I became friends. He was in charge of my squad, less than ten soldiers, and under the supreme command of Fallow, we marched into the jaws of death.

Fallow said, “One more offensive and we break through Omsk. We can shut off a supply depot that’s helping them up the river.”

It was true. There were factories in Omsk, and PT boats that were regularly making runs up where they were met with trucks and taken to Kazan. But someone had tipped them off. In the three weeks it took us to reach Omsk, the entire city was rigged with plastic explosives. There were no PT boats left, no supplies. It was a ghost town meant to blow when we arrived.

I set out at once. My squad was in an old hospital, and along with four other explosive experts, set out to diffuse the large bombs that sat on the borders of the town. I managed to diffuse 3 – red wire, blue wire, red wire. 3 out of 25.

22 exploded. The hospital, a rec center, and one half of a factory were the only buildings left standing when the dust cleared. McLenehan survived, as did most of my squad, but Fallow was killed. Most of our final offensive push had been killed.

We radioed, and were told to await orders. My nights became sleepless. McLenehan and I took turns watching the horizon. We were not afraid of a river attack, which we could easily stifle with a heavy MG. It was an attack from the east. Conquering Russia is a horrible idea at worst, patchy at best. Impossible is a word for it.

I kept view through a bent sniper scope 4 hours a day, leaning on an MRI bed that looked out of the window the ICU. The town was rubble.

On many days, I would see, at the end of my line of sight, Branson. He would stand, staring, in a bloody uniform with his helmet ****ed to one angle, but it was Branson, the dead man. Branson, the ghost.

I told no one. Not McLenehan or Texas of Frankie. Not a soul. Branson would not advance. He would only stand at a distant and stare as if he knew I willed him to die.

After six weeks of waiting, we received reinforcements and new orders. There was a large platoon setting up shop in Chelyabinsk. It was a three week trek. This was another final push.

The number of soldiers seemed almost impossible, but the mission was clear. Take and hold Kazan. Wait for reinforcements. Move up to Nizhniy. Wait for reinforcements.

Moscow. Find and capture the dictator Olingrad.

Kazan was a cake walk compared to Nizhniy. They were waiting for us there.

The streets were lined with red slush, the blood mingling with the snow. So many died. Snipers in almost every high rise, foot soldiers in the streets, tanks blocking alleys.

McLenehan took a mortar blast to the chest while charging up Pletsy Square. I fought the remainder of the battle covered in him. The Square was the main point – capture the square, set up a perimeter, storm out forces.

Demolition crews, I was informed, were making their way from Africa. They had already overtaken London and were destroying the anti aircraft guns.

There were a few touch and go days as I led my squad, flanking troops that tried to muscle their way into Pletsy. Texas, our sniper, was a gift from Heaven. It felt almost natural to sit in a high rise and issue orders to several squads.

When the roar of the planes sounded overhead, I knew our angels had come in. Red smoke lined the streets, signaling targets, and soon, over half of the city was leveled. The Russian defense force had almost completely been destroyed.

I was given command of a platoon, and after a few days recuperating in the renamed St. Michael’s Square, we headed for Moscow.

It was highly anticlimactic. It was a frenzied battle, a last ditch attempt at the Russians to keep us away from their capital.

During the battle, I shot a retreating Russian soldier in the back.

I later found out the man I shot in the back was Olingrad.

Upon my return, I was hailed as a hero. As the man that won the war, that killed the evil despot.

When my feet hit American soil, I could only think about the coin and the luck it had brought me. Four years, but I was the most popular man in the free world. Perhaps the prisoners in the interment camps we had set up in Russia didn’t view me as a hero, but those who counted did.

I wasted no time returning home, ignoring Rosa and heading to the fireplace. I left my heavy coat on the foot. A fire was raging six logs high, and I reached in for the penny, finding it surprisingly cool to the touch.

When Rosa asked me why I did it, I told her so many years away in the cold, I wanted to feel that fire.

My left hand was bandaged for months.

Rosa did look beautiful, but she did not matter. I had my prize.

Fan mail began show up in the post and I knew I had arrived.

-

“I thought you had seen horrors in the war,” she said. “I thought that’s why you had cloistered yourself. You shot a man in the back.”

I nodded. There was not much I could say, because it was true. In the heat of the slaughter, I had shot a retreating man who turned out to be the worlds greatest enemy. And it was no battle, no matter how the papers portrayed it. It was downright slaughter. We stormed Moscow almost free of heavy opposition.

I looked down at my left hand, and the burn scars that creased it, like an orange peel.

Rosa looked down at me. Not just her elevation, but in her eyes, I saw her look down at me.

“Where’s the coin now?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know anymore,” I wrote. It was a lie.

“And you think it had to do with your charmed life?”

“I don’t know,” I wrote. It was true. I had no idea if the coin had any true power or if I was just lucky, but I preferred to think that the coin was responsible. When given a power such as that, who wouldn’t go insane with power?

Re: Wish Resign


The letters came pouring in. They called me “hero” and “friend of the people” and other such niceties that I did not deserve. At the end of the day, I had shot a man in the back. That was not the worst part… He had been wearing one of my own soldiers uniforms. I was shooting a deserter in a calm firefight rather than a Russian.

Naturally, I told everyone that it was my keen eye that noticed his limp, a limp similar to the one I had. I told everyone, the newspapers, the journals, the television programs, the late night talk show hosts, that I had smelled the cheap whisky on him. That I recognized his broken nose, and he had turned to run from me. The killer. The man who would bring reckoning upon him.

The populous ate it up like it was soup and they were in a bread line. They couldn’t get enough of my broken mug. My “dazzling” blue eyes. The eyes of a killer. A man who would stop at nothing to get what I wanted.

As if this is such a bad thing. Was a bad thing.

-

I watched her read the journal out loud and knew she knew that it was no journal. It was a confession, hastily written in the past few days, thrown together as an account of what happened to me. What drove me to such lengths. The dazzling blue eyes… The eyes of a killer. Of a man unhinged.

-

How quickly I resumed my old ways. Sitting atop my castle, leafing through letters. At best, they contained money. A few small bills from poor people who wished to share what they had with me, the true hero.

I went through the house shortly after and cracked each and every mirror. The fractured picture I saw reflected was far more true than anything. Rosa would see the same when she looked. She was more broken than I was.

But I relished collecting the money. It was my motivation for opening each and every letter. I had my servants work in shifts burning every letter that had no money, cleaning the ash out of the fireplace.

My phone rang off the hook to grant interviews. I would, at this point, do them by phone only, and only if I was feeling generous.

It gave me great pleasure to deny high school students interviews with me. I could hear them breaking over the phone. No longer was my business a business of being a hero, or a man inheriting his wealth. It became my job to break those I found unworthy.

Soon, the phone calls stopped.

Even the letters began to taper.

My servants no longer had to work in shifts to rid the house of the clutter. It was a job I could easily afford onto myself. There was not a single letter that I kept. I burned the letters from children, from the elderly, from the aspiring. They were all the same. They were all beneath me. They made me possible, and I would give them nothing for it.

I might as well have boarded up the windows, for all I was doing. I sat in my bedroom, staring at the dresser, my first purchase. And Rosa, my first gain. She kept the flower I had given her, the beautiful daisy, pressed in a book. She thought I didn’t know. I knew all along.

I didn’t understand why she loved me still. After everything I had done. She was losing herself, but she wasn’t completely lost.

I burned the book that she kept the flower in. When she asked me why, I hit her squarely across her cheek with the back of my hand. It was easier than sending her away.

Because I could feel the call. The small piece of copper on the mantle. It was telling me that nothing was important anymore except what it could offer.

I dismissed my servants, and would sleep with the penny next to my bed. My house fell into a state of disrepair, but I did not care.

There was only one more step to take.

I was already wealthy beyond reason. I had received a love that I had burned for so long for. I was a hero, adored by the public. I would go down in history.

But there was one thing I had not touched.

Godhood. Perhaps unattainable through conventional means, but I was smarter than that.

With the penny next to me, I began to plot.

Godhood would not be achieved if I died. I myself could not be immortal without the means being called into question…

But a resurrection?

-

Rosa stared at me. Hard.

“Please don’t tell me… Don’t tell me you believe this penny brought you everything… You earned so much.”

I shook my head. I earned nothing and deserved less.

“I don’t want to read this. I don’t want to know what you did… And you’re lucky to be alive. Please don’t ask me to believe that the penny is the reason you survived.”

That’s not what I wanted her to know. The reason I had written it down… The reason I had her read it out loud was so that I could not chase down the postal truck. I could not stop it from reaching who it needed to reach. I was a dark messiah.

It was a situation that needed wholly to be fixed, and she was just the person I needed.

-

I bought the explosives from several contacts I had made during the war. They were happy to help their old friend out, the hero. The man who stopped a genocide. The man who stopped a war cold in its tracks.

I even jerry rigged a detonator to look like it was a hack job. My training the service helped me build one on a professional level. I scaled it back from there.

My target was simple. It was a bus outside of a church.

And the plan was even more so.

-

“Please,” she pleaded, “I don’t want this. Please…”

But I sat, unmoving.

-

Leave the bomb in a location where people would find it. And I would happen to be near by.

The day of the event, I was near by. I was by a fountain, keeping my head down. If I was spotted, people would no doubt see the coincidence. People might put something together.

But the bomb was spotted. The timer told the children and women and priests and nuns that they had little time left, and they should make their peace.

If prayer weighed less than oxygen, that bus would have floated.

I heard the scream, and I gripped the penny in my hand.

“I wish to be brought back.”

It was as simple as that, but I revised.

“I wish to be brought back two and a half minutes after being killed.”

Long enough to be miraculous.

I ran towards the bus. “What? What’s going on in there?”

A small child ran to the window, pointing and screaming. When she saw my face, hope flashed across her eyes. The hero had arrived. Christ had arrived.

I ran onto the bus, but made sure that I was pointed to the bomb. I did not want to run to it directly. That would have been a dead give away.

I pulled a knife from my pocket and slid the brick of explosives out. I put on a damn fine show, which wire to cut. I even broke a sweat.

I clipped the yellow. Any of them would have done the same. The bomb was not meant to be diffused.

“I can only stall it. Everyone, get away! Go! Go!”

And they ran. Now that they had the time to escape, they ran like the wind.

All except that small child, the little girl who had run to the window. She stayed behind. She was not part of the plan.

The timer continued to tick down.

“Go on! Get out of here!”

But she stood rooted by my side. “No.”

I clipped the final wire. I had less than 10 seconds to make it off the bus, but I never had any intention of clearing the explosion. Something had to claim my life.

I picked her up. She weighed me down, and I had trouble with her as we exited the bus.

The explosion tore at my back and I felt the girl fly from my arms. I saw the look on her face as her body was tossed through the air, as it slammed against the ground.

Metal ripped into me. I felt it fly out of me at varying degrees.

Dying was excruciating. I never expect it to be pleasant. Never a walk in the park.

I woke up to brightness. A man was shining a light in my eye.

He was pressing down very hard on my throat. Other men were pressing down on various parts of my body, the holes where my life was slowly ebbing away.

It was fuzzy. In and out, touch and go, for a while. I was in the hospital for a while. I was amused when they told me I had been clinically dead for around two minutes and thirty seconds.

I was not amused when they told me the child that had stayed behind died from injuries sustained in the blast. They had done everything they could for her. They had tried everything. Carrying her was noble, but she was probably the reason I was caught in the explosion. The reason I had died.

She enabled my rebirth.

Guilt has no measurement.

-

I had achieved a messiah like status.

But a stray piece of shrapnel had tore through my throat. Through my vocal chords. And no matter how hard I held the penny in my hand and thought, nothing would happen. There was no ignition. There was no catalyst.

The explosion claimed the life of that girl and my voice.

Months without that power cleared my head, but I couldn’t go public. I was too much of a coward to throw everything away.

It was as if a fog had lifted from me. The red veil that I had viewed the world through dissipated. I hadn’t been living a life at all. I had been living whims.

All the good I did was matched with the act of claiming the life of that child. My hubris led me to design a bomb that was flawed in the sense that it gave me enough time to escape unharmed. The penny put someone innocent in the way to make sure I was killed and brought back.

I was a messiah.

I was a monster.

-

I declined physical therapy at first, because I wanted to meet the public. They put a statue of me in the Washington DC mall, in front of the monument. I declined relearning to walk to bask in adoration.

But as the haze cleared, I couldn’t face the press anymore. The people. The phone calls. The letters. The people that had begun to worship me. It was everything I had wanted. Wasn’t it?

I later declined physical therapy to deprive myself of one thing most humans, base, and animal have the ability to do. I chose to handicap myself as punishment, but it wasn’t nearly enough to atone.

-

“The rest is blank,” she said. She stared at me through teary eyes. “You blew up the bus. You killed that child. The only people to remember her were her family. Everyone else was so focused on you.”

“Juliette,” I wrote. I remembered her name. I saw her face every time I closed my eyes.

“You’re hideous,” she said, crying. “I loved you, I did, until I saw your face.”

I closed my eyes. I wanted to reach out and touch her. She didn’t believe anything about the penny. She didn’t believe the absolute power it had. I was a monster. It was my creator, my master.

“I’m going to the press,” she said. “They deserve to know. You’ll still be remembered as a man that stopped a war… but you’re a psychopath. People around the world are devil worshiping and they have no idea.”

I reached out and grabbed her hand, holding it fast. I laced my fingers with her and refused to let go.

“What are you doing?”

With my free hand, I wrote, “Let it all out.”

She tried to pull away, but I would not let her.

I gripped her other hand with mine.

“I loved you,” she said, “But you’re horrible. I never want to see you again. I wish I had never met you. I wish, I wish you would just leave!”

I let her go then. She grabbed the journal, my confession, my death knell, and ran to the door. The last time I saw her, the door was slowly closing behind her.

That night, I walked for the first time in almost a year. I moved to the closet, and began to pack a bag. Slowly, thoughtfully. Enough clothes to keep me warm while I was on the road, while I was disappearing.

Rosa’s memory of me will fade, I’m sure of that.

As sure as I can walk again.

When I had gripped her hand, there had been little between us save for skin and a thin piece of copper.

I suspect if my face is seen again by anyone civilized, they will likely kill me. I deserve as much.

I’ll keep the penny with me as a reminder of everything evil inside of myself. The buffalo, the blank side. The hope that I am the master of my own fate. If not, there are lakes that will take me. Crowds that will rend me limb from limb.

Rosa will one day, God willing, wake up and not remember me. I can only hope as much. It would be almost as like she had never met me.

And leaving is just what I plan to do.

May all her best wishes come true.

The End.

-

So what do you think?

Re: Wish Resign

hi random dude who joined ffr simply to post this story

i'll read it later maybe probably not

Re: Wish Resign

I'll edit this post if I read the whole thing, but some things I noticed:

-You used "he said", or "they said" at least once. You should avoid resorting to said as it is not very descriptive and rather overused. Other, more vivid verbs such as replied, retorted, commented, inquired, etc. are better choices than "said", and they can help to personify characters if used correctly.
-Your opening paragraph is rather weak. You have no hook, and your first sentence is extremely vague and not descriptive. The fact that I stopped reading, and had to decide to resume reading after four words can't be a good thing.

Re: Wish Resign

Break down:

First chapter sucks, re-write it.

Second chapter:

Gets better near the end.

Third and Fourth chapters:

Loved them, but for the love of God, you jumped tenses. You have spelling and grammar problems all across the board. PAY ATTENTION when you write.

I did like the story, though. And if your first two chapters were as good as the last two (specifically, the last one, holy crap I liked it) then you'd be in business.

Re: Wish Resign

quad post ftw also tl;dr

Re: Wish Resign

Oh hey, get out of lit.