Quadrophobia by Justin Robinson

Author:Justin Robinson [Robinson, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solstice Publishing - Solstice Shadows Imprint
Published: 2017-12-16T22:00:00+00:00

The Wretched

Raymond Carter was ready to die.

There wasn’t anything left to do. When he rose in the morning, with every one of his joints on fire, he felt a faint twinge of regret. He had been hoping last night would be the last time he’d close his eyes. That he’d just drift into that incredible myth of “dying in your sleep.” He knew that wasn’t the case. Dying in your sleep meant dying at night, but he’d take it. Waking up a final time only to find death opening up beneath you, yawing and black...

Yep, that sounded good to Raymond. As his own father would have said, sounded mighty fine.

His father was long dead. Keeled over from a heart attack at the office that had sucked his life away. Raymond–Ray, then–had been seventeen years old and hadn’t cried at the funeral. He was the man of the house now, so he was told. And one thing he knew from the word go was that men didn’t cry. They took what life had to give them and never complained.

He shed a couple tears when his mother died twenty-one years later. He had been alone then. She was disappointed he hadn’t settled down. He’d tried, first with Sherri, but that hadn’t worked out. Not the way the two of them wanted to. He tried again with Pilar, then again with Agnes. Failed, and failed again. After that, he was done trying.

Besides, Carter was a common enough name. Wasn’t like not passing it down was some great crime against genealogy. The Carters (same for the Whitmans on mom’s side) had been in the country since before there had been a country. Back when it was a strip of coastline and the biggest concern were taxes and wild Indians. There were Carters (and Whitmans) all over. Not that any of them visited.

What would he even say to a visitor at this point? Oh, he could tell them what happened on the reruns he watched in his room (not much). He could tell them what puzzle he was working (Paris, France). He could tell them what food in the cafeteria was bad (all of it). No, it would be nothing but hearing their stories. A new story or two might be nice, but he had heard so many, gotten the variations, that it was difficult to believe there were any truly new stories out there.

It was hard being the oldest man at Village Grove Assisted Living. He imagined they all went through it, this exclusive club of people who refused to die. Before Raymond, it had been Phyllis Wu, and before her, Leah Steinberg. Before that, the memory got hazy, his brain already dumping the unimportant flotsam over the side in preparation for shutting down for good. There’d be names on both sides of his, and pretty soon his would recede from the living. Written on a headstone over at Eternal Rest, sure, but it’d be a question rather than an answer. Who was he? No one would know.

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