Santa Fight Club and Other Christmas Stories by George Saoulidis

Author:George Saoulidis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Mythography Studios
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Scrooge looked around absent-minded. Then he noticed his assistant Clara, holding some papers in her hand and talking on the phone. She was quite close to him but he couldn’t hear clearly. The driver pressed the button and the window lowered a few centimetres so the outside sounds could be heard clearly, but was still blocking them from being seen.

“But I don’t make enough money to cover that. Those amounts are insane! Who can actually pay that much health insurance?” Clara said on the phone, very upset. “No, that was my Christmas bonus. No I can’t make a payment before the end of the month. No, you listen to me. This is my son’s treatment we are talking about. You can’t- Yes, I’ll hold.”

Scrooge watched her with interest, as if it was the first time after seven years that he laid eyes on the woman. She was thinner than the video of her last year. He hair was untended, simply brushed back. Her eyes were sunken. She was snapping angrily at everything.

She was in despair.

He tried to dig out his memories. Had Clara asked him for money to cover her son’s treatment? She must have, but he had dismissed it. Probably. Deep in his own accounts, his balance sheets. He was paying her what was due, what the law dictated and a good enough raise as she was getting experience. But had she explained to him how much she needed the money? She must have tried. The woman was spending half her day in an office right next to him, for God’s sake. An opportunity would have arose. Or was she so scared she might lose her only job that she didn’t even dare to ask. To ask him. The bad man. Scrooge rubbed his face hard, as if scratching away the layers to get down into his memories. He couldn’t even remember. Such an important fact about the only other person that was so close in his life, and he didn’t even remember. He dug up some calculations he’d done at some point about her salary, he had given her some extra pay for overtime. But it was nothing, a few euros here and there. The health insurance must have been asking for thousands.

He tried to find her again but she was gone in a second, somewhere inside the hospital.

“W-wait,” Scrooge said. “Is she going to spend the night here?”

“Every night for the past five months,” the young man said, his voice quiet. “I’m usually her driver, my routes coincide. Plus the AI believes that having a familiar face to take you there is easier on the parent who’s facing this, even if it’s only a few words spoken here and there.”

“It must be, yes.”

“I know you Mr. Scrooge. All the little bits and pieces she tells me, everything she mumbles on the phone over the months. Half of it’s about her son, half of it is about you. Cutting corners, keeping everything miserable so you can squeeze out some tiny profit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.