From a great height he plummeted, did Norman Johnson, a man who thought he had nothing to live for anymore. Annie, his wife of thirty-six years had succumbed to pancreatic cancer and the prolonged loss was a violent rupture in the soft center of his feeble being. It was like watching The Sound of Music (1965) with gruesome war atrocity footage spliced in. It was that sudden. It was that rough. It was that diabolically clever and in your face.
So Norman plummeted. He was sure Beth, his 25-year-old daughter, wouldn’t miss him. Despite their battling past she was still in his will. Her share would keep her in heroin and/or fentanyl for the rest of her life (meaning not long). Norman knew she wouldn’t use the money wisely, use it to fix her dismal situation. She’d have enough to buy a modest house but she didn’t seem to mind living in flea-infested flophouses. Letting sweaty repulsive junkies take advantage of her kind, generous nature. Whatever money that didn’t get injected into her squabbling veins would go to her lowlife squabbling friends. Beth was gifted with a selfless spirit. She always shared her toys when she was little. Now she gave everything away.
So Norman plunged. The lion’s share of the inheritance would go to his kid brother, Albert who would probably lose most of it at the race track. Oh well, it wasn’t like Norman would care by that point. He’d be busy moldering in a grave.
And that’d be it. All his money would go to the two last living members of the unremarkable Johnson clan. And he was sure they’d both use it to fuck themselves up even further.
So Norman dropped. Enduring Annie’s illness, suffering countless horrors to help her crawl through hell—and hell it was—had changed Norman in a profound way. It demonstrated how weak and afraid and ineffectual he was. He couldn’t save her. Every day she’d slipped farther away, fading until she disappeared under the dirt. And how ironic was that? That Dr. Norman Johnson, a competent oncologist, couldn’t save his own wife? Let the petty nattering commence.
Norman’s drinking problem was well known. There had been incidents. Embarrassing contretemps that jeopardized his career. He couldn’t perform surgery anymore because of his trembling hands. He was only a consultant now, surviving by the skin of his teeth and feeling diminished to subatomic particle size.
He wished for one last drink. He wished for Annie. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He didn’t believe in a god. He didn’t believe in cosmic justice.
So Norman descended. He’d climbed the exhausting stairs to the top of the bland medical building where he’d worked for thirty years and stood on the ledge, looking down at the six storeys of relentless gravity below. He closed his eyes and stepped off the ledge.
Norman fell.
Crumbling Asphalt 