Reginald Dyhre by Jason Alberty (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📖

fifteen years? Certainly not since his apprenticeship, not since he converted to his religion of numbers and finance. Was this the retribution of some reviled Old Testament God? Was this his spiritual cleansing before the final personal Armageddon? Surely there was a reason, a reason beyond blind chance... something beyond the self-determined rationalism of his former existence.
Reginald began to review his past. Who were the people he had slighted? Who were the poor he had ceased to help? What were his impieties and indiscretions and sins? He replayed his spiritual history. And yet nothing stood out as a grievous wrong against humanity or this God, this God he had been taught to fear and love.
Fear and love. They had never been able to meld within his ideology. He could not fear and love anyone at the same time. Either he feared and loathed or he loved and respected. And this God of his childhood he was taught to fear. Therefore this God ceased to exist within Reginald Dyhre's life.
Meaningless, utterly meaningless.
He no longer questioned his state. He had come to understand his situation. It had been, he thought grimly, a good idea about the will.
This thought, the will, clicked in his mind. He searched for the recollection of it. He grabbed for his pocket-watch in his vest's right pocket. It was there, just like he had written. This discovery quickened his blood like a Christmas morning. Is it there? he asked himself. He licked his lips with hesitant expectation and slowly moved his left hand down to his side.
Yes, it was there, just like he had written on that god-awful paper back in St. Louis. “Well, you can't be too sure about what's a gonna happen out there, you know,” MacKenzie, his attorney, had said. “You got to write down what you want done with your body. What kinds of keepsakes and memorabelios you want to take with you to the great beyond. It's all a lot of horse toddy, if you ask me. But it brings me some business.”
He slid his hand into his left hip pocket, feeling the cold wetness of the cotton insides against his thigh. He felt the little derringer, cold and moist, and quickly grasped it, pressed firmly between his fingers and his palm, like some lost talisman.
“Thank God,” he whimpered. Thank God for that god-awful will, he thought.
He pulled the gun from his trousers and moved it up to his chest. He rubbed the side with his right hand, lovingly, softly. It was his most outrageous, wild-haired purchase. The first thing, the only thing really, he had purchased with the spontaneity of a young boy's early summer skinny dip. He closed his eyes, now only from habit, to concentrate on its image: the silver, stubby barrel with the filigree of such intricacy it drew him in every time he looked at it; the mother of pearl inlay in the handle, its opalescence like milk on a mirror. It loaded like a shotgun, but it was a gentleman's gun, a sophisticated gun. He had never even fired it. Indeed, he had slipped it into his pocket so often along with his coppers and nickels, handkerchiefs, and pocket-watch and all the other talismans he adorned himself with mindlessly in the morning, that he had forgotten it was a prized and cherished possession.
And now he knew what he would do. Was this the way he was going to leave? Was this what his mother meant all those years ago? "God has a plan, Reginald. You just remember that." The imagined sound of his mother's voice no longer carried a mother's love. Now it was the sound of his end, the sound of mocking. Was this God's plan? Reginald was angered now at this thought. Even though this God was no longer in his heart, this God still dug into his brain.
“What the hell did you want from me?” he screamed. “What did I do? To whom? To what? What?” He began to cry in a sudden burst and writhed within the coffin like a larval moth.
“What?” he screamed again.
“What?” he wept.
“What?” quietly, the torrent over.
Resolve, he thought. It was, of course, against the law of God. But God had left him now. He could not imagine anyone more alone in the world.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Christ was said to be alone on the cross. But he had Mary Magdalene and his mother and his kingdom. He wasn't alone. I am alone, he thought, and stifled a cry.
The sooner you do this the better. Come, now, resolve. His fingers could not grip the gun. His hands, shaking, could not do the work now. He violently slammed his hands against the sides of the coffin. “Work, damn you!” he yelled. “It's all I ask.”
He shook them out and grasped the gun with his right hand and weakly pulled back on the hammer, hearing and feeling the light click he loved so much when cleaning the gun.
“Now,” he said through clenched teeth. He brought the gun barrel up under his chin and pressed in into the softness of his skin. He rested the top of the barrel on his Adam's apple, and it wavered there.
“Now,” he said again, a little more determinedly. He swallowed hard and the thought of a blessing, a prayer, something just in case, went through his mind. His eyes began to water profusely and the tears ran like rain down a window into his ears and along the bottom of his neck at the hairline.
“Now,” he said again, in a squeak, nearly inaudible.
He pulled on the trigger as Samson at the columns. He pulled and pulled, so slowly, pulling ever so slowly.
“Now, damn it.”
He felt the trigger snap back.
Click.
A sudden rush of fear swept through him. He pulled the trigger again.
Click
Again.
Click.
It was a sound more painful to him than the pain of the whole universe. It was a feeling more empty than death. He grabbed the barrel with his left hand and cracked the gun at the middle, without a beat sticking his right forefinger into the butt-end of the empty barrel. His lungs exploded outward with his held breath. "No," he breathed.
His elbows dropped to the hard wooden bottom of his coffin, his hands sliding down his chest, his belly, to fall at his sides. His prized and worthless derringer thudded on the wood next to his thigh.
He stared silently into the darkness. Imprint

Publication Date: 08-03-2009

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