Excerpt: Just Listen

Epiphanies don’t have to make sense, do they?

An apple supposedly hit Newton on the head and helped him come up with the theory of gravity. It was just a lucky coincidence that helped found physics.

So I was just sitting down eating my nachos. I didn’t even need a coincidence. I could hear Shawna arguing with one of the employees on the food line. There was a child who looked about two years old wailing at a table across the lobby. Some teenage girls were sitting at the bar in the middle of the lobby, giggling and talking excitedly about those stupid books by Stephenie Meyer. And reality just kind of hit me.

Maybe it was all that noise. I have pretty sensitive hearing, and I’ve never liked loud noises. And there I sat, on my break, trying to relax, and instead, I was just being overwhelmed by sound.

And I realized that my life was going nowhere.

Some people never figure out what their purpose in life is. I had a feeling I was one of them.

I looked around the restaurant, the glaring lights shining off of the tacky faux Mexican décor, and realized that working in fast food was not something I could do for the rest of my life. Especially Taco Bell. But I didn’t know what I wanted do for the rest of my life.

My hatred, for so many of the people I had met, the treatment I received merely because I worked in fast food, the money I had wasted for the past four years, getting an education I didn’t particularly want, only to graduate without a well-paying job, just boiled over.

I saw Shawna from the position where I was sitting. She was talking to the cute, twenty-year-old kid working the drive-thru, and as I watched, the two of them burst into laughter. And I thought to myself that that woman deserved to die. And then, I thought, why don’t I kill her?

I had imagined it several times before.

And I realized, I don’t have anything to live for, anyway. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? I’ll go to jail? Maybe go to the electric chair?

Really, killing Shawna would be more of a public service than anything else. If there was a God, he had sent Shawna down as a punishment for our sins, or else he had fucked up. And I didn’t feel like taking her shit anymore.