A short-short story by Joel Durham Jr

———-

I’m alone, and that is how it should be.

–

The last time I really tried, really, really tried, it didn’t work out so well. Oh, it was so long ago. Decades, presidential administrations, blue moons, and at least a dozen wars have passed by since I last tried.

I’ve been alone ever since. I don’t know where they are, the one who left me behind, the ones I left behind. I wouldn’t recognize their faces. I’m an old man, wrinkled and shaking.

My parents, I’m sure, are long dead, and she might be as well. Hell, my sons could be passed; I don’t know. I’ll never know. I’m near my own grave, likely in my final days as I write this. Someone told me I could use computers and the internet to find them. I don’t like computers as they are today. I worked with mainframes. I don’t understand how a little box can have millions of times more power than what once filled a massive, refrigerated room.

I also don’t want to find them.

–

How, you say, how can I leave my sons, parents, people-who-called-themselves-friends, and everything else behind? How? First I moved to a tiny town in Utah, but my past almost caught up to me. Then I moved into a smaller town on the eastern, desert side of California, down toward Mexico, and left no forwarding address. It was easier, but someone hired a private investigator who was too good at his job.

I had to move quickly that time. I’d never killed anyone besides Nazi soldiers before that, and I’ve killed no one since.

–

On the lam, I went to Mexico. Then I paid an insane amount of money for forged documents and moved to Switzerland, and later a very small farming village in Ireland. Europe was different two decades after the war. Prettier. The architecture was more intriguing when you can look at it for its beauty, and not as cover from an ambush.

All the time, I had the money. Changed to various currency as I went, it was now all in euros, and all in cash. Rarely did I use banking systems. Mostly I kept it stashed in false compartments of my luggage.

You can go a long way with a couple million dollars.

–

I got it from her father. Sometime in the 1950’s – a dozen wristwatches ago, fourteen vehicles ago, 62 years ago – she divorced me. I don’t remember the exact year anymore. So much slips away…

I went berserk. I was angry and foolish and still too young to handle that kind of rejection, so I went for revenge. Her father was in the record industry when Elvis was big, and managed to make millions of dollars on the backs of rockabilly stars.

I told him, in a car, with a gun behind my back that he couldn’t see (for possible coercing) that I had compromising photographs of his daughter. They were in a safe deposit box. a million dollars, I’d tell him which bank to visit, and for another million, I’d sell him the key. He fumed as my hand started to wander around my back, but he agreed.

On one condition.

–

It hurt more than anything to leave my sons when they were in their early teens, but her father had the power to have me killed. I got my money, I gave him the key to an empty deposit box in a bank a hundred miles away. That gave me plenty of time to fulfill his condition.

If you have any sympathy for me, just forget it. I’m a thief and a murderer. I never got caught because I was too slippery.

–

The money’s almost gone, and so am I. Alone, as I should be.