Bad Night

O.k.-- this is my first story post. I'll admit, this is not an original story. I wrote this a couple years ago for a creative writing class I was taking. It is not a true story. Hope you like it.

----------------------------

It was just one of those nights. You know what kind of night I'm talkin' about. One that pushes life back into perspective. The one you look back on and then wish you didn't. I call them balancers.

It could be as subtle as losing something. Your keys, your wallet. Not the end of the world, but it might help you realize something big. It m≠ay remind you that you had all your money in cash and now from then on you should only carry a certain amount at all times. Or you can't get into your car now that you lost your keys, but now that you're at the mechanic getting a key made, you might as well fix up that dented bumper.

Potentially, your balancer could be as damaging as a relative dying. Your mom was in the hospital for her routine chemo. No biggie. But when something goes wrong, she dies on the spot. And so notes serious doctor so and so. Serious doctor so and so calls up you, her next of kin. She had died rewriting her will, so it seems that your inheritance goes to her abusive ex-husband instead of you.

It's the kind of thing that happens only when you least expect it. The night that you're walking down the dingy, badly lit street in the neighborhood that your parents warned you about. Every other night you'll look around; have your guard up. But not this night. Tonight, your thinking about the comment she made about your haircut. You're hoping your dad remembered to pick up your new boom box from the UPS warehouse.

You're in the zone. Not paying attention to the dangerous looking mob that appears to be materializing behind you. If you'd noticed you could have pretended to call someone and come up with a comment like "Gee, I'm sure glad I remembered to bring dads GUN with me tonight," to keep them at bay.  The group of scary looking guys behind you would instantly disappear. You would've thought yourself witty for coming up with such a clever idea. You would have to laugh about it with your friends on AIM that night.

But you didn't notice. Not until the guy with the dodgers cap comes up to you and ask if you got any smokes. You start to say "no," but before you can even get out that one syllable you get grabbed from behind. The dude that asked you for the cigarettes grabs your hood and pulls it over your face. He presses it against your mouth, causing you to panic, writhe against the steely grip of the two guys holding you from behind. They're pulling you into that standard, inner-city alley, the one with the hobos warming their weathered hand over the fire barrel. You're a strong guy, normal build and around five foot nine, even though you like to tell girls that your five eleven. You fight back, but how much could any tenth grader do? They push you up against a wall, with one guy holding each arm and one guy spitting words at you. He's obviously high. You manage to get an arm free and give one of those jerks an elbow in the gut. This doesn't go over well with his buddies. The one with the hat lashes out at your face. You hear a cracking sound. Your nose is broken. The one you hit gets out his knife. Crap. He starts slashing your arm, then your stomach as you fall onto your back. You try to put your hand out to stop him, but all this gets you is four fingers on your left hand. "What the hell?" you think. You didn't do anything terrible. Nothing to deserve getting stabbed. Suddenly it stops. The thugs ran away, only after taking your phone and iPod though.

And so there you are. Middle of the city, bleeding out in generic alley number twenty-three.  You recall your biology teacher saying that it can take anywhere from days to a couple of minutes for the human body to bleed out when it takes wounds like yours has. You try to roll over onto your stomach. Ouch. Crap. You forgot. The thug cut your hand up pretty bad. You try to roll over the other way. You can't move your arm. Its probably broken. Or maybe they cut a major artery. Maybe you're just to weak to move period.

You almost smile. The one night. The one night you aren't paying attention. You always pay attention. You suppose that this is what happens when you don't. You wonder if you're going to die. Will you see your life flash before your eyes? Okay, now you do smile. "Only in movies," you think. "But hey," you think. "This is kind of like a movie." You chuckle quietly to yourself, only to find that it hurts to do so. "Tragic," you think. "Here I am, paying for the consequences of being stupid and I can't even appreciate the humor of it. After that thought you feel yourself losing energy. As you slip out of consciousness, you wonder: will I ever wake up?

You don't hear the sirens of the ambulance and cop cars. You don't feel the latex covered hands ripping your Gorillaz t-shirt off in the fluorescently lit ambulance. You aren't awake to feel the ever-so-joyful sensation of being pulled up by your broken arm, onto your sliced-up back.

You wake up the next day at around two PM. Your dad is sleeping in the chair next to your bed. You move your hand, pushing the pain button attached to your finger. Three nurses immediately rush into your room. Two of them reposition you in your bed. "Ouch," you think. Then you realize that there is no ouch. Just numb. The last nurse shakes your dad awake. He stands up diligently, as though he had just drank three espressos. They rush up to your bed. You find out that it isn't the next day. It's actually the next year. You had been in a coma for fourteen months.

"For what?" you wonder. Your hand me down phone? Your outdated, cruddy iPod? A year gone. And just because some people decided that it would be fun to fuck up someone's day. What kind of screwed up society do we live in that people almost die because others don't feel like living legitimately. "A bad one," you think. But the only thing you can really think about, is that all of that wasted time came from one tiny moment. From one second of savagery. From one bad night.