Crying Won’t Help You, Crying Won’t Do You No Good.
11:59 PM, Friday, October 7, 1983
You’re dead, or you very soon will be, and you’re thinking that if this were a George A. Romero film, shot in black and white on a shoestring budget, this would be Bosco Chocolate Syrup pooling outward from the center of you. But this isn’t a movie, it’s your life, or what’s left of it. And the blood seeping out of you onto the floor and slowly creeping its way beneath the chip rack to join the dusty crumbs, greasy change, and anxious roaches waiting there, is definitely red and probably not very sweet.
You read somewhere that the moment you die, all of your memories come back to you at once, so that what may seem like seconds to the living, is in death, an eternity. No was or will be, only the flood of your experiences crashing over you like the ocean through a hole in the wall, like the levee when it breaks in that Led Zeppelin song.
Or is it more like that story Ms. Jensen had you read in your English class, the one where the hanged man dreams he escapes into the river and returns to his wife all in the time it takes the noose to snap his neck?
And then what? Of course, you want there to be something else after this, something more. Who doesn’t? But Heaven? Hell? Neither seem very likely. Reincarnation maybe? That would be nice, wouldn’t it, to go back to the start, try again?
But as you lie on the floor of this gas station convenience store watching the blood dribble like a leaky faucet from the hole in your chest, you think, most likely, it’s none of the above.
The Misadventures of Matthew Van Der Boot is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental … no matter how many times you ask.