Story Idea: Conspiracy (Rough Draft)

Ten of us conspired to murder Garrett Greenwell although only eight of us actually managed to endure the exhausting course it took to arrive at this moment.

You’d have thought that standing over Garrett’s body, his immaculate blue suit, blood-soaked, would have invoked certain emotions in me, terror heightened by the rapid beating of an adrenaline fueled heart, anger rising from a manufactured offense, pleasure withdrawn from a well of psychopathy housed in the core of my soul. But none of that was the case. I felt nothing but pure serenity.

“What are we going to do with the body?” Unlike me, Igor failed to appreciate the beauty in Garrett’s death, failed to perceive the canvas upon which we artists had sketched our work, failed to distinguish between the colors of the pallet we used to paint upon that canvas.

We hovered over the body looking down upon it, eight murderers, shoulders hunched, heads hung, vultures over a carcass ready to feed. I exited my body for a moment so that I could look down upon us conspirators looking down upon the body. I imagined the scene like the single frame of a gritty gangster film, easily an image which the promotion department of a film studio might incorporate into a movie poster.

I felt a desire to remove my cell phone from my pocket a snap a quick selfie, all of us gathered around this body. To preserve the deed. A memento of our union, which could not be denied. I fingered the phone in my pocket.

This man who had not known any of us until two weeks ago, after our little group met together, suddenly linked together in our conspiracy. He had not committed any offense toward any of us, toward any of our families, or our friends. Garrett did not belong to any group, race, gender, or sexual orientation which might explain our macabre plan for him. In fact, Garrett Greenwell’s lack unremarkable character which drew our attention to him to begin with.

I knew Gear from work. In reality, we worked in the same high rise building.

I worked for First National Bank which occupied the first floor of the fifteen floor skyscraper. I manned a post behind glass, a kind of fast food window, where I received orders from customers, some depositing money into the ever growing piles of money First National Bank hid in their vault, or, more likely, doled out their money which we graciously held for them for a small fee.

I held no plans for my future, mostly because the future did not exist for me. Rather, the future developed only when the accumulation of my actions formed into some kind of pattern, an afterimage of the choices I made and the unpredictable responses from those around me.

I did not worry about what happened yesterday; yesterday dissipated into nothingness, like a puff of pot, meant to be held onto as long as possible, to squeeze every bit of effectiveness out, and then to be released into the air to dissipate and dissolve into nothingness.

No, for me, existence was about immediacy, about only the present, about what I was doing now. That is why Gear and I got along so famously, Gear who was all about extracting as much out of life as possible, usually under the aid of some kind of drug. His preference was Xanax.

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