| I Go to Pieces |
[01 Oct 2006|10:03pm] |
JULY 17, 2010:
It had been a bad day for Elliot Cappert.
One of those rotten everything-goes-wrong kind of days.
It started in the morning, when the alarm didn’t go off. Coffee on the tie before breakfast, and a short in the kitchen circuits set the toaster ablaze. All this before seven in the morning.
Rear-ended on the way to work, making him later than he was to start with. Two company servers had crashed the night before, taking with them the medical records and claim reports of more than six hundred different customers of United Healthcare. As the go-to computer guy for UH, this was, of course, Elliot’s fault.
Even though the cause of the failure was soon found to be a careless maintenance man who attempted to clean a server clean room.
A meeting through lunch, and then when Elliot finally had time to grab something to eat, he realized he had left his requisite power-bar / apple lunch combo on the kitchen counter, with his wallet right beside it, denying even the chance of cafeteria cuisine.
It had just plain been a bad day.
Arriving back at his townhouse on the outskirts of the city – late, of course, Elliot was glad it was almost over. To see Shawna, waiting for him with a smile and a cup of coffee to wash away the day’s annoyances, was the best part of Elliot’s routine.
“Bad day?” the honey-blonde asked with a soft smile, handing him a lukewarm mug of oversugared coffee – just the way he liked it – as he stepped through the kitchen door. Just off the driveway, it was their usual point of entrance and exit in their small but comfortable home.
Elliot sighed, slipping his laptop off his shoulder and dropped his briefcase beside it on the kitchen table.
“Long day,” he amended, accepting the coffee with a tired half-smile.
Some days, he mused, he didn’t realize just how lucky he was. He decided to tell her just that, the sweetened warm liquid passing over his lips from his favorite mug, but the words never came.
The blue ceramic coffee mug fell to the ceramic tile floor and shattered; Elliot’s limp body was soon to follow.
~*~
Elliot blinked open his eyes, feeling cold and oddly disconnected. He was in the backseat of an unfamiliar car, he realized. The humming din that had been echoing in his ears was Shawna in the passenger seat, talking to a tall man he didn’t know who was driving the car.
“It’s so messy, though,” the man grumbled.
Shawna laughed. “Awww… what’s the matter baby, can’t handle a little gore?”
“I just don’t get why we had to put him into so many pieces,” the driver replied stubbornly.
Shawna sighed. “Don’t you get it, Jared? Even if they find the bits and pieces way out in this crappy little town, they won’t find them all. They’ll never make an ID. You check in to the hotel with me in Cancun, we say you’re Elliot. Then, oops… pulled out by the undertow, that’s that. Accidental death yields three hundred thou, baby. No one will know he wasn’t really with me in Mexico, they’ll believe me. And so long as they never put together every little piece, they can never prove he didn’t drown.”
Jared shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know, Shawna…” he began.
“Well it’s not like we can fucking sew him back together, Jared,” she snapped, crossing her arms and staring angrily at the open road ahead of them. “So just shut up and drive.”
Searching for his voice, Elliot stared.
“What? What happened? What the hell… Shawna?” he stammered, but to no avail. She never answered, never even looked back.
Before he could offer another protest, Elliot glanced down and froze in horror; his own dead eyes were staring up from a plastic bag at his feet on the floor in the backseat. The rest of him, similarly packaged, was spread out on the seat.
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bouncy