Ripped from the Headlines

A brisk October morning in New York City. The elevator door opens on the 17th floor of a swanky apartment complex. Out steps Chip Dipson, detective extraordinaire.

His rich brown, sturdy, leather dress shoes clap on the thinner-then-paper carpeted hallway floor. His perfectly creased black pants and the ends of his tan trench coat, sway around his ankles and hips respectively, as he confidently strolls past each apartment. He briefly adjusts his tie, and his black button-up shirt as he opens the door to apartment #29.

Inside the studio apartment, there are police officers standing in every corner. Pizza boxes are cluttered around the reclining chair that sits in front of the 36" HDTV. A couch with pullout bed is against the hallway wall, trash strewn about in the sheets.

In the kitchen, a massive pile of dirty dishes is stacked in the sink and cigarette butts are scattered across the counter top, as well as the entire apartment. On the outside wall, sits a computer desk, with a large, flat screen monitor, combination printer/fax, and dead man slumped over the keyboard.

"Alright Jim, what'd you get me out of my nice, warm bed for?" Chip says as he slides his left hand into his pant pocket and takes off his sunglasses with his right, a hint of frustration in his voice, like he's too good to be working this case.

"Well Chip, Oscar Madison over here seems to have gotten himself shot in the back of the head." He says nonchalantly, motioning toward the dead body laying on the computer desk, blood running from the bullet hole in the back of his head, down the side of his face.

"There a Felix, or Mrs. Madison?" Chip asks, still holding his sunglasses in front of him, open, as if ready to put them on at a moments notice.

"Doesn't look like it, he seems to live alone. Not that any roommate or spouse would ever put up with a mess like this." Responds Jim, as he precariously picks up a moldy, half-eaten piece of pizza from a pizza box balanced on the arm of the recliner and tosses it back down with a disgusted look on his face.

Chip, having tossed up the ends of his trench coat and perched the tips of his thumbs into his belt loops, strolls over to the dead man. He leans over his body, examining the bullet hole in his head, then turns back to Jim.

"This whole thing reminds me of the case we had last week," He declares, holding up a picture of another dead man on his LG Dare cell phone, "You notice any similarities?"

"That guy was equally trashy. Life didn't seem to be working out for either of them." Jim replied distractedly as he held up a porno mags sideways with one hand, eyeing the centerfold.

Chip was peering around the dead man, at the trash strewn about the computer desk, looking for some kind of connection between the two murder cases. His eyes panned across the desk, and stopped abruptly at the tray of the printer.

"Hey Jim,"

"Yeah Chip?"

"Didn't the last victim have an unemployment check in the mail that he was holding when he was killed?"

"Uuh, I think so." Jim said, as he tossed the magazine back down on the bed and began to walk over to Chip.

"Well, if so, then we may have found our connection." Chip said confidently, holding a freshly printed resume up for Jim to see.

"Are you saying we have a killer out there targeting people who've been laid off? With the job market the way it is right now, probably half the city is at risk!"

"It looks like it could not only hurt to have your resume up to date, but it may even kill." declared Chip smoothly, as he slid his sunglasses back on and strolled out the door to the apartment, rock music blaring.

Suddenly everything went black.

In a double wide trailer, somewhere in Ohio, the every man gets up out of his reclining chair. He mumbles obscenities to himself as he stumbles to the kitchen, limping slightly.

"Stupid fuc... CEOs and big-shot Hollywood writers... think they have a clue about what we're going through." He grumbles.

The factory where he works has been shutdown for four weeks now, and he's too old to keep doing roofing and construction jobs to make ends meet -- his leg is already crying foul. He grabs a half eaten ham sandwich out of the refrigerator and takes a bite as he limps down the hallway to his bedroom, still cursing big-wigs and television networks under his breath.

Story

I wrote this story quite awhile ago. I've always been interested in paranormal stuff so it figures I'd choose to write about that. I'm also fascinated by biblical type stories even though I don't believe in god, so it doesn't really mean anything. I would like to see something someday though, help me decide what I believe. Anyway, this story was getting lost in the Internet forum I posted it on so I thought I'd resurrect it here. I wrote it after a night of brainstorming while doing papers, which means I was on no sleep, and I've yet to really attempt to edit it or anything. Hopefully this will motivate me to expand details on whats already been written and write more, I just don't know where to go with it. Any constructive criticism or ideas for continuing the story is more then welcome.

You’ve always wanted to see something like it, at least that’s what you’ve always said. There are thousands of stories, but you’ve always wanted your own.

When you think about it there are more positives then negatives, delivering newspapers. That’s if you don’t weigh their value. That’s if you don’t assign them a certain point system based on their importance. Good money, only a couple hours a day, easy, no boss to answer to day in and day out. The one real negative though, is boredom. Mind numbing monotony.

On your first day, you think you’ll never be able to remember all those houses. Then your first week you start remembering parts of the route. Soon you stop using your list altogether. It’s not long until if you stopped and thought about a specific house, you’d have no recollection of ever doing it. You delivered to it alright, but if you stop and think about it, you don’t remember it. You don’t think about it anymore. You just do it. Day in and day out you drive the same route. You do it subconsciously now.

Nothing can satisfy your insatiable appetite for music. Every day you download several CDs and everyday you exhaust them. Soon you turn to audio books, anything to combat the silence, take your mind off the utter repetitiveness of it all. There are only so many books in the world though. So many stories to be told.

Out there with no one else around, everyone asleep in their beds, your mind begins to race. You begin praying for something to happen. You imagine pulling up upon a raging inferno, the family screaming from the windows. You dream of happening upon a white van with no windows backed into the driveway of a house that you know the residents are gone from, masked men loading electronics into the back. You beg to see silhouetted figures, one on knees with hands up in fright, one with hands clenched together, the shadow of a knife facing downwards.

Just so you can have a really good story to tell. Something to come from the boredom you face everyday, besides paying the bills. How you raced into the inferno, pulling kids out as the fire trucks pulled up. How you watched from down the street as the police pulled into the driveway just before the white van took off. How you sat on the witness stand and pointed toward the defendant saying loudly, “It was him!”

The story you get however, isn’t the one you'd hoped for.

One moment it’s just another day, another paper to deliver, but as you look back to the road, your life changes. A white flash, all it takes to start a spiral. You glance up and a bright, glowing flash of a white… thing, flies across the road in a matter of seconds. The left side of the road where it came from was a deep valley yet it appeared to have come from no lower then the road, so it must have flew. It only took a second or less for it to be up the hill on the right side of the road and gone.

It’s at this point in your reiterating the story to family or friends that you’ll inevitably see eyes roll and hear countless theories. It was just a deer and you didn’t see it well. You were tired and your eyes were seeing flashes of light that weren’t there. You’re crazy.

This is however Michigan. Doing a paper route during all hours of the night you see endless amounts of deer. You can’t even keep count. None of these deer, however, glowed white, no matter how bright you had had your lights, and even if they had they wouldn’t have done so the entire time they went by, just as they passed in front of you. Not too mention you have never seen a deer move as fast as that thing had moved. You weren’t tired at all as well. You hadn’t started to doze, you didn’t feel tired, you showed no signs of exhaustion. As for the crazy, well, that’s for others to judge.

After it had passed you just stared in disbelief, forgetting what you were even doing. You always wanted a story of your own. A real life, in your life anyway, paranormal experience to call tell at will. Proof for all those years you had believed without any proof to offer. A reason to have believed all the Sylvia Brownes in life.

You didn’t realize that this was nothing. You didn’t realize what this would do to you. One moment your safe and ignorant and believe just because you want to believe. The next you’re grasping, clinging to any scrap of proof to prove your point, desperate to have something to show all those people who think your insane that you aren’t. You failed to realize that all this story would get you was ridicule. It started you down a life obsessed with what you thought was the necessity of proving to anyone and everyone that you are right, and what you saw was real.

One thing leads to another and before you know it…

Whoever said curiosity killed the cat wasn’t bullshitting you.

Whoever said ignorance is bliss wasn’t fucking around

P.S. I was definitely channeling Palahniuk when I wrote this.