Jolt

NOTE: It would mean a lot if you could provide me with a bit of feedback for this story. I am not sure if it is any good or not because I just can't tell the difference anymore.

“WUM-BAH-BUM. WUM-BAH-BUM. WUM-BAH-BUM.”

The heavenly, oft-unheard form of Verizon’s Ringtone 6 blared into the Wednesday stillness of my cubicle domicile. I usually don’t have the volume on my phone turned past silent mode, but the foreboding gulag of the “2010 Epic Milton Dormitory Complex Prank War Grande” had claimed my homemade alarm clock. Dementedly simian as the members of the Elon Phoenix Obesity Brotherhood are, they were awful nice to let me see off my prize-winning feat of student engineering as it hurtled six stories down onto the public bike racks and exploded like a personal watermelon. Such is life: unbeknownst passion spitefully splattered on the caramel-colored lawn.

Not a big deal, though. Rather, a little deal. I’m sure my pre-paid cell phone’s alarm clock has a 75-decibel siren attachment. Besides, this just means I get to start a new one and learn more from my brother. Being the extreme newbie to the craft of electrical engineering that I unashamedly am, it always helps to learn as much as possible. Especially when your mentor happens to be a veritable freaking wunderkind of science who got promoted to Senior Project Manager within his first year on the job at Arredondo Technologies, the most prestigious company in the county. Definitely sets my standards past the mesosphere.

Immediately after ceasing the angelic warbling of the plasticine Wal-Mart frugality, another unusual noise presented itself. Never before in my nineteen years of existence had I heard my mother’s tone of voice so distraught and chilled. Even worse, my Dad was in Seattle promoting his new novel, so he wasn’t there to comfort her. As the sun began to rise, she quivered through the speaker like a stranded explorer feebly wailing in misery amidst gasps for air on the Antarctic coast. Words evaded me. This was not the mother I knew: the mother whose chirpy wit and soothing candor made being her son an absolute blessing. What force of Satanism could have elicited this dispositional 180? Maybe she heard about the alarm clock?

When I learned the cause for my mother’s immense worry, I had been struck by lightning. Or, at the very least, I had been given such a one in a million opportunity to feel like a bolt of lightning hurtled down from the cosmos just for me. How terrifying a feeling! I wished I wasn’t conscious. I ached all over in places I didn’t even know had developed. I didn’t know what to think, but there were three zillion conflicting thoughts and emotions coursing through my everything like a meth-addicted sprinter in the Olympic finals. Why I decided to drive in that condition, I will never know. Why I seemed to instinctively swipe my barbaric prankster roommate’s keys and drove his Ferrari home, I will never know. Why I went 110 in a 55, I—well, that I do know. The combination of potentially horrible, family-destroying news and an inopportunely jubilant feeling of driving my roommate’s brand new Ferrari kind of made such speeds inevitable.

But that fervently illegal jubilance was short-lived. Upon homecoming, the budding little oddity I knew to be my life was shattered like a shot put through a chapel window. My mother sat sprawled on the lawn, bawling like I had never seen before. A policeman loomed nearby, leaning uneasily on his shiny new squad car with a clipboard tucked into his freshly laundered armpit. I tried to stay calm, to be the rock that Dad would have been for Mom in this situation. The policeman, known by nametag as Officer Greg Lafferty, strolled over towards my direction.

“You’re her son, right?” asked the lawman, timorously breathing with each toke as he fumbled the clipboard with his sweaty palms, “Mister—um—Zacchaeus Ritterboro?”

“What happened to my brother? What happened to Paul?”

Officer Lafferty wiped his brow and turned to page two.

“Alcohol poisoning. Your mother found him at the house here and he wasn’t breathing. She called 911 and the paramedics took your brother to the hospital and they did all they could, but it was too late. There was just too much in his system—yeah.”

The lightning emerged within my body once again as I fell to our once frolicked-upon lawn and embraced the grieving shell of my mother as Officer Lafferty wiped his glistening eyes on his crisp shirtsleeve.

We spent most of the rest of the day praying as well as reminiscing on all the wonderful times we had with Paul. And when Dad came home early the next morning, we did the same thing for all of the following day. Though the shock of Paul’s death was still there, we came to accept it as a family and, after a few days, Mom and Dad felt emotionally ready to start making the necessary arrangements. While my parents were hashing out the details of Paul’s memorial service, I went upstairs to my brother’s room, which hadn’t been touched since Wednesday.

Sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, as always, was his bed. Paul made his own bed back in high school wood shop class and insisted on taking it home to use for everyday sleeping. Despite the undeniable craftsmanship, it was still a high school wood shop class project and Paul often had to rebuild the bed frame so he could continue utilizing his own creation. Though they wished he would give in to accepting a real bed, Mom and Dad were proud of Paul for his persistence nonetheless, which made me want to look up to Paul. Seeing it now, marked by the unkempt putrescence as a self-indulgent fortress of now apparent alcoholism, it was pure misery. More than misery, in fact. It was wrong. More so, it was stupid. Paul was stupid. So fucking stupid. And this is Paul we’re talking about! My brother! My mentor! The smartest person I knew until now!

And then, as if an expert puppeteer were working me like a Broadway marionette, I lunged toward that bed, tossed that repulsive mattress over my shoulders, and kicked the nearest support beam. I stomped at it again and again until it snapped in two and sent Paul’s deathbed to the floor in a heap of plywood and carpenter’s glue. Then, as I heaved its remains out the breezily inviting window, I felt the lightning escape from my dusty fingertips back skyward into the cosmos from whence it came. Feeling new and euphoric, I sat in the empty, sawdust-scented playpen of discovery and got started on a new project: the second edition of Ritterboro Alarm Clock.