Bridgits Flame Prompt: “There must be 50 ways to leave your lover…”

The writing challenge this week is to create a story inspired from one of your favorite quotes. Pluck it from a song, a movie, a book, that witty next door neighbor, whichever you like. The only requirement is that you include a citation for the source in an author's note. Have fun!

Author:  Urb-banal

Title: He Wasn’t Expecting This

Word Count: 1350

Genre: Sci-Fi

He Wasn't Expecting This

Steven drove his truck into the city. It had started to snow. He turned the heat on and volume up. He was listening to some vintage mid-twentieth century music; his favorite era.  The sweetness of the male voices belied the message:

 The problem is all inside your head, she said to me 

the answer is easy if you take it logically.

He thought back to leaving her that morning, a tussled mess in the bed; the swell of her belly like a volcanic island rising out of a sea of blankets. The girl was infuriating and captivating at the same time.  He had touched an auburn curl on her forehead and she stirred. He was acting like a newly wedded fool.

 He was going to be a father, at his age! He was insane.  Martha, his neighbor, had told him Lady was going to be trouble. He should have had a vasectomy. He could afford it but he thought by this age he would have prostate cancer not a girlfriend.

He had successfully avoided all romantic attachments since Agnes had left him and returned to London with the boy thirty years ago. If there were any grand children his son would know better than to tell him.  The only solution for the world’s over population was to stop BREEDING. He knew it forty years ago.  He made no secret of his opinion. 

And here he was about to repeat the mistake.

When Lady announced that she was pregnant, he was so angry he thought he might hit her.  Instead he paced back and forth as he had done compulsively as a child when stressed.   She had taunted him cheerfully, “If you keep pacing like that you’re going to wear the floor  deep enough you won’t hit your head on the rafters anymore.”

 It was a restored farm house from the 17^th century when people were all very small, like her. He often hit his head. Because her laughter was infectious instead of it making him angry it made him laugh:  But not this time.

He had gone out and chopped wood.  It was a repetitive activity like pacing but it had an element of violence that needed releasing.  She had stood in the doorway and shouted at him.  “Good your chopping wood! I feel like a cup of tea!”

She was crazy. He didn’t understand how she had lived so long, fifteen years, with a mouth like that. But she tore his heart in a way no one had ever done and so when he was bent over the iron stove and she had wrapped her tiny arms around him from behind and whispered, “Let me have this baby. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Just let me have it.” He had dissolved into tears. What if the child was deformed, all those weeks she was still working at the factory... but she didn’t care. She said it had to be beautiful because what she felt was happy, for the first time in her life.

She broke him. He was a potty, love sick old man about to become a father again.

He had managed in his life by keeping blinders on. It was the only way. There was so much suffering and devastation in the world. If he looked around his heart might break, and yet without thinking he had taken her in and now he loved her. There was nothing to be done for it. There was no cure. 

As he drove closer into town the stench of decay became stronger even with the windows closed.

In his youth he had been a hailed a genius for his work in developing vaccine therapies for cancer.  He was knighted by the Queen in 2015 at the tender age of 28. “The boy wonder” it had said on the news. He got a prestigious position in Guildwood Pharmaceuticals. There was a slippery slope that followed, personally and professionally.  How was the world to survive with so many hungry and the soil depleted? All solutions had unexpected consequences.

 Guildwood Pharmaceuticals had gone from making medicines and research to looking for cures for illness caused by the world they helped create. Was the byproduct an intentional control of population? Steven could not allow himself to believe it.  He preferred to think it was a combination of ineptitude and honest mistakes. The wars that kept erupting everywhere, the riots and the famine took their toll on populations too. Mankind was at a precipice and hundreds of thousands were being thrown off the edge.

Despite the failed attempts at controlling the sterilization virus (which resulted in a new sex, albeit an infertile one) despite hunger and homelessness, people still made babies.

What science came up with to feed all these growing populations was cloned muscle tissue, no brain, just meat.  It tasted like chicken and was pumped full of vitamins but life expectancies were getting shorter.  Chronic illnesses and hunger and the failing infrastructures for sanitation, water and power, had made life a cesspool.

He knew it was wealth and privilege that kept him alive to such an old and healthy age. He ate organic food.

He pretended he was trying to find ways of re-introducing sustainable agriculture but in truth he knew that his little farm in the Green Valley was an expensive hobby that he shared in secret with a select few.  He was no different than the despot in olden times who would go into his vault and swim in gold. Lady was part of it.  All his efforts to teach her how to make things, to teach her animal husbandry, to teach her how to live away from the crumbling city were just selfish acts of a man who learned too late what was important.

I'll take your part

When darkness comes

And pain is all around …

Agnes would have called Lady, his “Welsh whore”. His heart clenched at the thought. Agnes had despised him in the end. He welcomed her rancor.  He felt he deserved it. He was contributing to a terrible evil in the world, not because he was evil but because he could not break free of the path his life was taking.  He was weak. He was then. He was now.

As governments and economies failed it got easier and cheaper to find laborers at home.  No more branch factories, no more developing economies, just homegrown serfs who would put up with anything for a job.

Lord Steven Lawry and his Lady, a grateful milk maid indeed, Agnes would have laughed. 

If he had turned on his radio he would have known it wasn’t safe for him to drive into the Guildwood. He would have known that rioters had stormed the gates and killed the guards.  There were thousands of them, a tidal wave that overwhelmed the fortress even though they used gas and bullets and deafening sound to stop them, they just climbed over the bodies of the fallen and they kept coming. 

A small group broke off and surrounded Steven’s truck.

He got out of the truck, holding his hands up in the air, he said, “I understand the inequity. I sympathize with your plight…”

They descended upon him like beasts, like a pack of starving wolves.

 The next track of mid-century American music began to play in his truck…

 Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Girl ya gotta love your man
Girl ya gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm

Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote a book called Slaughterhouse Five. But I seem to remember reading that he thought of calling it “The Children’s War” because that was what they were, children, all of them, when they went off to war...

Kurt Vonnegut taught me how to be a human being without having my heart break.

I think it is possible that he is dead. He might have died long ago. I don’t keep track of these things. It’s funny because when I talk about Kurt Vonnegut I always want to say, “he told me...” rather than “I read in his book” or “he wrote in his book”. I know I never met him but I also know something else. This is what I know:

I remember a lover once said to me , “...It’s just as possible that all that hair you find on your clothes is not coming off the cat, but actually is on the way to the cat, that a cat is actually a small contained quantum irregularity.”, I laughed. It still makes me laugh. It will always make me laugh.

In the end the disappointments don’t matter. In the end we all get to be Billy Pilgrim. “Hello, Fair Well, Hello, Fair Well...”