The Decision
Recently, Years 7 & 8 wrote for the National Short Story Young Writer competition. The winners will be announced in April. The remit was to write a short story entitled ‘The Decision’.
So here I am, on this bench, where it all began.
We were living as happily as any other family can. In Manhattan.
But, for a reason that has not become apparent to me since, I walked out on my dearly beloved wife and daughter. I can’t comprehend why I made this horrendous mistake. For I am still feeling the guilt now. Two years on.
One day, I was sitting on this very bench, reading this very newspaper brand, with this very weather, feeling this very way - guilty. I looked up at the headline, went to turn the page, and over the top, I saw my beautiful daughter wandering through Central Park with her friends from school. All of them looking as if they hadn’t a care in the world, and that is the truth, they didn’t. (Oh to be young again!) I could be metaphorically swinging from tree to tree.
But I’m not, I’ve served my childhood, and now here I am, guilty of ruining two people’s lives, my own life, and now depressed about being old. Time to do something about it. Something dramatic.
I am here on this bridge in Brooklyn, I wonder what it’s called. Over the years this famous bridge has lived through many a cold, bitter winter night, but this is the coldest and most bitter night I have ever lived through and the skies and my eyes are thick with glutinous fog., nevertheless, I must carry out the deed that I promised to myself a few nights ago, I am fixed, I am ready.
Now I’m balancing, on the last railing, the last railing of this piece of engineering, the last piece of railing before I meet my cold icy death. There is a thin layer of ice on the surface of the East River, I have crossed the Hudson River from my home in Jersey City, NJ, just west of New York, to come here tonight, my mind is full of fear, I am drenched in regret of what I am about to do, I cannot help but think how Rachel, my wife, and Jennie, my daughter, will be feeling if they find out about this.
I think to myself, is this worth doing? Is it worth taking a human life for the good of that person? Why would I do this to myself? Shall I? Shan’t I? But then I realise, I’ve made my mind up.
For some obscene reason, my life’s work flashes before my very eyes, and fuzzy images of my once close family appear in my head, my body is overcome with a starvation of hope, a drought of happiness, a glut of loneliness. So, 3…2…1…go!!!
“WAIT.” I recognise that voice, but it is too late. I witness the dying embers of my life fade away in the moments before I crash into the water and plunge into my icy death. The water stares at me like the Grim Reaper. It looks me deep in the eye, and seeks out my inner cowardice, but I know there is nothing I can do about that now.
I shut my eyes, to find myself immersed in a dark, below ground world. But it is not until I try to move my arm that I realise that it is not water that I am submerged in, but something an awful lot thicker, mud, I am in the ground, how I don’t know, but all I know is that!
I shout for help, but it seems nobody can hear my screams, for a moment I think that the Grim Reaper was real, I had been transported to a world of gloominess. But then, I hear voices, the distant whisper of human life. They are talking about someone called Michael. I then realise that it was the earth I was touching when I tried to move my hand, but there was a hole. Everywhere else, I can feel some form of structure or box. It is a shock, but what I then think is that I have been buried alive. But why? Why would somebody bury me? Press me into the pages of history when I may still have had some to make.
This box, it must be a coffin!!!!!!!
Then I think, me jumping, I must have been unresponsive and seemed dead. Been knocked out and suffering from hypothermia, they must have thought I would stand no chance and saved their time. No!! They wouldn’t do that. I then think, something more sinister may have been to blame. But who? And why? They wanted to murder me, but when I was already dead they decided to bury me.
I then hear more voices, a large group, I try banging my hand on the side of my coffin. In the vain hope that somebody might hear me. I shout, I bellow, I scream. I then hear who sounds like someone very familiar, Rachel. I shout “Rachel!” She screams, to this day it is the loudest scream I have ever heard in my life. I hear a persistent banging, a digging. Only then did I truly believe I would get out alive.
But why would I want to be alive anymore? I tried to commit suicide, but now I really do value the sheer precious nature of life, you can’t waste it, you have to live every moment of it, treasuring it all the same. For it is only now that I can be relieved that I am able to sit here telling you this story.
For this was my past, but now is the present, and that is what now is, a gift, a gift that some shall never truly be grateful for. I was one of them, but now I am different. I am Michael Dandecht, and I am sitting on this bench, with the two people who mean the most to me, I am looking ahead to the future, because we all have one.
