Man With No Name. (Short Story)

How did this happen? This is the question Jeremy Quint asked as he lay in a field of daisies, bleeding to death. At this point he had given up on trying to crawl to safety, he knew there was no point. With every move he made, more blood gushed out and the more his life faded away. Jeremy knew this was the end, he was certain of it. Yet he still couldn’t accept this ending. This wasn’t supposed to be how the last page of his life went. ‘How unsatisfying, how disappointing,’ he thought. Soon to be a pale, decomposing corpse surrounded by unharmed daisies who of which couldn’t even mourn the man. He wasn’t supposed to die for many years… he was to be an old man surrounded by his grand children and slow beeping machines, not on the ground with, what he now thought of as, worthless weeds. He’d never been so bitter than in these last moments. ‘Why is it taking so long to die?’ Jeremy wondered. Perhaps it was punishment for the other pages and the sins written within. The ink once black now turned oxblood. He could feel each word slowly dripping off the page. Everything he experienced, everything he accomplished, now useless. 

A gentle gust of wind rustled his blood stained hair and the blue sky began to darken. This was it, the end. “Jeremy?” A voice spoke in the distance. 

‘Oh no, oh please no,’ Jeremy panicked inside of his head. He tried to crawl away but he had lost the energy to move. 

“There you are,” the man hovers over Jeremy’s practically lifeless body. As the man reaches down, Jeremy loses consciousness. The man with no name tosses Jeremy’s limp body over his shoulder and carries him home. 

Hours later, Jeremy awoke in his bright medallion room. He quickly searched his body for the wound, but he found nothing. He was physically restored. Jeremy began to cry intensely, sobbing yet finding no sort of relief through it. There was no escape, not even death was an option. It was now clear to him that this inadequate medallion room was his destiny. 

Poor Jeremy’s intense cries turn into quivers, he stands up and approaches his small desk… atop was a note. 

Try Again. 

These simple words managed to feel like a dagger in his chest. Jeremy was tired of trying. He’d begun to hate the thing he once loved. The thing he lived for, now his enemy. For he could not stop trying. This man… the man with no name had enslaved Jeremy, thus removing him from his former life. His friends, his family, even his sanity had left him alone with this monster. 

He sat in the office chair, picked up the pen, and kissed it to the paper. Jeremy wrote the title; the title was always the same no matter how much he had failed with the story. He stared at it’s name and pondered what to make of it, when suddenly as if a flame was lit, he was struck by the beautiful mistress, inspiration. Though at times she could be a tease setting him up to fail, he felt like this was it. He was finally going to be accomplished. He would finally be free. 

But, that’s what he thought every single time.

Never would he be satisfied, and never would life be the same as it once was. For this was his new normal. Everything else in the world, even success, were now foreign.

The End.