I looked at the world differently after I was murdered and needed a heart transplant.
All puns aside, I had a change of heart and felt things differently. At age 33 I still had a perfectly good heart, but another man murdered me. At the time I’d been drinking in the wrong neighborhood bar when a big, bad, burly, belligerent bully decided to try humiliating me because he liked the cute girl I was flirting with. I tried to brush him off and focus on the pretty little Latina by my side and he responded with a sucker punch that crunched on my cranium. I was dumped on my rump. I was more surprised than dazed because I’d taken plenty of punches in life. I saw his foot flick in a kick to split my face into paste. I barely blocked the flying foot, so only the toe of his boot hit my snoot to lacerate my lips and nose. I rolled, snagging his ankle in a jujitsu hold that brought him down on the floor and soon he was screaming as I brutally wrenched and something in his ankle popped.
His buddy blindsided me with a kick that nicked my neck before sliding along my skull in a graze. He tried to hop and stomp me again and this time I lashed his leg and brought him down in a hold that had his leg ready to snap. Another guy tried to grab me from behind and suddenly I was in a tempest of flying fists, feet, elbows and knees as we exchanged blows, holds, throws and rolled around.
The first guy, named Al, was up on his injured ankle and buried a blade in my back. It felt like a hard blow, but when I looked down I could see the knife tip protruding from my pectoral and blood spouted out as my heart pumped. The backstabber left his knife spiked in me and the gang fled. They would later be caught and all charged, convicted and sent to prison for numerous years for my attempted murder, but it did me no good.
As I lay there dying on the dirty bar floor, I thought I was hallucinating because I saw a strange, swirling, dark wormhole open and from it stepped three demons. They were dark shadowy things with glowing red eyes and horns on their heads and huge clawed paws and titanic teeth. They approached me.
Abruptly a ghostly glowing translucent woman appeared beside me. She was beautiful, angelic actually, with emerald eyes. She waved her arms and was saying something to the demons because they grudgingly backed off from her to return through their wormhole. The female ghost spared me a sad smile. Then I passed out.
Doctors told me that I was clinically dead over a minute that they knew of for certain. They told me that dying people’s brains often produce strange chemicals that create hallucinations. But I knew better, because that glowing female ghost was the spitting image of my deceased mother when she was young.
I tried to get my life back together while recovering. I felt that I’d been given a second chance to do things differently.
Unfortunately; a man named Pablo crossed my path. Pablo was an escaped prisoner. He was so crazy in Mexico that his own cartel tried to kill him and he fled to America. Pablo was good looking with a lean build. Over the past year he had made a living picking victims in the gay community. He went home with men from gay bars and his poor victims had no idea what a monster they were with. Apparently Pablo hated gay men. His last seven known victims had been bound and tortured to death by being cut, burned, choked and beaten over numerous hours. He’d sodomized all seven with burning hot objects and mutilated their genitals, all while they were still alive.
Pablo’s eighth victim’s roommate came home with friends and Pablo fled the scene, but the cops were chasing him. Pablo ran right into the corner store where I was waiting in line behind a bunch of kids with their moms. They were celebrating after winning a soccer game. Suddenly there was Pablo screaming at everybody to lay on the floor while waving his pistol. He locked the door behind him as cops pulled up outside.
Pablo looked crazed and desperate. I got the sense he wouldn’t surrender and there were a lot of innocent kids there. Even as that thought flitted through my mind, a ghostly female figure appeared behind Pablo. She looked right at me and I had no doubt I was looking at my mom’s ghost. She shook her head sadly and pointed at Pablo and then at the kids in the room.
Then she was gone.
Pablo likely just saw me as some crippled middle-aged man. My cane whipped to hit his hand and the pistol fell on the floor. I grappled him, but I was so weak and still wounded. He pulled a knife he sunk in my stomach. By then the cops had seen the struggle and busted the locked door down with a battering ram to arrest him.
I survived the struggle and stabbing. I was hailed a hero in the media. Unfortunately I quickly developed a bad staph infection and my heart began rejecting me. Ironically the heart had come from a man that murdered his wife and eight year old son when the boy tried to stop him from strangling his mother.
Life is funny.
I’ll be dead when you read this. But don’t fret, I’m pretty confident I’m going to a better place.
The End
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in
the Dirt, The Horror Zine, Freedom Fiction Journal, Short-Story Me, Dark Harbor, Blood Moon
Rising, Flash Phantoms, Phantomania, Lowlife Lit, The Listening Eye, J Journal, Evening Street
Review, Conceit, Spotlight on Recovery, Muscle and Fitness, Outdoor Life and many other
magazines. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, DC in 2019. You can find more of his writings at tomkropp.wordpress.com. He has
many audiobooks and eBooks available free at Google Play Books.
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