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| Alarmingly Strange Stories |
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Ronald Plant: His Mother's Fault Dan Ericsson |
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Ronald Plant had been walking for a long time. He carried with him the small sphere of his peripheral
vision. He could see the trees slipping out of his sight, joining the darkness and forest from which they were
spawned. He wasn't seeing them, though. His eyes were glazed over to protect him from the hallucinations that sprawled
within the dark. Since he didn't see, he thought. He thought: "What am I going to do now? Why did
this happen to me? There are millions, billion, kajillions of people who deserve this. I'm better than they are.
Why am I being singled out?" Some people would call Ronald Plant self-centered and
egotistical. But he knew better. He was such a perfect specimen of humanity that he couldn't possibly have a character
flaw. No. He couldn't think that. There was obviously something
wrong with him. Perhaps it was his mother's fault. After all, she had named him Ronald. What kind of name is Ronald?
He's not an Irish resteraunteer. What was she thinking? His father had been an alcoholic. Probably his mother's fault. He continued walking down the narrow road as a car approached
from behind him. "My father … an alcoholic" The headlights of the 1974 Esperanto Semaphore bathed
him with their irregular, yellowish gaze. "Why?" Ronald walked on, the car lurched off the road as the
wheels lost their hold on the porous road, the car swerved toward Ronald. His subconscious screamed "Mother's
fault. … mother's fault" until it became a whimper, sobbing itself into a wadded up Kleenex
at his father's funeral. "Mother's fault …" The driver over corrected and spun off the road, through
the guardrail on the other side and down the precipice the road spiraled around. In an apocalyptic fireball, the
car became a heap of twisted steel shrapnel; the charred body inside slumped over the steering wheel. The seatbelt had held the body into the car as it tumbled
unceremoniously down the nearly vertical Ronald had lived through his near fatal experience, but
he hadn't noticed. There were a lot of things that Ronald never noticed.
Unfortunately, he didn't know what any of them were.
. Page 1
The End More Cool Stories are at Dan's website, "One Page Detective Stories." at (http://www.angelfire.com/hi3/onepagestories/index.html)
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