Storymania - Harold by Acquiesce

Harold
Acquiesce

It was Black Thursday, the 13th. Harold thought he was feeling completely under the weather. Which, when you logically think about it, is quite good actually, because it means that you’re not 70 kilometres above the weather, and you won’t have an unpleasantly fast meeting the ground. So he dismissed the thought, and decided to think he was simply depressed. He thought he was depressed because he had just been fired, and thought depression was the only answer. He’s really quite right. Harold had been fired because he was caught running with scissors at work, and apparently ‘could’ve injured somebody, or taken an eye out.’ This was a fair claim, as he had been running with the scissors at eye level.
So here he is, at a bar in the middle of Baltimore. Trying to drown his sadness in forty litres of Guinness. Little does he know that his sadnesses are getting drunk off their pathetic little heads, not unlike Harold himself. He woke up the next day in the hospital, with a hangover the size of Norway, and was still quite drunk. Every single sound reverberated through his entire body. It was like having your liver smashed out by a small slice of lime wrapped around a large lead brick. Even wing beats of the hallucinatory dragon fluttering about the room caused extreme discomfort. It can be likened to watching a rock concert, while the band is playing a song with a tempo faster than the escape velocity of Jupiter, while you’re standing next to a 30 foot tall amp and wearing a hearing aid. Doctor Mortis, the G.P. who was trying to get Harold healthy again, wasn’t being very pleasant to him: insulting him, putting on the telly and turning it up loud, signing him up for unneeded rectal exams, etc.
When he had finally got out, he instinctively went straight for the bar.
“It was terrible in there. I’m never going back to the hospital again in my life. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.”
“Tell me about it.” Said Alfred, the barman.
“They made me feel about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit in there. It was horrible. The doctor was about as efficient as a cat flap in an elephant house. He annoyed me so much. Must have had a Masters Degree in Torture, for goodness sake.”
“Perhaps another 110 cans of beer will help take your mind of things…” Alfred said, hopefully.
“Not now Alfred. Maybe tomorrow. Let me finish my story first. You know, he said that I had the intellect and wit of a donkey?”
“Yes, but it would have to be a particularly stupid donkey. Cheer up. Tell you what, if you buy 10 beers, I’ll give you another one, absolutely free!”
“It comes as no surprise to me, Alfred, that you run an insurance company called ‘Cheetum and Swindlers’.”
“Don’t go! What about drowning all of your saddening thoughts?” He said, desperately.
“After the other night, most of them died from alcohol poisoning. The rest of them are in rehabilitation.”
“Well, if you’re not going to drink anything, you can just leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon you can leave in a minute and a huff.”
He left in huff.

Harold hailed a taxi, and the weather hailed small lumps of ice. It would have hailed taxis, but they’re rather hard to pull away from the road, and into the sky. Getting them down again isn’t quite so difficult, though. And the people on the ground make quite funny faces when they realise that the slab of pavement they were standing on a moment ago has just been rather noisily inhabited by a black and yellow mess of taxi.
He told the cab driver to “take me home, captain!”
“I would, sergeant, but I don’t know where you live.”
“Er, 14 Lilac Place, then.”
“Right away.”
“Left aways actually. Followed by a right aways, before a straight away. Then you can try a fly away, but I’m not sure how gymnastically capable an eleven hundred kilo automobile is.”

So after an argument full of somersaulting taxis, Harold arrived at his house, without a scratch on him. He did have a birthmark on him though. He wasn’t sure how long it had been there, but he had suspicions that it had been quite a long time.
“That will be twenty dollars and thirty three cents.”
“Good lord man, I’m not putting a down payment on the car, no matter how many cartwheels it can do. I only want to pay for the ride!”
“Oh right, excuse me. Okay… the ride will be seventy five dollars.”
“Thank you. Here’s the money.”
“Have a good night.”
And he drove off into the sunset.

Later on that night, Harold switched on the telly, sat in his favourite armchair after kicking his dog out of it, and grabbed the newspaper to look for a new job.
Something on the tellybox grabbed his attention. It was on the late news update.
“It looks pretty rough and hot here, Leah.” Said the reporter, talking to the newscaster.
“The man who is just being dragged out here is unidentified, but you can rest assured that he is alive. He has third degree burns over eighty six percent of his body. It’s just been confirmed that he is a taxi driver, and, yes, you can see the smoking remains of the car, over there. According to witnesses, the man had tried to drive into the sunset. The extreme heat from the sun had ignited the fuel tank, which subsequently exploded. He only just survived. Back to the newsroom.”

‘Silly fool’ Thought Harold. Anyway, back to the job hunt. He found one:
‘Lawyer wanted for large legal company (it later turned out that the legal company was the Police Force), must have experience in law. Email your name to [email protected], and we will give you an employment form.’

He Emailed them and they sent him a form. Wheeeeee! The miracles of the internet! As Harold had never filled out anything like this before, he enlisted the help of his good friend Atrox Succurro.

“Okay, name. You should know this one.” Said Atrox.
And Harold wrote down Harold Amitto.
“Good! Right, address this is difficult, but you should be able to get it.”
14 Lilac Place, Cherry Hills, Baltimore.
“Oh, well done you! Birthday.”
30th November 1979.
“What a coincidence. The very same day that Pink Floyd released their eleventh album, The Wall. Why you think you should be a lawyer.”
I’m good at lying, good at public speaking, I know a lot about lawnmowers, and I like to wear nice suits.
“I’m not sure how lawnmowers will help, but what the hey. Next is criminal record.”
None.
“Now come on, you’re going to be a lawyer! Here, I’ll, er, just write down tax evasion… and bank fraud. There, a job well done.”
“Thanks a lot Atrox.” Said Harold. “You really saved my life.”
“No problem. Well, I’m going now. See you later.”
“Bye.”
And Atrox left.
That night Harold had a dream, where he had got the job, and was defending an eggbeater, who had been accused of attacking his wife. His wife was an egg. It made a change to the normal nightmares, when all of the postage stamps in the world have run out, and he doesn’t have anything else to stick to his protruding facial features.
The next day, after the job interview, he went home, waited for the phone call to come, and bloke on the other end to say that he didn’t get the job.
Suddenly, the phone didn’t ring! But it happened so quickly that Harold almost didn’t notice.
Then, the phone rang. The bloke on the other end said he didn’t get the job. No job, no money and no more eggbeaters. Everything the body wanted, nothing the soul needed. And he didn’t have any of them. Suicide was his only option.
So he sat down, and had a brain-stem storming session for ways to commit introverted murder. He finalised on jumping off the Legg Mason building, the tallest in Baltimore.

20 minutes later, in the lift up to the top floor, he started having second thoughts. But, as everyone knows, second isn’t as quite as good as first. He thought about simply hijacking the elevator and flying it to Italy. No, no. He couldn’t do that. Not only the elevator didn’t go that far, he was already on the roof. Time to do what he came here to do. He was feeling literally above the weather, but emotions-wise, he was a little unbalanced. And he fell. And fell, and fell, and fell. And then he suddenly stopped falling. Then he went up a little bit, and then down again. But Harold didn’t know any of this, he was already dead. Gravity will do that to a person.

People on the ground already saw him falling. They got out of his way, so that he couldn’t be charged with assault. He hit the ground, and bounced once, and then didn’t move a bit. People rushed to his aid.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” One lady was starting to panic.
“Quick, somebody get a doctor, or a defibrillator! Whatever!” Another man was starting to come to conclusions.
“You plonker. A defibrillator will not repair broken ribs and punctured lungs!” A different man altogether was thinking a bit more clearly than the other two.
“Alright then. You seem to be the expert. What do you think killed him.” The first man was turning this in to quiz.
“I’m not that dumb. He’s lying next to an awfully high building. He jumped and the fall killed him.”
“Wrong! The fall never kills anybody. It’s the very sudden stop at the bottom that gets you.” He was starting to sound like a game show host.
“Don’t you two know anything?” The lady butted in. “The poor man died because of death. It has a one hundred percent mortality rate. The worst disease you can get.”
“Oh you silly woman! Death isn’t a disease! It’s a lifestyle choice.”
“By heck, you are dumb. I’ve got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.”
“Oh yeah? Well I’ll have you know that I will not be part of a club that will accept me as a member.”
“At least I’m not as stupid as a tree.”
“Shush up, woman.” He started talking to the other man. “This woman, she may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. She really is an idiot.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got the brain of a four year old. And I bet he was glad to get rid of it.”
“I’d horse whip you if I had a horse.”
“Were you only born yesterday?”
“I’ll have you know that I was actually born at a very young age.”

Meanwhile, Harold had mysteriously come back to life, pick himself up and dusted himself off. He then dematerialised and strangely appeared somewhere in India, and became a prosperous movie director, got two Oscars and with a beautiful wife and two lovely children, happily lived out the rest of his life in Amsterdam.