Mr. Business Executive

Mr. Business Executive Richard Ivan Pierce lived all his life without the thrill of the hunt or the enjoyment of the game. Not once did he stop to smell the flowers, or at least bask in his own self-created happiness. All his life was about the stocks and the investors. All his life was aimed towards the goal of retirement. Because of this, he never tasted the good food in the expensive restaurants he would go to. He would just suck it all in, too worried about losing money. After all, his company depended upon him and every moment that he’s not in his office, he’s losing some money. After all, this food is just the sustenance that he needs to survive.

He never really went to his son’s basketball games. Sure, he was physically there, but his fingers were too busy typing in calculations and he would keep telling himself that he shouldn’t stay there for too long. It bothers him that for every minute that he’s not in his office, he’s losing a little bit of money. He forgot what a good night’s sleep felt like. Every creak or crash in the night woke him up. Thieves? No, he never thought about animals that would make noises or the wind. It would keep him up at night, ever vigilante for the nonexistent thieves, his revolver in easy reach.

More importantly, he never really enjoyed having sex with his wife. All through the years he was physically there, humping her, but it was the dry sort of humping without passion. His mind was somewhere doing calculations, analyzing stocks, meeting investors, while his body was in between the legs of a woman who told him to stop five minutes ago. Maybe that’s why his wife divorced him. Or maybe it was the little trysts that he had with his secretaries. After all, having sex at work was pretty damn convenient. He never had to leave his office and he can punch in numbers while she smoked in the afterglow. Even then, he was unable to show any passion afterwards, often pushing away his mistress when she wanted to cuddle up a bit more. He hated his wife for divorcing him. He regretted not signing a prenuptial agreement. Now, he’s going to lose a lot of money. That money was supposed to be his, for his retirement that is. But it’s alright. Just a little more time and he’ll be retiring soon.

For one thing, he was proud that he raised an independent son—one that didn’t cling to him and go back to him to ask for money, that is. He’s off doing his own thing, travelling around Europe, playing for a National team, the hell he cares. He heard that his son’s team made it to the finals once and a ticket to the game ended up in his front desk, though he gladly sold it away without a second thought. He was going to work overtime that night. He just couldn’t be bothered.

Someone pointed out that he’s been coughing a lot recently though. Despite this, he kept punching in the numbers, meeting with investors, observing the stocks. At night, he would wake up and start coughing incessantly. In the morning, he would wake up and find blood all over the sheets. Coughing up blood? Maybe it’ll go away soon. Two weeks passed. His shoulders jutted with pain every time he stretched his arms. His chest felt as if someone put a clamp over it; and then the cough. The cough was beyond excruciating at this point—and it was keeping him from meeting up with investors. He thought to himself, what if investors don’t want to meet because they think they’ll catch whatever I have. Begrudgingly, he set up an appointment with his physician.

X-rays, biopsies, whatever. Just give me the pills, doc, so I can get back to work. He said with an impatient tone. He never trusted doctors anyway. Dentists either. They’ll always find something—some sort of God forsaken disease unknown to man and make you buy pills that cost half a human corpse from a man in a lab coat who gets paid too much for counting pills. Well what are you waiting for, doc? It’s been a week now, just give me the news. TB? Some goddamn flu from Mexico? (I knew I shouldn’t have gone there for that fucking waste of time investors)

The physician looked at him with a stern face and told him that he has lung cancer.

Mr. Business Executive Richard Ivan Pierce looked back at those eyes as if to retort to his diagnosis. Is this one of your scams doc? His voice was rising as he stood up from the chair and began putting in his coat.

The physician clarified and said that if he doesn’t undergo treatment soon, he will die for certain.

No, no, I’m not doing one of your cheap scams doc. I might be sleazy but I’m not stupid. I know how the bunch of you work. He stormed outside and trudged to his car, coughing, covering his mouth with his bloody handkerchief. He finally got in his car, slammed the door and drove out of the lot.

Deep inside Mr. Business Executive Richard Ivan Pierce, he had a small voice that was telling him: you’re going to die, Dick. You’re going to die. Then he said out in a hollering voice (it hurt his throat) that there’s no fucking way. That damn doctor liked to talk to his ex-wife anyway. Maybe they’re on to this together. It’s probably some elaborate scam. Either way, he can’t die now. There’s no way. Despite this, the tiny voice kept saying the same words: you’re going to die, Dick. You’re going to die. This time, they were a little louder and they echoed in his mind.

No. It’s a scam. That fucking bastard of a doctor’s sleeping with my wife. They’re trying to take my money. Cough.

These were his last thoughts as his car slammed into a raised flatbed truck, utterly annihilating his face. The paramedics had to pick up the pieces of his brain and skull, which spilled all over the asphalt, and the police had to look for his ID because it was near impossible to identify him. Afterwards, his car was towed away, unceremoniously, and the city’s biohazard crew had to clean up the blood he spilled all over the road, creating backed up traffic. Everyone who got stuck in traffic swore off whoever the asshole was that was the cause of this.

As it turns out, he held his business all by himself through some sort of superhuman feat. His will declared that all of his money be invested back into his business, which in retrospect, was a terrible idea because his spineless second-in-command never really knew how to run the business. Investors fled. The company went under. Bankruptcy was filed.

All that is left of Mr. Richard Ivan Pierce was his corpse in the morgue, with his crushed face and broken body. It lay there, unclaimed and ready to be shipped off to a University for dissections, or maybe it will stay there in the morgue for a while and some funeral home donates their time to give the poor wretch a funeral and bury him somewhere no one will remember. No one remembers him anymore, and he never left a single speck of him ever existing (besides his son and his other bastard children, but they’ll never really know their father). Perhaps he planned for that enormous amount of money that he was amassing to be his monument—his gravestone in the corporate world, in a way, but none of that exists anymore.