There is a misunderstanding in the world. For some reason, love has gotten a weird reputation. It's believed to be easy, to be beautiful, to be without hardship. Perhaps we can blame TV, with its trivialization of the human condition or perhaps humanity itself for falling for such a fallacy. Love is not easy. It's not always pretty either. This is a story about that.
It features a man named James Korbain. James is a loser. No, not like the lecher who staggers up to women he believes are easy at a bar, but rather the guy at the corner of the bar, drinking because he's at rock bottom and still falling.
It wasn't entirely his fault. He was incredibly bright, just in that overly perceptive way that makes teachers hate. Despite their best efforts, he aced his SAT and their finals and maybe he could have got into a good school. But then his father got into the car accident and his mother had committed suicide soon after. He was able to pay for the funeral and still have a little left over for school, but then the will had come where he had learned that what his father mostly had left him were obscene gambling debts to shady people. Through a total destruction of credit, he had been able to rise to the level of debtor to "respectable" people. In other words, those who sent nasty letters before they harvested your organs, instead of the ones that just showed up with surgical tools.
All he had to his name in fact was a crappy one-room apartment in the Dregs with a single second-hand mattress. By the tone of the last notice, he wouldn't even have that in another month.
And in the general scheme of the Universe which can't resist the temptation to heap insult on injury, his personal life was going no better. For some trick of fate, he had an aura of despicability. It wasn't, to his ability to detect, a fault of his nature for in truth he was a generally nice albeit quiet and sullen guy. It was just for whatever reason of coincidence, people assumed the very worst of him. Police officers would constantly stop him on the street and search him, he could never keep friends for long, and he would be fired from every job for suspicion of a crime someone else committed. And as the cherry on the sundae of misery, every woman saved her most barbed and painful rejections for him. It had continued even though he had stopped trying. Long after he had ever given up hope of human interaction, he could not drink a beer alone without a woman sending a note emphatically pre-rejecting him and even sitting in a bus staring out the window ended in him getting slapped.
Given all this, it probably isn't a surprise that eventually James gave in to the downward spiral. He stopped caring about appearance or human interaction. He lived almost entirely in his mind, not bothering to live, but rather going through the actions of going to work, eating the base minimum of nutrients, and then sleeping. He had become the shell of an automaton.
Or at least that's what occurred on the surface. Inside was a different story. Inside was waiting for its chance, the crack in life to prove its merit, to shun the constraints and bitterness of an uncaring reality.
And it would soon get its chance to do so, on the bitterly cold evening of February 12th while James was walking back from yet another soul-draining day in his minimum wage dead end job. He would pass an alleyway and hear a noise that would set it all flooding back to outside. And it was:
"Damnitt, you hold the wench.
"
Thought processes foreign to many of his fellow city dwellers began to take over and slowly he looked over.
"Fuck, bro. She's utterly wasted. I can't wait to try."
"Well wait your turn, fuckwit. If you don't hold her up, neither of us is gonna get a taste."
The outside began to thaw with old convictions, ones buried out of bitterness and just a little bit of spite, and slowly he began to walk down the alleyway.
"Slip me the knife, I need to get her out of these fuckin' clothes."
"Okay. God her breasts are soft and nice even if she smells like shit."
"Well that's what matters. HEY, WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM, FAGGOT?!?"
James noticed the knife at his side, but was by far the worst person to pull that shit on. A normal person when faced with a loss of life and limb for someone they don't know goes through a moment of hesitation where they wonder if it's worth it and thus give the knife-holder an upper hand. James however, had long ago given up much care for his personal safety. He merely acted and broke the punk's wrist with one movement.
"Brother," the uninjured one screamed. "Oh you're fucking dead." With that he charged with another knife pulled from somewhere on his leg which served as a sort of Street Punk's bag of holding.
Again James had the upper hand. He wasn't strong enough to beat the punk, but he cared less. He felt a bit of pain in his side but that didn't stop the path of his knee. He had no clue if the wound had been fatal or even if the punk had left the knife there while he crumpled, but he quickly moved to keep him down, kicking his face as hard as he could, pouring years of barely suppressed anger at the world into keeping the second brother down.
He stopped soon after it stopped moving. By the sounds of the barely audible gurgles below him, he hadn't gone that far, but he was beyond caring. He looked over at the first brother who had thought about rejoining the fight while his back was turned but had wisely decided that raping a skank wasn't worth getting thrashed by someone well on the down curve of sanity.
"She's just a crack whore, you dumb shit," he pleated bitterly.
James looked over slowly. It was one of those turns you see in a certain type of movie. Sort of the universal sign to stop talking and get away. Unfortunately, the street punk was common-sensically illiterate.
"Fuck, she's probably been raped before and I doubt she'd last long in that condition. Besides, it's not like you know her." The brother stopped in a rare moment of thought process and a look of terror flashed across his eyes. "Right?"
