I couldn’t believe I just lost my job at Hoffers Foods some minutes ago. I went to source for loan but I got a sack letter instead. Ill-luck? Father had told me I was full of ruins failure and ill-luck. Now I just confirmed it. I was a bloody disaster that was about to happen.
This could be the reason nobody wanted to associate with me. It was conspicuous in my life that I was an embodiment of failure and poverty. Father was dying; I had lost the panache to return to the ruins I created. How would I behold my father with my eyes while he died like a kitten? I sniffed dropped on the floor and felt like taking my life.
Jaded!
What was I living for? Of what use was this worthless world to me without the three lovely people in my life? The only job that put food on our table had been taken from me like hawk stealing away the chick from its mother hen. And with the flu that had engulfed father, I argued if there would ever be a light at the end of the tunnel.
I had lost the enthusiasm to return home; I had lost the panache to source for jobs in a society that despised me with utmost disdain.
On the busy road I stood and wondered if it could ever get better; if actually I was created to suffer this much. My ex-wife had said it; my fathers had groaned it repeatedly in my ears; and the society had reminded me that I should have remained in jail and perish therein.
I wasn’t fit for this phase of life. I shouldn’t have been release to face this inhumane treatment. Hoffers Greenfield! Why would you sack me now? Why would you take away the only thing that gave me joy now my father was sick and dying?
When I ran back to father, I met a catastrophic sight that left me shrieking.
My eyes had glowered upon that sight; a pool of blood trickled down the ground before him. I glared at his mouth and saw traces of it. Father had been throwing up blood. Once I appeared at his side, he slumped and dashed on the ground before he writhed in pain and dragged his eyeballs inwards.
“Father! Father!”
I called waggled his hands and tapped him slightly on the chin once I perceived his eyes shutting up slowly. His body was running temperature at the time and I glared around wondering who could be of help to a castaway boy like me.
We were on a lonely track and the commuters that passed by never gave a shot at this boy and his sick father that had lived in the open street for two months now. I whined as I noticed he wasn’t having an easy breath anymore.
What could be happening? Am I going to lose my parents in a space of three days? What sort of ill-luck was this? I shook him repeatedly on the shoulders and spoke onto his face.
“Father! Father! Please don’t do this! Father!” I yelled as his eyeballs were beginning to roll back into his skull.
This man was dying. I fondled into my pocket and I saw a squeezed one dollar note. That was all I had; that was the balance of my salary for last week, which I had spent on food.
I flagged down a taxi; “I am taking you to the hospital father. You must not die. You are going to be fine. Please stay alive for me. Please,” I mumbled as the cab driver assisted me to drag him into the back seat.
Soon I was pacing alongside a band of nurses who rode my father on a stretcher into the ward.
“Brian Patrick!
I heard a voice and when I paused and tilted my neck backward I saw it was the doctor. He had a gloomy face as he folded his arms to ask, “What happened to your sense of care? Do you realize that your father has caught the flu and right now it has morphed to pneumonia?”
“Pneumonia?” I beamed and widened my gaze at him before I lowered my gaze to sob, “For the past two months we have be living in the open place. Our landlords sent us packing after we failed to pay the rent of five hundred dollars,” I explained and couldn’t stop shaking my head as I wailed.
“Five hundred dollars?” the doctor intoned and winced at me, “Are you telling me you couldn’t afford five hundred dollars for your rent? Oh Lord!” he exclaimed, “in other words you allowed your father to stay in the spring. You couldn’t even take him out of the fall and the snow to a place he could get warmth. What sort of lackadaisical attitude is this?” the doctor yelled at me and slammed on the desk furiously, “Now he has acute pneumonia. We need a deposit of ten thousand dollars to commence treatment.”
“Ten thousand what?” I snapped, raised a furrowed brow at him, “See, doctor I just lost my job. My rich father-in law that is supposed to be of help encouraged her daughter to divorce me. I don’t know who to run to. I don’t have a dime on me.”
“Brian Patrick!” the doctor shouted at me, “You don’t get excuse for falling to put off the fire you started. If you had given shelter and warmth to that man , may be you wouldn’t be faced with such unscrupulous bill now..”
The doctor was yet speaking when a chubby nurse barged in on us and gasped, “Mr. Patrick needs your attention doctor.”
Hastily we made into the ward and met father jerking and spewing slight blood through the corner of his lips.
“Father! Father! Don’t do this to me! Father!” I wailed at the tops of my voice as I grabbed his face, clenched my hands to his feeble hands and couldn’t let go.
I could see his lips opening slightly as though he wanted to mutter something. But then he never made a comment. Rather he gave one last emphatic jerk and gave up the ghost.
Father! Father! No! No!” I kept yelling as the doctor pulled me away
“Father! Doctor! Do something please. Father! No! No! This can’t be happening!
I grabbed the collar on the shirt of the doctor and pled intensely almost tearing his shirt, “Please do something! He mustn’t die!
But it was too late. The nurses were already covering his corpse with the white duvet…