The Wake

Nervous from the thirty-some hits of marijuana, he had taken on the ride through the neighborhoods. Bryan McCoy resorted to sending text messages to his estranged girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old student at McCoy’s former private high school. According to the young man, he was “bowl-cruising to check the epic X-mas lights, lit up like fire like me man,” he reported, giggling like an asshole, careless and unaware of his forthcoming demise. McCoy, a hopelessly tragic nineteen-year-old and an unemployed hair-gel wearing stoner, insisted that he was neither a hipster nor a hippie, yet maintained a distinct anti-establishment air. Recently, he moved back in with his parents, the experiment of his forty thousand dollar per year tuition failing. Upon being asked what he’d do with the free time, McCoy brushed off the suggestion of work. “I’m no conformist, I won’t join that rat race,” following this statement, he smoked some more pot while eating his parent’s food in his parent’s basement, his waxed skin warm from the designer clothes his parents purchased.

Regarding the evening in question, McCoy, bored from watching movies all day, decided to smoke some joints and examine his neighbor’s efforts to entertain the season’s greetings. McCoy’s neighborhood of Rolling Green in Edina, Minnesota, which boasts residences of the Polad families and presidents of Northwest Airlines and Target Corporation, is never short on Christmas lights. This past Tuesday was no exception and a splendid treat for a THC soaked brain that was never too smart to begin with. After twelve drags, McCoy admitted that the lights were inside him, whatever that means, and decided to convey this newfound beauty to the woman of his life.

After years of using his cell phone, courtesy of his parents of course, for several years to cheat on exams in high school, McCoy had developed a bony right thumb, which was thoroughly adept in sending text messages. This appendage aided him in depersonalizing a conversation that would eventually become his epitaph and death rattle. McCoy, overwhelmingly disillusioned by the significance of this technology, warmly embraced all new communication products and services which flashy advertisements proclaimed to him. If there was a noxious hip-hop song and a silicone-injected woman to push it, he was always the eager consumer. Because of this lack of cynicism, he was more than happy to send ten-cent text messages about how “[he] wuz bord and drivin round the hood thinkin bout [his] gurl.” His girlfriend Janette was eager to respond to her boyfriend’s text. “Oh ur so sweet,” she replied. McCoy, being vain as he is, scoffed at the text and leaned sideways to fix his perfectly gelled hair in the rearview mirror.

Growing tired of the ostentatious light displays, the young man took to the icy Interlachen Blvd. One hand on the wheel, the other clutching his phone and pressing buttons, McCoy wrote how his dad was “still sweting [sic] him to geta job and get off the couch.” McCoy, however, “[wasn’t] some conformist.” Janette, aside from her admiration for McCoy being genuine, did admit without much restrain that the young man “could be a whiny little bitch once in a while.”

By this point in the evening, McCoy started down 50th St. toward the trendy business section of “downtown” Edina. He had waited several minutes before responding to his girlfriend’s most recent text, and ignored her call from the preceding minute because “it’s good to keep’em in the dark sometimes. Like once she dropped the whole ‘love’ bomb, I just spat out my gum and smiled.” Finally, the young man wrote to Janette saying, “the new bond movie looks totally tits. It’s [sic] got this new phone in it I totally need.” After suggesting that they see it together, McCoy leaned over to the rearview mirror again to readjust the flawless style only the coroner would notice, at which point it wouldn’t matter since McCoy would be dead. While leaning to his side, pulling at the meticulously maintained gooey strands, he lost control of the wheel and moved into the oncoming traffic. He never looked away from the mirror, even as his German car was mutilated by the cold steel of the approaching truck. The truck, which was bearing a heavy load of freshly pumped sewage, spilled open and covering McCoy’s mangled corpse with sticky, smelly muck.