Sawdust – Xperience Fiction

Sawdust – Originally published in Dead Man’s Switch – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

Sawdust

The grey, rotted wood splintered and cracked beneath their feet as they walked the North Pier. It used to be full of hustle and bustle and bullshit spoken by bourbon-drinking poker players on the ground floors of the many bordellos that silhouetted the night sky, now as broken as the pier. Things weren’t what they used to be.

Flip James adjusted his fedora before tucking his rough hands into the pockets of his overcoat. He wasn’t always a venture capitalist. He used to work in a steel mill outside of town. He still had scars on his wrists from the searing heat of stray sparks. It was work to him, not the American Industrial Dream that people romanticized it to be. He’d come home dirty, smelly to a nagging wife and a six-pack of Miller High Life. That was the closest thing he had to a High Life back then. He was a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking lotto-player. It was that last thing that changed his life.

He won, and he won big. Thirteen million, which was huge back then. He blacked out from the celebration, but he kept his head after the hangover went away. He invested wisely, and as of three days ago, his net worth was seven-hundred and fifty million. He made his fortune by his own name, Flip, flipping failing companies into profitable ones.

Which brought him here.

He loved a girl once; not his wife. He tolerated her. But he loved Betty Anne Mason. He met her on the North Pier when he was sixteen. There was an amusement park back then, long ago dismantled for scrap metal. He wrote her love poems, and she wrote him back. They spent hours on the beach, looking up at the stars. He even bought a book of the constellations at the town bookstore, studied it to impress her. She was beautiful.

On his eighteenth birthday, he’d finally saved enough money, even sacrificed getting his own car to buy a two-carat diamond ring for her. He was going to propose as he made his way to the North Pier. He turned the corner to see her lips locked with Spencer Richards, the town’s rich kid, off to Princeton that year.

In a letter, she told him that she cared about him, but Spencer could offer her a way out of that shitty little town. She wanted the best for herself. They were married as soon as he finished school. Flip was invited. He put in for overtime that day.

“I can’t believe you’re considering buying this place.” Jonas Gilmore, his financial advisor said as they stood out on the pier, getting swept by the cold ocean breeze.

“Bought it. Not considering.” Flip said.

“Well,” Jonas struck a match to his pipe, “what are you gonna’ turn it into?”

Flip looked back one more time at the place filled with every truly memorable moment in his young life; his greatest hopes, his darkest fears, most vivid pain. He turned back to face the ocean.

“Sawdust.”

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