A Sacrifice to the Republic

A Sacrifice to the Republic
                                                 Nick Hilton

“I’m falling” he thought,
As he held his miserable head in his miserable hands, his eyes closed tightly starting at the blackness of his inner eyelids.  A bleak nothingness wrapped around his brain as he thought about his family, especially his two little girls.
“how would they eat?” he thought.  “What is my wife going to say?” “Will she divorce me?” 
These are questions that he did not have the answer for.  People walked by him and gave him distasteful looks, because he was openly crying while sitting on the curb, but he didn’t care.  All he cared about was the job that he had just lost.
It wasn’t the fact that he had lost his job, it was the fact that it’s now been six jobs in three months that he’s lost.  And now, with another firing on his resume, there would be no way that he could get a better job, or even any job at all.  He had been a janitor twice, a nightman at a convenience store, a clerk at a grocery store twice, and most recently he was working in a local factory that makes cat food.  Why had he lost all these jobs?  Well it was for a variety of reasons, one of which was showing up late too many times because he had to watch his little girls while his wife was working overtime at her workplace, another, was he would not be able to show up some days for the same reason. 
“Why can’t my bosses understand this? “ Why don’t they care?” He thought to himself. “Why can’t they see that my kids need to be watched?”
“Get a daycare.” His bosses would say
But there was no way that they could afford a daycare, they could barely afford the bills they had now, they were barely keeping their heads above the water.  And now that he had gotten fired again he wasn’t sure if they could survive another mortgage payment.  They’d be kicked out, everything they owned would be repossessed, they would lose everything and have nothing but each other,
“ How would the girls go to school?” he thought aloud to himself “Would they take the kids from us?” “Would they have to live in a shelter?”
These questions made his head hurt, so he got up and began to walk down to the nearest subway station, which was about a half mile away.  He walked slowly, and looked at all the people rushing about to and fro, all with their own personal agendas.  All with familes and nice homes and a hot dinner waiting for them at home.  He envied them more than anything, he wanted to be them, with their big homes and fancy cars.  All the money in the world, college degrees, and not a care in the world at all. 
“ I had no choice for that!” he said to himself.  “My family had no money for me to go to college, all I could do was work.”  “ It’s not like I’m stupid, I got B’s in high school, I tried.”  “But my family needed the money, I had no means...”
He walked to the subway station and walked down the grimy old cement staircase, looking at the ground, and bumping into a few people as he descended into the station.  He didn’t care about those other people, he just wanted his troubles to end.  The poverty, the sleepless nights, the nights with no dinner on the table.  He just wanted the best for his daughters and his wife. 
         “Maybe they’d be better off without me…” he thought. “ NO NO NO!” he snapped himself out of some kind of trance, “They need me!” “I’m their father!” But a little voice inside of his head muttered “But you can’t give them what they need”.
He walked up to a machine and pulled out his wallet, and when he opened it he saw the pictures of his little girls and his wife beaming back at him. But he couldn’t bear to look at them, and he held back his tears.  He grabbed the last dollar bill out of the billfold, put it in the machine and got his token for the subway.  He then replaced the worn old piece of leather back into his pocket.  And after paying for the token he walked down another set of stairs to the bottom floor where the subway tracks were.  He looked around at the few people waiting for the 2:30 D train.  There really weren’t many people at all.
“Most of the people must still be at work.”  He though to himself miserably
The tiles on the walls sported 50 years of grime and dirt.  Various signs on the walls showed rich movie actors and actresses staring at him with their flashy white smiles, and expensive plasticized faces.  He looked at them with envy and disgust. 
“They have it all” He muttered to himself vehemently “All the big houses and expensive cars, all the things they need to make them happy while I stand here, poor, jobless, with a family to feed and bills to pay.”
A train let its horn sound to let the people know it was coming; it wasn’t his train, but just another one passing by to a different station.  He took out his wallet again and opened up that grimy leather billfold, and looked at the pictures of his family.  He let a strangled sob of unhappiness and discontent.  He couldn’t do it anymore, he couldn’t disappoint the people he loved anymore.  They needed a better life, but that life was one that he could not give them.  The little voice was speaking again.  He loved them so much, but the fact that he couldn’t support them drove him to the point of madness.  The train sounded its horn again.  He looked down the tracks and saw the blinding whiteness of the lights which illuminated the dirty, rat infested tunnel that it flew through.  He clutched the wallet to his chest as tears ran fluently down his cheeks, like little streams leading to a bigger river. 
“I wont disappoint them anymore.” He told himself
At that precise moment in time, a terrible thing happened.  He propelled himself into brilliant light of the train, looking it in the eye and being blinded by its brightness.  And as he looked into the light, the pictures from that worn, old leather billfold flashed into his brain and imprinted themselves onto his eyes, so the last thing he saw was the family he was leaving behind, and the problems he was running away from, the little girls he would never see and hold again, and the wife who had depended on him so much during these times of trouble for the family.  The train came roaring on and the conductor had no time to stop it.  He never reached the ground as the speeding bullet had struck his flying body into oblivion and onto another world.