Gerald

Gerald never really wanted to go on the trip in the first place. He only really went because Jenny asked him to go. Jenny was Gerald's step-sister, and he had actually gotten to know her. He regularly beat himself up about that. There were so many siblings in Gerald's earlier life that he couldn't name all of them on both his hands and never bothered to ever really know any of them. Gerald's father was killed in Korea, and his mother was never the same. Sure, she dated, but they were all faceless men, who Gerald never bothered to get to know while they were free-loading on his mother's couch. They would bring their children, and Gerald, the only child, was forced to put on his fake-smile every time another brother or sister would 'live' with them. Jenny was nine years older, and was Antony's daughter. Antony didn't stay with Gerald's mother long, only a couple of months, but Gerald had liked Jenny. He didn't know why and didn't know how, but when Antony left his mother, Gerald and Jenny stayed in contact.
         Gerald lives in Baltimore now, and Jenny lives in a small town in Pennsylvania called Ancaster. They rarely see each other, so hence, the trip to see Jenny in Ancaster. As Gerald was just about to leave his seat to exit the train, he realized, then and there, that his reading glasses were still in his Baltimore apartment.
         'Oh well,' he quickly thought, ' they're only reading glasses'. However, the reading glasses that Gerald had thought he left in his Baltimore apartment had actually found themselves into Gerald's pocket.
         He did not know this, right up until his death, 27 minutes after he exited the train station at his stop in Harrisburg, and got onto a coach bus to Ancaster, 192 miles away. Since the trip was in the beginning of the summer season, the majority of the seats taken in the coach bus were college students, off to see mummy and daddy back home, or naturalists, eager to appreciate the scenery.  Gerald took an aisle seat, opposite the driver, sat down, laying his assorted carry-on baggage on the seat beside him. As it happens, Gerald took the one seat that needed the most repairs. In fact, the whole bus needed repairs. It rattled and clanked every time the driver hit the gas and pressed the brake pedal. Gerald didn't think this would be a problem and normally it wouldn't, but with every bump and with every pothole, the glasses that were laying in his pocket moved ever so gingerly to the seam, as if pleading to be released from their cotton and polyester prison.
         A sharp bend in the road appears ahead, and, as if on cue, Gerald's glasses leap from his breast pocket to the floor, assisted by  the hardly kept road, and covertly make their way to the driver's feet at the brake pedal. As if guided by some unusual force, they wedge themselves between the backplate and the floor. The bus driver, unnoticingly and instinctively, depresses the brake pedal to slow the massive bus, but receives no deceleration from the engine and brakes. Gerald did not even notice the bus head straight for the guard rail and crash off the road, and into the ravine below. He was too busy following the trees whiz past outside the bus windows.
         Gerald, along with all the other passengers and the driver, died from the immediate impact of the bus colliding with the deep trench that lay adjacent to the highways long and narrow pathway. 
         As the coroner arrived, he was not terribly surprised, as this one particular curve was known to the locals as 'Dead Mans Curve'. He almost immediately diagnosed this crash as just another bus that went off the road. But no one thought to look at the brake pedal and the backplate, where the reading glasses were still wedged, guilty to ending the lives of everyone aboard the Harrisburg-Ancaster shuttle.
         The bodies were examined and the wreckage analyzed. And yet, still no one had even thought of looking at the drivers foot space.
         A week after the bus has taken flight, Jenny was at the coroner's office, ready to claim Gerald's lifeless body from the morgue. She did not go without a stream of tears, and yet it seemed so appropriate that she, of all people, would be burying him. Jenny was nine years older than Gerald, who was 42 at the time of his death. Gerald's mother was an alcoholic, which was somewhat attributed to the lack of a father figure in Gerald's adolescence.
         Gerald once called the police on his mother, because she had attempted to hit him in a drunken rage. The police had arrested her, but released her because they simply did not have th evidence to convict her. It was a shame, because Gerald blamed his mother for all his troubles, and if she had simply stayed in prison, then she would not have met Antony at an Alcoholics Anonymous picnic. If she did not attend this picnic, then Gerald would not have died on the bus towards Ancaster.