Ron

Born into ghetto‘s of New York City, an ill-bred man trashed his thirteenth bouquet of roses. Roses? Ron was never thought of as handsome or dreadful yet an unhealed bruise diagonally crossing his face terrified most. “Damn her!” He yelled, striking two frames off some adequate table in his blank white studio apartment. The shattered glass on them held pictures of life before. Before the accident, before the doctor induced addiction, before the diagnosis. The women he looked up to, hazed in overdoses, the women who shun beside him, pale as the interlining of her coffin. Thirteen years after running away from his mother’s thundering abuse and the shack pertained to as home ,she still sent these meaningless roses on the day Ron came into a hated world. She knew his baby feet would urge to run from the clouds of acidic smoke but he could not, for nothing attracted him to the other end. Ron meant king, his queen floated inside the crisp golden sheets that soon helped him reach freedom. Oh, the scent of his wife’s floral sweat in that scene could linger for days if he kept his mind to it but he had lost her. The sweeping fire that raged into her flesh ,she survived, but the infectious stinging afterwards secretly broke any women from the commitment of breathing. He had skipped the funeral and ran, watering from the wound caused by trying to save her. The slanted mark on his face signified courage yet he held none for himself. What had he contributed to the world, Ron pondered too many times. Breathing soon affected the man too, cigar smoke breathed in as a child had viciously followed him. Time flew by. His lungs dropped and dropped to their lowest point. The bar was Ron’s new meadow, replacing the pressure out of inhaling until he had started throwing up blood. “Call the doctor!” a sober woman shouted, unwilling to let this stranger die. Ron blinked once but now could only see the clingy sheets that floated like his wife’s, they were blankets in the back of an ambulance. Those rhythmic sirens strolled like Ron’s trembles had, drowning in coughed blood. The reaper waited outside while death was lingering too. Terminal. They only whispered. Lung Cancer. He used to believe running away canceled out problem after problem from his mother but it tracked his path. Doctors said it could be cured. Could it? What point did he have in trying to live when no one was there to love him? “No,” Ron said politely, staring at the paper that could maybe, just maybe, give him a few more undesired days to live. Ron, a lover and a believer, died that day, leaving behind nothing.