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    Last Minutes
    Last Minutes
    Last Minutes
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Last Minutes

    By FM

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The last minutes of 10 people’s lives.
    Did they make the right decision?
    Or was it the stupidest thing they could have done under the circumstances?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFM
    Release dateJan 25, 2019
    ISBN9780463689875
    Last Minutes

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      Book preview

      Last Minutes - FM

      Last Minutes

      By FM

      Copyright 2019 FM

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      Other books by FM

      Deli Owner

      Freelancer

      White Collar

      College Student

      Bus Passenger

      High School Dropout

      Village Girl

      Teacher

      Unemployed Girl

      Insomniac

      Other books by FM

      Please visit your favourite ebook retailer to discover other books by FM:

      Short Stories

      The Loan

      Stories from the Village

      Last Minutes

      The Nameless Wanderer Series

      Homecoming

      Collateral

      Judge Chen Series

      The Temple of Yongzhou

      The Elixir of Immortality

      Casebook of Judge Chen

      Disclaimer

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

      In other words, nothing is real.

      Deli Owner

      I own a restaurant.

      Or maybe I should call it a deli. After all, it’s only about the size of your average living room, and customers who come here often arrive by bus, bicycle, or on foot. The last time I saw someone getting out of a car in front of my diner had been an out-of-towner who gave the taxi driver the wrong address.

      Still, it’s a business, and I own it. In a way, you can even say I am a boss, or an entrepreneur. If I register a company, then I would be a CEO. Not bad, huh.

      And I have two employees. Granted, one of them is my nephew who, on any given day, is more likely to be found in the alley behind the deli than in the kitchen, texting his imaginary girlfriend on the Internet, who I suspect will turn out to be a forty-year-old man with an unshaved beard and living in a cramped apartment.

      The other employee . . . never mind. He’s not much better. He’s fifty-four years old this year, and as deaf as they come. Customers would place an order, watch him write down the wrong one, shuffle to the kitchen, and come back half an hour later with a fresh notepad, What did you order again?

      It’s a wonder the deli has survived for so long.

      Three years. Longer than about 75% of the start-ups who are on my street. I’ve seen the shop on my left being let and sub-let so many times, I’ve lost track of who’s the tenant there and what shady business they are engaged in.

      Most recently, though, the new tenant pissed me off. I don’t own the deli. It’s a lease. My landlord also owns the two adjacent shops. But any landlord with a brain would have known not to lease out the shop space to competitors in the same business.

      I sell breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I sell wontons, noodles, fried rice, claypot, and anything that the customer wants to eat, except for shark’s fin and abalone. The idiot landlord, who shall remain nameless and who is currently spending the winter in tropical Hainan, has decided that one more deli doesn’t hurt.

      Yet, my new neighbour on the left is another restaurant.

      At least I was here first, and have, through legal and illegal means, built up a customer base. Legal means would be vouchers, discounts to repeat customers, and of course, sometimes helping the husband lie to the wife about his whereabouts. Illegal means would be . . . Well, if they are illegal, then I shouldn’t tell you about them, should I?

      Ah what the heck. It’s not like I’m going to live after this anyway. And even if I do survive, by some miracle, the crime I will have committed will land me in far hotter water than . . . Fine I’ll tell you. Occasionally, here and there, I drop a poppy capsule into the soup or the dish. It’s nothing more than dried pericarp of the opium poppy plant. Supposedly, it contains more than twenty types of alkaloids, including those found in morphine and cocaine. So, you know, customers would want to come back for more.

      There, you know my secret recipe now.

      But even with this secret weapon (mind you, poppy capsules are not cheap. I can’t use too many of them too often, as it would attract the attention of the authorities, at the same raise the cost of operation), my business took a hit after the neighbour opened up.

      They sell breakfast only. Which is dumb, if you ask me. If you only cater to the breakfast crowd, what do you do with the shop for the remaining 16 hours of the day? If it were me, I would have set up mahjong tables. You know, grab an egg omelette wrapped in bacon to go, but if you don’t feel like heading into work today, I can fake the voice of a doctor and help you call in sick to your boss, and you stay for a round of mahjong, or maybe two rounds. And I serve you tea and dried watermelon seeds, in exchange for part of your winnings.

      Not a bad business idea, eh?

      But the idiot who owns the breakfast diner apparently is not as business-savvy as me. He would sell porridge, fried youtiao, and some other kind of dish to the throng of office workers who are on their way to work, dressed in identical suits and equally boring shoes, with a uniform zombie-like expression on their face.

      After 9.30 am, the crowd thins, and he would shut down.

      His name is a common one, the kind of name parents liked to pick in the 40s and 50s. Let’s just call him Old Lao, as he is really old, in his fifties. And he is really short. Probably less than 1.6 metres. He hails from one of the southern provinces that are renowned for the number of millionaires and billionaires, but apparently he isn’t one of them.

      What does he do after Old Lao closes for the day? I am not being nosy. It’s just that there simply aren’t a lot of customers from 10 to 11.30 am, so I have some free time, and I happen to spend it glancing at his direction.

      Old Lao would bring down the rolling gate, secure the lock, spit into his hands, and use it to smooth out his hair (I know, disgusting, right? I mean, it’s not like hair gel is a luxury good nowadays). After this ritual of grooming is done, he would put both spit-stained hands in his pockets, and strut off down the street.

      I know where he is headed.

      He has rented a small apartment not far from his diner. Or should it be called a breakfast nook? Anyway, he lives with someone. That someone is a woman, who is in her fifties, and who must have been hit hard in the head for her to fall for someone like Old Lao. Rumour has it that she used to be a streetwalker, you know, lady of the night, or more commonly, a whore. I guess it has to be true—only someone like that would be able to turn a blind eye to the toad-like appearance of Old Lao and lay beneath him, listening to his pig-like grunts and enduring his sporadic thrusts, all the while counting down the minute she could get out of there, fifty yuan richer.

      Anyway, whatever her old profession was, my impression of her deteriorated at an exponential rate after I learnt that she and Old Lao have hooked up. Have some self-esteem, woman!

      Maybe Old Lao met her on the job. I know he’s not married. There may have been children back home, but he never talks about them. An adult man, living alone, with some cash to spare, would want some company.

      For now, let’s just call her Old Tai.

      I don’t care what the kids call it nowadays: shacking up, test marriage, having fun . . . As long as they are not married to each other and they live together, sharing the same bed, they are a couple living in sin. I like the comfort of knowing that different levels of hell await them after they die, which is going to be very soon, if I have my way.

      She would go to the Chamber of Tongue Ripping first, for she is a consummate gossip. I have no proof, but in my guts I know she’s the one who spread the word that I’m a faggot. Not that I have anything against being gay, but since I’m not, it has made it extremely difficult for me to find a girlfriend and a suitable wife. Which is why sometimes I find myself forced to direct all my pent-up energy in a certain direction, that of the hair salon district, with red lanterns hanging high outside their doors. After about thirty minutes (I’m not being boastful here, you can ask the girls who work there), I would come out, feeling lighter, more relaxed, and reinvigorated. Which is also how, incidentally,

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