Mad John
John sat at the bus stop thinking to himself if he’d like to have a sandwich or not, only to decide against it a few moments later. He played with his fingers, scrutinizing each individual cuticle, realizing that he hadn’t clipped his nails in quite some time. He had a lot to think about, after all. He was getting on this train to visit his mother.
A roaring locomotive steamed past, sending a flurry of debris into the air.
“What a mad, mad world,” John said to himself as he watched trash idle in the sky. Then he stood and took a step off of the platform, falling underneath it all into oblivion.
John worked at a factory where he assured the quality of rivets before they were sent out to various construction sites across the country. He stood in a line for eight hours every day and fingered several metallic objects for split seconds at a time. He had learned to differentiate between a good rivet and a bad rivet by touch alone, and thus slept his way through the day.
John knew the Anti-Christ was coming the day he ran out of rivets.
“What are you doing?” asked his supervisor as he walked towards the exit.
“I’m going to visit my mother,” he said, remembering the day she died ten years prior. “I’m not going to stick around for this!”