Pain Killer 2.0

By A. A. McGowan

A short story that captures paranoia, disgust and anxiety with a bit of humor. Follow Mike - pessimistic, out of time and out of luck. Just when you think things couldn't get worse...

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. A. McGowan
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301017782

A. A. McGowan

I was born in a small, dying steel mill town in northern West Virginia; brought up on a steady diet of Sci-Fi, Horror and The 3 Stooges. I have a deep appreciation and love of history. Now I live on the outskirts of Pittsburgh... waiting.

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Pain Killer 2.0

By A.A. McGowan

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 A.A. McGowan

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Beginning

Middle

End

Pain Killer 2.0

Trying to wrap his mind around the fact that we all begin to die at the moment of conception, he listened to the pops and cracks as he rolled his wrist around. The finite amount of cartilage between the bones was ever diminishing. The TV was on, but he couldn’t say what the show was. Like so many things, it had become nothing more than backwash. He watched Brittany flip through pairs of pants. The pairs of black straight-leg skinny jeans all looked the same to him. She, however, would always point out the nuanced differences. She had to wear the same dark green shirt to work that he did, but the pants, as long as they were black, were open season.

He thought she was what you would call attractive. She swiped her long straight hair from her face and tried, unsuccessfully, to tuck it behind her ear. Her breasts hung free, looking like sharp stalactites every time she bent over. He jokingly told her once she should get a butterfly tattoo on her left breast, or at least on her ankle, to go along with the tramp stamp on the small of her back, some weird design that he couldn’t decipher. And she had a Chinese symbol on the back of her neck. It stood for a word. Not that she knew what that word was. She liked the way it looked. She gave him the bird when he made his smart-ass remarks.

Now she didn’t even know he was in the room. She straightened and shook her head and pulled her tiny panties up over her narrow hips. Her legs were kind of nice, he thought. But too short. Along with her narrow hips, they made her torso seem way too long. Her long brown hair slid over her shoulder. Individual strands brushed her little brown nipples. Mike sat up, still rolling his wrist.

All those pants are the same, he said. Any will do for work.

No, they aren’t. They’re nothing alike. She held a pair up to the dim TV light. Damn it. I think these have a stain on them.

With his view blocked by the jeans, he started to zone out again. The crunching in his wrist became louder. He was pushing thirty. He tried to force that thought out of his head. He had nothing to show for it. Sadly, he realized he wasn’t zoning out, he was thinking again.

He hadn’t done anything atrocious in his life, nothing too exciting. He had courted no real danger, had played it smart, he thought. He thought about all