The Briefcase: Day One

The Briefcase:
Day One

 

Mark sat at his local bus-stop, grimy, damp and with shattered glass scattered where a timetable once lived. A terrible place for any human to be at 7am, never mind under the dark grey clouds that blanketed over the town, pissing down rain in a fashion that seemed to be a direct message to Mark. The message of course, was a giant fuck you.

Moving his toes through his wet socks, which were acting as both a towel and plug for the holes in his shoes, Mark let out a long, defeated sigh. The day was a write off and it had barely begun, he hadn't even really started his daily pilgrimage to work. The joys of a nine till five life, getting home to an empty house by seven, dinner at eight and bed by ten. Rinse and repeat.

God he missed her.  Everything was going as planned, the mortgage, the engagement and hell, he was even starting to grow attached to the revolting dog. Seven years gone just like that, what a waste. His brother Matthew assured him that time would heal all, all the clichéd crap that an elder sibling spouts out as wisdom. A self-righteous asshole pretending to give a damn but really using his little brother’s anguish to stroke his own ego.

Mark didn't hate his brother, he just resented him. He was jealous of his sibling’s success, his attractive wife, his lucrative job and his obscenely extravagant house - Mark was currently living in a flat that even squatters would turn their nose up at. Still, in the fallout of the breakout, Mark had discovered with envy that his previously close friends had moved on, matured, grown up, living the life that Mark was inches away from achieving himself. He was lonely and genuinely looked forward for his twice-a-week pint with his brother.

In fact, to Marks distress, his closest acquaintance with a non-relative was his drug dealer. Mark had begun to smoke cannabis more and more to mask his spiralling depressive thoughts, plus it helped him sleep, something he was struggling with increasingly. Petr was a Polish immigrant that was perhaps a little unstable and a tad unpredictable. Mark had met him trying to sell drugs to teenagers at school, it turned out the drugs were just smarties. He would tell his origin tale differently every time, changing details so they were more impressive upon the next hearing, he truly did live in his own little world. But he was reliable to Mark and had the ability to conjure something from nothing, be it money, a badly thought out plan or the herb that Mark bought from him. He was the King Midas of petty crime.

The bus arrived, as was standard, five minutes late. A wave of puddle water crashed onto Mark, the epilogue of the fuck you message from the clouds. He boarded his modern day Charon, paid the driver his obol and sat back in the just-about comfy chair and closed his eyes as the vehicle started its early journey across the tarmacked river to his destination, the Underworld aka Work.

As Mark's eyelids flickered on and off, desperately wanting to escape to sleep, he noticed something sitting alone on the seat to the right of him, a black, leather-bound suitcase. He looked around him, remembering that apart from himself and the driver, the only other passenger was the old aged pensioner that took 16 minutes (he counted) to board. He dismissed the thought that it belonged to her, she could barely hold her head up. He shifted rather suspiciously across to the other seat, the briefcase was surprisingly heavy, as if full of lead and was securely closed. The bizarre thing that stood out to Mark was the lock. Its series of characters on the combinations neither words nor numbers but strange symbols, almost alien.

Mark, overpowered by curiosity, clung to the briefcase for the rest of the journey and, shocking even himself, he proceeded to take it off the bus and with him to work, neglecting to hand it in or even ask the other two people on the bus. For the first time in months, Mark had managed to find something that distracted him from the regrets that plagued him.

KRS 2013