The Right Thing (PG)

Here: have another rage fic! It's super short, but once again, I needed to vent.

*****

I got in the car. He did the right thing.

I drove up the hill. He did the right thing.

I reached the summit. He did the right thing.

I stumbled on my way to the grave site, one of my black heels sinking into a patch of mud. It had rained the previous night, and slate-gray clouds still lingered in the sky, grim and threatening. A hand caught my elbow - I don’t know whose - and I righted myself, pulling my shoe from the sucking mire with a sickening slurp. He did the right thing.

I sat down beneath a fluttering canopy on a plastic folding chair and stared straight ahead at my son’s coffin. It was blue with gold accents, a nod to plans interrupted. The weekend Matt died, he was supposed to be packing for Annapolis. He made another choice instead — one that led to a brief hospital stay and - eventually - a closed-casket wake. The funeral home could only do so much, after all. But he did the right thing.

Didn’t he?

Everyone had said so the day I agreed to turn off Matt’s life support. Even his closest friend had said so when he stood to deliver Matt’s eulogy in the sanctuary of the ransacked church which stood a hundred yards below. He did the right thing. He was a good person. He took the beating like he was supposed to.   

An image rose unbidden before my mind’s eye: Matt lying still in that ICU bed, surrounded by beeping machines, most of his swollen face obscured by white bandages that held his battered flesh in place. One of his assailants had cut him with a pocket knife; the other had bludgeoned him about the skull with a metal baseball bat. But Matt didn’t fight back. He’d made a mistake at first; he thought he could protect Mr. Jefferson’s drug store. But in the end, he recognized his error, and he did his duty. He put down his gun — and he submitted. Because he knew what was just, the sweet boy.

Someone pushed a packet of tissues into my right hand, and I realized - with a twinge of horror - that my face was wet. Dear God, what’s wrong with me? Matt did the right thing! I’d spent the entire day mentally repeating this like a mantra, yet my white woman’s tears still came just the same. I thought I had done the work, but I was still a manipulative monster. I was still centering my own selfish, privileged desires. I was still refusing to accept this balancing of the scales. But our kind must be held accountable. We are the reason much is wrong with the world.

The pastor spoke. The coffin was lowered into the freshly-dug pit. Flowers and dirt were scattered atop its glistening lid. And presently, the small crowd faded away, leaving me alone to watch black smoke rise from Main Street — and contemplate my reckoning.

End.