Diatribes

Fiction

He kept screaming at the top of his lungs: “We’re all going to jail”. His colleagues and coworkers, riveted but bewildered by this sudden bout of rage, were not sure what to make of this. Was his ranting diatribe an early onset of some rare case of Turret’s syndrome or was he really expressing fear based on concrete evidence? Scott was after all a top dog at HAP, the fastest growing advertising company in the West Coast. He was someone to always be taken seriously and not simply for his typical yet sudden almost manic rages.

The golden rim of his Versace glasses, long ago dull and scratched by his constant nervous habit of wiping them with his dry fingers, were perhaps the harbinger of less shiny times to come. But for now, not a single soul at this last extravagant Caribbean executive meeting, or “networking event” as his cronies liked to call it, could have fathomed that this would be Scott's last trip outside his cell. Not even Gustavo, his most trusted childhood friend, the man with an almost uncanny ability to foresee the tides of change, could see it coming.

Scott, red with anger continued to attack the shocked executives who still wondered when this joke was going to end. “This is a Ponzi scheme. They are on my tail and I swear, I will NOT be the only one going down. I’ll bring all of your asses down to the slammer with me if that’s what I have to do!!” “Ya cálmate, coño”, whispered Gustavo. “We can still fix this. Don’t worry about it” As Gustavo spoke, Scott, still lost in his mad stupor, swallowed three of his tranquilizer pills. He had to stop the buzzing in his ears and somehow these tablets did the trick.


... to be continued ...