Dying is a Sad Game…

Harry Hogg
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

Dying is a sad game, even when you perfect the idea.

It may be that soon a Dummies Guide called — ‘The Art of Dying’ — will appear on bookshelves.

Take suicide, a serious subject. Simply put; the goal is to die. Primarily, most don’t achieve it, but flop around the idea, flirt with attempts, and some, often by pure accident, actually manage it.

Richard was that guy. He and I shared many a golf round together. Golf was a kind of communion. The place we would go to avoid reality. He played the game better than most. Not, however, the game of golf, at which we were both exceedingly poor, but at playing along. That’s why he’s my hero.

It’s much easier to write about people when they are dead; I don’t have to make some of their features perfect or their manners acceptable. Richard smoked a lot. He drank enough to be social and sometimes enough to be your best friend. The combination, you must believe, was a long term attempt at suicide. Fear not, all you smokers and drinkers, none of these habits killed Richard. No. His wife killed Richard.

The story is not complicated. Richard was a bastard, not literally, but generally speaking. He was a wealthy man by modern standards. Not a tycoon, just an ordinary millionaire who had guarded his money well, had invested wisely, or not at all, and only bet on certainties. The trick of Richard was that he knew people; he watched them and weighed up what chances they would take, which, as you’ll understand if you choose to continue reading the installments, made me the perfect foil. And, to be clear, for my part, no greater pleasure was had by any other living man.

Richard cared little for social graces but obeyed them at the side of his wife. Murder, you must understand, was a constant thought in the life of Mrs. Richard. It happened with monotonous regularity. It was the ‘how’ that caused her to stumble periodically from that chosen route; while he slept in the chair, afternoon or evening, was always a good time to ‘run him through’ she imagined, but that would only bring recriminations. So, for many years, Mrs. Richard amused herself with intuitive ideas on how to end her husband’s life.

She rarely spoke about her adventures into murderous thoughts, except to say something unambiguous like, “I’ll kill you myself.” Every time she caught him smoking in the garden shed and always laughed at by those of us who knew them.

So Richard worked on. The business had got past being his ‘baby.’ It had almost done the job of his wife years earlier. Wealth, I believed, was what turned him into a recluse, hiding away in his office with journals and papers while the money came rolling in.

Richard, in the local community, had become a legend of stories and folklore. You see, that was it with Richard; you could not dislike the man. Impossible, unless, of course, you happened to be married to him. Then it was straightforward. So this is my story. It will follow over the next several weeks in installments. We have a hero, a fool, and a woman who is hell bent on killing her husband.

I’m a writer; I can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Your role, if you choose to follow the story, is to enjoy Richard as I have done.

I can reveal to you that I’m a novelist. I’m also the owner of a vivid imagination. Meaning my first sentence may not be true. This fact is born out by my uncanny knack of inventing a lie for all and every occasion.

My mother told me that the truth would one day clobber me into the open…we will see.

Written by

Harry Hogg is a pseudonym. I was born in London, lived my youth on an island off the west coast of Scotland and now live part time in California.

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