Stan
You were waiting at a crosswalk when someone you didn’t recognize started waving from across the street.
Stan.
Stan is a nice man. Stan is a smart man. Stan is a software engineer and enjoys his job very much. And, despite the fact that Stan had just that morning started using the next hole in his belt, Stan also enjoyed lunch.
After a hearty lunch, Stan started on his walk back to his car. Standing at the crosswalk that separated him from the parking lot, he thought. He thought the thoughts of a software engineer. Out loud. “Did I check my work into version control? Is there a code review today? Did the new guy submit a pull request yet?” Stan often talks to himself.
Like any other introvert, Stan lived inside of his own head most of the time, oblivious to the world around him. That may be why he was caught off guard when the stranger on the other side of the crosswalk started to wave at him. Naturally, Stan began thinking of ways to appear to not notice the slightly pudgy man. The crosswalk sign lit up, granting him passage across the street. Despite the mock interest in his cell phone’s lock screen, Stan couldn’t help but notice the stranger’s disheveled appearance. The closer Stan got to the other side of the street, the more he contemplated just flat-out ignoring the unkempt man.
“Hey, excuse me sir,” the man said. The stranger seemed to be favoring his ribs. There were fresh bruises on his face and his hair was a mess, but despite it all, the man smiled. It wasn’t quite a happy smile, though. He looked more eager and desperate than anything. That made Stan hesitant. With a nod of acknowledgement, Stan kept on walking toward the parking lot. His car was in sight.
“I’m sorry to bother you sir, but I just need a little bit of change. See, my phone and my wallet have been stolen, and I…”
Stan sighed and stopped walking. The stranger almost bumped into him from behind. “Okay, okay,” Stan said, turning to face the man. “Dude… You look pretty bad. You gon’ be alright?” Despite Stan’s aversion to social interactions with strangers, he felt concerned when he took a good look at the man. The stranger didn’t reply. He simply rubbed his hands together. The man’s smile faded a bit into something more sorrowful than anything else, as if he was reliving what must have just happened to him. Stan retrieved a handful of change from his pocket and then handed it over to the man.
Clearly delighted, the unkempt man took the change and then wrapped his arms around Stan for a big hug. Pulling Stan in close, the man whispered into his ear. His voice was somewhat shaky, and with the sounds of the traffic filling the air, his words were hard to decipher. Stan could only pick out a few words. “Passing.” “Burden.” “Schmoe.” Maybe, the guy was happy that someone helped him with his burden in passing, Stan figured.
With a good deed fresh on his mind, Stan continued toward his car. The stranger darted off in the opposite way, walking briskly across the street. Turning to get one last look at the man, Stan saw that the crosswalk was no longer saying, “Walk”
Stan.
Stan is a nice man. Stan is a smart man. Stan has just witnessed a very gruesome scene, and now Stan is in shock.
An hour had passed since it happened. Stan was in his car, just sitting there and staring at the dashboard blankly. He replayed the scene of the unkempt man being swiped out of sight by a speeding vehicle over and over until something in him just popped. Bile rose in his throat, causing him to frantically struggle with the handle of the door. Just in time, he kicked the door open and stuck his head out to empty his stomach.
“Get it together, Stan,” he told himself. Stan often talks to himself.
With his mind clouded by the sudden happenings of that afternoon, Stan had forgotten that he was supposed to be at work. His mind craved to think about anything other than the unkempt man, so he willingly let it latch onto work-related thoughts. Version control. Code review. Pull request. With his thoughts realigned with work-related matters and his constitution shaky at best, he finally started his car and was on his way back to the office.
“You missed the code review, Stan.” That was Marcus. Vice President of Technical Operations. Marcus, a former software engineer for the company, was very enthusiastic about code reviews. Marcus made Stan nervous.
Stan attempted to explain why he was late, but all that came out was a jumble of unintelligible sounds. Marcus frowned and checked his watch before walking away and shaking his head. Feeling heavy with worry and grief, Stan lurched back to his homely cubicle.
“Ok, let’s deploy this code… Deployment time…” Stan often talks to himself. His fingers danced across the keyboard with a level of skill that ten years in the industry would only provide. His skilled fingers talked to the network in Ubuntu and the network talked back. Just as a sense of ease was beginning to come over Stan, the server croaked back a few lines of red text. Stan’s sense of ease had turned into a sense of dread. Frantically, he scraped the development server for missing files. He looked for failed unit tests. He even uninstalled and re-installed several gemsets and third-party libraries that the server’s operation depended on. And, much like the unkempt man, the server crashed.
The crashing server brought back the idea of the car crashing into the unfortunate man from earlier. Along with those memories came a familiar feeling in his stomach. And along with that feeling came even more of his lunch. In the midst of it all, he found himself wondering how he still had something left to throw up. A wave of surprise and disgust washed over the cubicle farm.
“Stan, what in the…” That was Marcus again. “Dude, take the rest of the day off. No, just leave the computer. I’ll… well, somebody’ll clean it up.”
With a vomit stained shirt and the mental capacity of scrambled eggs, Stan moseyed on out of the office. Every eye in the room was on him, but he was too catatonic to feel anxiety. Once he got outside, he took a deep breath of fresh air. It gave him a moment to think about things.
“Why me? I mean, what is this, reverse karma?” Stan often talks to himself. He continued to do so as he made his way to his car. “All I did was give a guy some change.” After taking a moment to decide that his head was clear enough for him to drive, Stan started his car and drove off. Traffic was slow near the crosswalk from earlier. Police cars and firetrucks were blocking lanes. Stan figured they were cleaning up the messy scene from earlier. His stomach twisted and he dry heaved, grateful that his intestines were empty this time. But the closer he got to the crosswalk the more he dreaded passing by it. Fortunately (or maybe “unfortunately”), the staccato sound of his car’s engine coughing meant that he might not have to pass the crosswalk. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he did both as he pulled into the same parking lot from earlier. His car shut off just as he pulled into a parking space, and so did his hopes of salvaging the rest of his terrible day.
“Ok, what gives?” Stan often talks to himself. “I witnessed a guy get hit by a car. Then I miss Marcus’ code review. And then, I crash the servers and puke all over the place. And now my car is dead all of a sudden. What’s next? Am I gonna spontaneously combust now?” Stan was distraught. For a moment he seriously wondered if he would suddenly catch fire. When it didn’t happen, he decided to call a tow truck. If it weren’t for the “No overnight parking” sign, he would have just left the car there and called someone for a ride.
After making the call, he waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Hours later, the tow truck arrived. The driver was a skinny middle-aged man who looked as rough around the edges as his old truck did. He held a clipboard in one hand and a lit cigar in the other. “You pay before I hitch you up. Where you headed?” Not one for conversation, Stan didn’t mind that the tow truck driver skipped the pleasantries.
“Celina,” Stan said, bracing for impact, waiting to hear how much it would cost.
“I’ll charge you one-hundred.”
After checking his wallet, Stan realized he didn’t have any cash. That familiar feeling of dread returned as he looked up to the tow truck driver without an ounce of hope left.
“No cash, no tow. Sorry, bub.”
The driver left. Stan stood there with his wallet in his hand, watching the tow truck driver drive away. For a long time, he just stood there. He stood there until a group of rowdy youngsters approached. They were not nearly as friendly as the tow truck driver.
“Ah, ain’t the city nice. You got people just handing over their wallets freely. I didn’t even need to point my gun this time.” That was the tattooed ring leader of the group, apparently. The other youngsters laughed as their leader lifted his shirt. More tattoos. A stab wound or two. A shiny silver gun tucked into his sagging pants.
Stan just didn’t have any emotion left in him. He simply handed over his wallet and continued to stand there silently. Snatching it out of his hand, the tattooed youngster smiled. “Thank you for your courtesy, sir,” he said sarcastically. The last thing Stan heard before they jumped on him for no good reason at all was their laughter. The last thing he saw was a tattooed fist getting larger and larger in his field of vision.
There was no telling how much later it was when Stan woke up. His head was pounding with pain, as was his entire body. His clothing was ripped and there was blood in his mouth. Propping himself up against his car, he sat on the ground. He found his mind wondering back to the unkempt stranger from earlier that day.
“What did that guy say?” Stan often talks to himself. “Something about a burden. Something about a schmoe.” Bits and pieces of what the man said were gradually coming back to him as he sat there. The sun was long gone, and so was the foot traffic in the area. He had no idea what time it was. All he could think about was the unkempt stranger’s puzzling words. Eventually, it all began to make sense to Stan.
“He called me a schmoe… He said something about passing the burden… I’m cursed. He cursed me. That must be it.” It was a ridiculous notion for such a logic-minded man as Stan. His whole world was literally ones and zeros, but with his mind as broken as it had been, he had given up on logic. His patch of misfortune was unnatural. It was illogical. No one just suddenly has a string of bad luck as bad as Stan had had. He genuinely believed it was a curse put on him by the unkempt stranger.
Stan had read his share of fiction. Science fiction, fantasy fiction, and everything in between. It sounded crazy, but the only way to get rid of a curse, as far as Stan knew, was to pass it on to another poor, unfortunate soul. Desperately, his eyes began scanning the area. For a while, he didn’t see anyone. Eventually, he saw a nicely dressed man standing at the crosswalk across the street. The fact that the man didn’t start crossing the empty street until the crosswalk sign lit up made Stan think he was a pretty nice guy. Too bad, though. Stan had to get rid of that dreaded curse.
Stan began to wave at the man. The man nodded politely as he started crossing the street. Once he made it all the way across, Stan took a deep breath and approached him. The man seemed a bit on guard. Stan was worried that he wouldn’t have enough patience to hear him out.
“Hey, excuse me sir,” Stan said. Stan was favoring his ribs. There were fresh bruises on his face and his hair was a mess, but despite it all, Stan smiled. It wasn’t quite a happy smile, though. He looked more eager and desperate than anything. That made the man hesitant. With a nod of acknowledgement, the man kept on walking toward the parking lot.
“I’m sorry to bother you sir, but I just need a little bit of change. See, my phone and my wallet have been stolen, and I…”
The man sighed and stopped walking. Stan almost bumped into him from behind. “Okay, okay,” the man said, turning to face Stan. “Dude… You look pretty bad. You gon’ be alright?” Despite the man’s apparent aversion to social interactions with strangers, he seemed concerned when he took a good look at Stan. Stan didn’t reply. He simply rubbed his hands together. Stan’s smile faded a bit into something more sorrowful than anything else, as if he was reliving what had happened to him earlier. The man retrieved a handful of change from his pocket and then handed it over to Stan.
Clearly delighted, Stan took the change and then wrapped his arms around the man for a big hug. Pulling the man in close, Stan whispered into his ear. His voice was somewhat shaky, but without the sounds of traffic filling the air, his words were clear enough to understand. “I’m passing on this burden of woe to a generous, unsuspecting schmoe…”
The man was a bit puzzled by what Stan had said to him, but with a good deed fresh on his mind, the man continued toward his car. Stan darted off in the opposite way, walking briskly across the street. Turning to get one last look at the man, Stan saw that the crosswalk sign was no longer saying, “Walk”.
Christopher Roberson is a father, author, and introverted software engineer. Follow him on Medium and be on the lookout for more of his short stories. Fantasy-fiction, Sci-fi, bedtime stories, etc.
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