Three Years Ago

I saw it again today. This time it was for real.

I happened to glance out of my window while on my break, and it was there.

Again.

Just for a second.

I saw it.

It saw me.

It was watching me.

And I’m terrified.

I know what I must do.

Three years ago. That was the first time I ever held a smartphone.

Her smartphone.

Didn’t I tell you? I’m a liar. A bad liar.

I don’t just get drunk once a year. It’s more like once a week, fifty or more times a year.

I don’t have a wife, or family. I wouldn’t know how it feels.

I was driving back from an office party, one night in December three years ago. I would have failed any police drunk test, but with astounding luck I was not stopped.

I passed by a bridge, Kingdom Bridge. It’s named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Nobody was about, or so I thought.

I can’t have been thinking clearly. In fact, I know I wasn’t.

The first indication I had of anything being wrong was the sickening crunch of flesh beneath my wheels.

A little girl had been out tonight.

She was crying and crying and crying. Nothing I could do would slow the flow of tears.  I stopped it, the only way I knew how.

She stopped crying as soon as her neck was broken. From then, it was only a matter of minutes to tie rocks to her corpse and let it sink into the river below.

I’d already taken the phone from her pocket. I knew then that they might try and track it somehow, so I crushed it beneath my foot. Down into the river it went as well.

Three years ago.

Three years ago I held a smartphone for the first time.

- John Thomas

Office Secretary

Fieldworker Administrations