Last Minutes
By FM
()
About this ebook
The last minutes of 10 people’s lives.
Did they make the right decision?
Or was it the stupidest thing they could have done under the circumstances?
Read more from Fm
Gone Girls Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Harvest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Temple of Yongzhou Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCasebook of Judge Chen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Elixir of Immortality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCollateral Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHomecoming Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Man Who Thought He Was An Assassin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories from the Village Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPast, Present, No Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Loan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKilling Under Duress Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Last Minutes
Related ebooks
Dipso Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Book of Instructions for Living With A Modern Woman in the USA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Will of Fate Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExit Nothing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath with a Cinnamon Sugar Twist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen No One’S Looking Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDosser's Dreams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Adjunct Down Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Monkeys Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Little Red Cafe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSomeone Like You Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDo Not Read This Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Joy (Not) of Online Dating. . . A Senior's Perspective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToo Good To Refuse Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How A Cowboy Saved This Bad Girl: How A Cowboy Saved This Bad Girl, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur Dangerous Lies: A Dexter Nash Novella, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHorse Latitudes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShe Has so Much to Say N Still Alone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBillionaire Secrets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWelcome to Castle Cove: A Design Your Destiny Novel, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Case of the Menacing Meandering Malevolent Manifestation of Muchrocks Manor: A Gan Greene P.I. Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWannabe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBanged: Blue Collar Bad Boys, #9 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5His Accidental Triplets - A BWWM Dark Mafia Romance: Ruthless Mafiosos, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDon of the Living Dead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIt's Best If You Don't Reach Out: The Unexceptional Late Thirties Male against Covid-19, Genital Herpes, and $18 an Hour Employment Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRavage (Book 3): Demon Riders MC, #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Barman Is Not a X-Men Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Zombie Apocalypse Call Center Box Set #1: The Zombie Apocalypse Call Center, #8 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDestiny and Pheromones Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Short Stories For You
The Stories of Ray Bradbury Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Skeleton Crew Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex and Erotic: Hard, hot and sexy Short-Stories for Adults Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lovecraft Country: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: A Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Tuesdays in Winter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Novices of Lerna Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Four Past Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Explicit Content: Red Hot Stories of Hardcore Erotica Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ficciones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfinished Tales Of Numenor And Middle-Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sour Candy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Tower: And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night Side of the River Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Scorched Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Last Minutes
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Last Minutes - FM
Last Minutes
By FM
Copyright 2019 FM
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
Other books by FM
Deli Owner
Freelancer
White Collar
College Student
Bus Passenger
High School Dropout
Village Girl
Teacher
Unemployed Girl
Insomniac
Other books by FM
Please visit your favourite ebook retailer to discover other books by FM:
Short Stories
The Loan
Stories from the Village
Last Minutes
The Nameless Wanderer Series
Homecoming
Collateral
Judge Chen Series
The Temple of Yongzhou
The Elixir of Immortality
Casebook of Judge Chen
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
In other words, nothing is real.
Deli Owner
I own a restaurant.
Or maybe I should call it a deli. After all, it’s only about the size of your average living room, and customers who come here often arrive by bus, bicycle, or on foot. The last time I saw someone getting out of a car in front of my diner had been an out-of-towner who gave the taxi driver the wrong address.
Still, it’s a business, and I own it. In a way, you can even say I am a boss, or an entrepreneur. If I register a company, then I would be a CEO. Not bad, huh.
And I have two employees. Granted, one of them is my nephew who, on any given day, is more likely to be found in the alley behind the deli than in the kitchen, texting his imaginary girlfriend on the Internet, who I suspect will turn out to be a forty-year-old man with an unshaved beard and living in a cramped apartment.
The other employee . . . never mind. He’s not much better. He’s fifty-four years old this year, and as deaf as they come. Customers would place an order, watch him write down the wrong one, shuffle to the kitchen, and come back half an hour later with a fresh notepad, What did you order again?
It’s a wonder the deli has survived for so long.
Three years. Longer than about 75% of the start-ups who are on my street. I’ve seen the shop on my left being let and sub-let so many times, I’ve lost track of who’s the tenant there and what shady business they are engaged in.
Most recently, though, the new tenant pissed me off. I don’t own the deli. It’s a lease. My landlord also owns the two adjacent shops. But any landlord with a brain would have known not to lease out the shop space to competitors in the same business.
I sell breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I sell wontons, noodles, fried rice, claypot, and anything that the customer wants to eat, except for shark’s fin and abalone. The idiot landlord, who shall remain nameless and who is currently spending the winter in tropical Hainan, has decided that one more deli doesn’t hurt.
Yet, my new neighbour on the left is another restaurant.
At least I was here first, and have, through legal and illegal means, built up a customer base. Legal means would be vouchers, discounts to repeat customers, and of course, sometimes helping the husband lie to the wife about his whereabouts. Illegal means would be . . . Well, if they are illegal, then I shouldn’t tell you about them, should I?
Ah what the heck. It’s not like I’m going to live after this anyway. And even if I do survive, by some miracle, the crime I will have committed will land me in far hotter water than . . . Fine I’ll tell you. Occasionally, here and there, I drop a poppy capsule into the soup or the dish. It’s nothing more than dried pericarp of the opium poppy plant. Supposedly, it contains more than twenty types of alkaloids, including those found in morphine and cocaine. So, you know, customers would want to come back for more.
There, you know my secret recipe now.
But even with this secret weapon (mind you, poppy capsules are not cheap. I can’t use too many of them too often, as it would attract the attention of the authorities, at the same raise the cost of operation), my business took a hit after the neighbour opened up.
They sell breakfast only. Which is dumb, if you ask me. If you only cater to the breakfast crowd, what do you do with the shop for the remaining 16 hours of the day? If it were me, I would have set up mahjong tables. You know, grab an egg omelette wrapped in bacon to go, but if you don’t feel like heading into work today, I can fake the voice of a doctor and help you call in sick to your boss, and you stay for a round of mahjong, or maybe two rounds. And I serve you tea and dried watermelon seeds, in exchange for part of your winnings.
Not a bad business idea, eh?
But the idiot who owns the breakfast diner apparently is not as business-savvy as me. He would sell porridge, fried youtiao, and some other kind of dish to the throng of office workers who are on their way to work, dressed in identical suits and equally boring shoes, with a uniform zombie-like expression on their face.
After 9.30 am, the crowd thins, and he would shut down.
His name is a common one, the kind of name parents liked to pick in the 40s and 50s. Let’s just call him Old Lao, as he is really old, in his fifties. And he is really short. Probably less than 1.6 metres. He hails from one of the southern provinces that are renowned for the number of millionaires and billionaires, but apparently he isn’t one of them.
What does he do after Old Lao closes for the day? I am not being nosy. It’s just that there simply aren’t a lot of customers from 10 to 11.30 am, so I have some free time, and I happen to spend it glancing at his direction.
Old Lao would bring down the rolling gate, secure the lock, spit into his hands, and use it to smooth out his hair (I know, disgusting, right? I mean, it’s not like hair gel is a luxury good nowadays). After this ritual of grooming is done, he would put both spit-stained hands in his pockets, and strut off down the street.
I know where he is headed.
He has rented a small apartment not far from his diner. Or should it be called a breakfast nook? Anyway, he lives with someone. That someone is a woman, who is in her fifties, and who must have been hit hard in the head for her to fall for someone like Old Lao. Rumour has it that she used to be a streetwalker, you know, lady of the night, or more commonly, a whore. I guess it has to be true—only someone like that would be able to turn a blind eye to the toad-like appearance of Old Lao and lay beneath him, listening to his pig-like grunts and enduring his sporadic thrusts, all the while counting down the minute she could get out of there, fifty yuan richer.
Anyway, whatever her old profession was, my impression of her deteriorated at an exponential rate after I learnt that she and Old Lao have hooked up. Have some self-esteem, woman!
Maybe Old Lao met her on the job. I know he’s not married. There may have been children back home, but he never talks about them. An adult man, living alone, with some cash to spare, would want some company.
For now, let’s just call her Old Tai.
I don’t care what the kids call it nowadays: shacking up, test marriage, having fun . . . As long as they are not married to each other and they live together, sharing the same bed, they are a couple living in sin. I like the comfort of knowing that different levels of hell await them after they die, which is going to be very soon, if I have my way.
She would go to the Chamber of Tongue Ripping first, for she is a consummate gossip. I have no proof, but in my guts I know she’s the one who spread the word that I’m a faggot. Not that I have anything against being gay, but since I’m not, it has made it extremely difficult for me to find a girlfriend and a suitable wife. Which is why sometimes I find myself forced to direct all my pent-up energy in a certain direction, that of the hair salon district, with red lanterns hanging high outside their doors. After about thirty minutes (I’m not being boastful here, you can ask the girls who work there), I would come out, feeling lighter, more relaxed, and reinvigorated. Which is also how, incidentally,