A short story - Harvey
Harvey
Harvey looked in the bathroom mirror, he hadn’t shaved in a week, he looked a mess, red bloodshot eyes stared back him, his pupils dilated, and the normally clear blue eyes looking cloudy and troubled.
He noticed his skin now had an overly pale almost opaque complexion, the skin so translucent that it almost glowed white and insipid, like the young Goths he had seen around town, trying to look like cool outsiders, but instead looking like yet another teenage clan, just another identity that the world forced upon you, forcing you to choose a tribe. It had been the same when he was a kid; he had been a crusty looking grunge kid with unwashed long black hair, the hair now long gone along with all those years too.
He looked down at his hands, inspecting his nails; he was surprised to see he had bitten into them so hard and so frequently that he had torn the flesh from the sides of his fingers.
He sighed to himself and walked over to the bathroom scales, getting on the digital reader, the little screen told him he had lost another five pounds this week. At the start of the year he had weighed, over two hundred pounds, now he weighed in at about one hundred and fifty.
How had he let himself get into such a state, was it a woman, a failed relationship, a death in the family, worries at work, or the stress of a deadline?
No it was none of the above, it was one thing.
Routine
A pretty big thing when you think about it, he didn’t give himself over to much deep thinking, he wasn’t a natural philosopher or anything, just a regular guy, but a guy who just now, more than ever, felt weighed down by all the mundane petty insignificant everyday stuff that plagued this forty something man’s life.
He had thought that he would be able to shake off all the repetitious nonsense of his life given his current circumstances, but somehow he just couldn’t.
He left the bathroom and walked down the small hall that led to his study, he had no family, no wife, no kids, but he did have this luxury apartment and a shed load of money. He entered the room and resumed his position on his black leather swivel chair; he looked at the computer screen in front of him, he checked the morning trades again.
He was up.
He had made more money in the last five years than he had in the twenty before that. He had been a gambler, then one day he had sat down with a copy of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and he looked at the shares, stocks and bonds and had realised he was gambling in the wrong game.
He had used formulas in his gambling career, but they had never really paid off, people said you couldn’t use maths and statistics and probability ratios to plot if a horse would win, or when a jockey would fall off.
And they had been right.
But he had used those same techniques at the stock markets and he had won, he had found a winning formula.
And won
And won
And won
And won
And as he had won, he had forgotten, forgotten to shave, forgotten to wash, forgotten to eat, but he hadn’t forgotten to smoke.
And now he had all the money in the world and three months to spend it in but he would not leave his apartment, not now, because the little things would not let go of his soul, the little things, the urge, the drive, the addiction, not his addiction to nicotine, his addiction to the formula, his winning formula, he would stay in this study and he would make yet more money. Routine, Routine, Routine…..
Six moths later….
The small round policeman shifted in the office chair, he was impatient, he wanted to get home to his wife and kids, it was pizza night, and he loved it even more than his eleven year old twin sons, ‘Yeah, well they reckon he died about three months ago, nobody noticed till the neighbour complained about a smell coming out of the doorway and into the communal hall, anyway how did you get on, found out what he died of yet?’
The mortuary pathologist smiled at the small policeman, the policeman’s physical polar opposite, the pathologist was tall and thin, as he leaned forward over his desk he read from the file he had prepared earlier on this Harvey character.
He replied to his friend of more than twenty years, ‘Hey Frank, well this was an interesting one, normally this sort of ‘late body find’ is a heart attack, or a overlooked stroke victim, this guy died of a combination of an aggressive form of lung cancer and malnutrition. No foul play involved though, just the usual, a man dying with no known family and nobody to find the body. Oh, and he died around the 14th of March’.
Frank raised an eyebrow, the pathologist noticed the little tic, a tremor that Frank had when he was intrigued by something, ‘Well Dave, I’ll tell you what puzzles me, the guy was still trading on the 14th, his last trade was at 11.23 in the morning. How can a guy love money so much, that he would be trading on the day he died for God’s sake! Can somebody really love money that much? He had nearly seven million dollars in the bank, now the Government will get it anyhow, he had no will, and his got no family’.
Dave shook his head, ‘Well, it’s a puzzle I’ll grant you. I don’t reckon it was the money though, I mean greed that is. He could still have eaten more, looked after himself, got help in, he could have bought himself a couple of extra months that way. At least he could have enjoyed what little life he had left to him’.
The policeman took his jacket from the back of the chair and rose to leave, ‘I reckon it was an addiction, just like any other, booze, drugs, but in his case he had an overwhelming urge to win, he had a journal on his computer, he reckoned he had found a winning formula, he called it the Routine, personally I reckon he had a run of good luck, just like any gambler. Well I guess I can close the case anyhow now. I’d better be off otherwise Julie will have my hide. You want a lift home Dave?’
Dave rose quickly to his feet, closing the paper file on his desk. ‘Sure, why not. Frank, now about this formula, this Routine…
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Originally Posted by Shankbot12
Thanks I'm glad you appreciated it, its a move away from my standard works, that are mostly about heroics with swords 
Are you calling me uneducated? 
