"The Fall"

By Izzy Viglione

For as long as Rivendale has been a city, the Wall has existed. The Wall is a unique marvel of the world that currently holds back enough water to swallow the city whole. It stands proudly on the North side of town, stretching up the crevice in the high cliff. It is a symbol of power to everyone who sees it, but also an impending fear for the day that it falls. Today it gained one more title. Today it became a tombstone for a man named Gregory Chanson.

Tobias leans over the guard rail and looks down the side of the wall to the city street, his coal black hair wavering in the cold breeze coming from the South. Greg must have hit terminal velocity before he was even half way down. He probably didn't feel a thing. That didn't make this right, though. In all its years of standing, Greg was probably the third person to jump from the Wall. People just didn't kill themselves like that. Suicide always seemed more private to the desperate folk of Rivendale. Few people wanted this kind of attention when they died. Attention is never a good thing in a town whose name rhymes with "sin".

"Why are you wasting your time on this guy, Tobias? It's just another bastard who thought life wasn't much better than the alternative."

Tobias stepped back and stared off behind his cold glasses. Why would Greg jump? Tobias pulled out a cigarette and lit it with the finesse of a man who's done it a hundred times before. "Do you believe in fate, Brian? Do you believe that things happen because they were meant to happen?"

Brian is a man of some sort of middle-eastern descent. He's lived in America for most of his life, however, and only gave away his heritage through his appearance. He's human, though; one of the few cops that actually cared about doing the right thing and saving people instead of earning a decent paycheck. Clutching his coat tighter as the breeze picked up, he tried to answer Tobias's question.

"How many times are you going to ask that? I think shit just happens, Maddox. Shit happens and you can't always explain it. Not everything can be relevant."

Tobias lets out a puff of smoke into the sky, almost like a signal to the divine. He's asking someone out there if they can answer his question. "I know you're parents died before you were old enough to know them, Brian. I know you've been shuffled off among foster parents, always being seen as a nuisance of some sort or another. The fact that you kept a last name at all is surprising. Records say your mother may have been raped months before your birth, and you think you may be a bastard as well as an orphan. You've murdered people, and this calling of yours is some sort of penance for all the sins you've made against the world. I know you Brian. I know everyone Brian. It's my job to know everyone. Now, answer my question with a it more thought than 'shit happens.'"

Tobias had bite. His voice came out so cold and calculating he made you feel like a number. No one was human. Everyone was just another calculation in the grand formula of the universe.

"That's what I think, Tobias. I can't it any better. I think everyone is given a choice to do right or do wrong, and this sends them to life or death. Stuff happens because people make choices. Choices have consequences. The world is just one big choice between heaven and hell."

"So this man jumped because he had a choice to jump or not jump. He jumped from this wall because he had the choice to jump from this specific location and not somewhere else. Is that it? So in the end, we are our own problem and no one else's? We have no one to blame but ourselves? I'll tell you what I think: I think we're all destined to walk the same path, only this path is so huge that we aren't aware that everyone is on the same road. This path was once small, but so many have stepped off the beaten path and forged their own that the beaten path is now the only path. I think you don't understand Gregory. I knew him, too. He was a kind man who did what he could to try and help this city defeat itself. He did what he could to try and save people from the shit that happens every day. He thought people deserved to get out of hell, and he did his very best to give them that chance. He had a family and friends that would have died for him. He was worth more than half the men in this city, and all the sudden he decides to jump off of the Wall. Not his twenty-second floor of his office, but the Wall. Tell me there's not something more going on here than shit, and I'll tell you someone who's about to see more shit happen over the next few days."

Tobias just stood and stared down towards the city. Rivendale was a city that rhymed with sin, but he also wondered if it rhymed with hope, too. Tobias wondered what chances this city had and getting better. And he wondered if he was full of shit, too. He wondered if Brian might be right and people really do have a choice. But could they simply be destined to make the wrong choice?