The Death of Teddy Smith (standard:Psychological fiction, 1380 words)
Author: Jeff Webster	Added: Mar 10 2004	Views/Reads: 4022/2381	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A teenager attends his friend's funeral visitation and observes the people around him in what has been described as a "shocking" tale of fate, karma, and the inevitable end we all have to face.

The Death of Teddy Smith 

At the age of nineteen, my close friend of three years, Teddy Smith, was
dead. I remember standing in line at the funeral home, waiting in line 
to sign the guest book and give my respects to his immediate family, 
and I remember how I had to stand behind the most loud, obnoxious 
person in the entire place. I remember the smell: the repulsive odor 
that everyone knows represents death, although not many have taken the 
time to smell a corpse before. One more thing I remember is the talk 
inside the funeral home, all of the personal reasons, the 
under-the-breath rumors: "I heard it all started when he lost his 
girlfriend." 

"No, it must have been when his parents were divorced." 

"I heard he had problems at home with his mother." 

Obviously, I was the only person around who knew Teddy Smith. Ted would
never let anything get in his way of having a good time. He was always 
the party animal, first to brag about his fake ID, and as a result, 
first in line to buy beer and booze for whatever college shindig was 
going on that night. 

In any case, it was the smell that bothered me more than anything else.
Hell, even when I was consoling Ted's mother and she blew a snot rocket 
on my shoulder, all I could think of was the smell. I think they should 
take more care of funeral homes, make sure they smell nice or 
something. 

That was until I saw Rob Jenkins there. 

A quick backstory: Rob Jenkins is the high school equivalent of a World
War 2 mercenary. He does pretty much anything for money, including the 
regular stuff like gambling and betting on the big game, as well as 
taking money for acts of vandalism or assault and battery. The sad part 
is, we live in a football town, and Rob Jenkins holds the state record 
for rushing yards. So much for justice. 

On second thought, he's less like a mercenary and more like a weasel. A
sniveling, ground-sniffing, 250 pound mass of muscle with the eating, 
mating, and behavior habits of a common rodent. 

Rob Jenkins's parents committed double suicide in 1997, leaving him as a
10 year old to take care of his infant sister until the only relative 
they had in the area-- a widowed aunt -- returned from a long vacation 
in Hawaii two days early. The early return wasn't on account of her 
sister's and brother-in-law's suicide. Her husband had taken a leap of 
faith into the middle of busy traffic. 

From the seventeenth story window of their beachside hotel. 

His sister, 24 years later, will be the only casualty of a carbomb
attack on her office building. 

I looked past Rob Jenkins's shoulder and saw Patti Harold. She was the
president of student council. She had never spoken to Teddy Smith. She 
was making an appearance at the funeral home to raise her popularity 
rating a couple points. All it took was an arm on a shoulder and some 
fake crying, and it's almost as if she actually cares. In about 30 
years she will be the first female president of the United States of 
America. For two hours and thirty minutes that evening, Patti Harold 
was the one person Teddy could count on to be able to talk with him and 
work through his problems. This was believable to them, seeing as they 
didn't know Teddy any better than she, anyway. My guess is that she 
dies in 76 years of natural causes. She'll have had a loving family 
with her until the end. Patti Harold was an only child. 

And then Teddy's younger sister, Helen. She is the future owner of a
Fortune 500 company. She is regarded as one of the most honorable 
businesswomen ever to live on this earth. She earns the Nobel prize for 
literature after writing a novel that changes the face of western 
civilization. She lived inside her mother for forty-three hours before 
she was murdered by a birth control pill. 

How appropriate. The pen at the guestbook runs out of ink right in the


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