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FLASH FRIDAY — DAY 5: WHAT IT COSTS
Ambition rarely explodes. It accumulates. In Take a Minute, a late-career accountant confronts the quiet arithmetic of a life spent chasing deals that never closed. Some transactions don’t fail — they compound.
It’s been almost twenty years. Your finances have been—are—a wreck. You have the privilege of looking back at a career full of shortcomings and disappointments, near misses too often enabled by poor planning or shoddy execution. Sometimes both. Your memories are a series of tragic vignettes where the hero doesn’t get the girl or vanquish the foe.
You can’t point to many highlights.
How’d I get here?
It’s Tuesday. Late. The sun went down hours ago. The rest of the office where you temp as a senior accountant—they went home hours ago. Your only company consists of passersby patronizing the Honduran supermercado next door. Even they’ll stop filing by soon.
Not that it matters. Nor will you notice. You’re trying to laser-focus on pulling this deal back from the grave. Forty-eight hours ago, it was on. Lawyers drafting documents, money moving to trusted third party accounts. And, just like that, with all the warning of a heart attack, it was on life support.
This story is part of Flash Friday — Day 5: What It Costs.
Write your own response to today’s prompt:
https://www.litromagazine.com/editors-pick/write-from-art-ekphrasis-prompts/
Just like every other failed endeavor for the last twenty years.
How did this happen? Again?
With head in hands, your mind strays, painfully, to familiar settings.
A slam dunk acquisition for a municipal waste servicer where you couldn’t put together the funds to buy out the owners. Three years of your life gone, the last six months of which were seventy, eighty-hour weeks. You missed your son’s final high school basketball game because of it. What were you? Fifty-four? Fifty-five?
And five years later? An undervalued scrap metal firm being run into the ground by a third-generation playboy of an owner. You came at it with a smart offer and got outbid. No matter if the new owners just filed for bankruptcy. You don’t give a shit. You care about the eighteen months of futility, the eighteen months of promises to your wife that this was “the one.” The eighteen months—like the time before and the time before that—where you couldn’t quite close the deal, gone.
You usually aren’t one to indulge in bitterness, but this one hurts.
Four years. Thousands of dollars of personal investment, your own money. In the hole, down the drain. Toilet, flushed.
And now you’re on the wrong side of 65. You’re woefully unprepared for retirement. You don’t know how many working years you have left in you. You wonder when the term “unemployable” will be applied to you?
You close your eyes, breathe in, and try to—struggle to—let go, refocus.
There’s so much left to do.
Want to write flash that lands with precision?
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Will van der Veen has spent over a decade working in international development. Conversations with Will frequently steer towards sociopolitical trends, governance, or public infrastructure and often go longer than anticipated. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and a pair of rascally dogs.
