Welcome to Serenity

Soft brown eyes stared over the steering wheel of the Jeep Grand Cherokee as it barreled down the paved roadway of I-80, the driver going no place in particular. It was difficult for Jamar to comprehend how drastically his life had changed in a mere three months, with more changes looming over the next horizon. In truth, he didn’t have a Plan B because in his head, failing Plan A had never been an option. Jamar hadn’t failed; fate simply dealt him another hand.

The main issue was that everything was always in his head. His heart, which thumped against his breastplate, unfortunately, too, was always in his head. So much so that it never made any room for the woman who shared his life or his bed. Frequently accused of being distant or cold, Jamar held on to the vision that he visited in his head. He wanted to live in a better world. If not a better world, build a better city with people who gave a shit about one another.

He worked for a company where the corporate culture was, “I got mine, you need to get yours.” It wasn’t as if any of the employees in the company were interested in helping a body to “get yours;” instead, it felt more like an “up yours” every single day. Drudgery filled his soul each Monday as he opened the doors to Levinston and Schooplar, the engineering firm that paid him a hefty salary to clear away pockets of annexed woods to continue that nasty trend of urban sprawl. Year after year, more houses went up, followed by more strip malls, which inevitably led to a big box store that boasted lower prices. Lower prices than whom? Their prices were lower than the neighborhood grocers whom they put out of business, which reduced the number of opportunities for neighbors to chat over the butcher counter about what’s for dinner.

Jamar hated it all. He hated the mid-sized SUVs that bogarted the freeways as he tried to get home in the evening to an empty townhouse filled with stuff he really had no use for. The weekends, were usually spent with some woman with daddy issues which always ended up the same way—bad takeout and mediocre sex. It seemed no matter how hard he tried to find a good woman, he always ended up with some lady whose name was a variation of something which ended in isha. Moneisha. Quinisha. Latavisha. To break his pattern, he once dated a nice lady from Peoria named Debra. She was so boring he remembered why he favored a woman whose name ended in isha. Isha always brought some flavor to the party.

The drawback was that Isha liked to fight. Not the type of cat fighting where she would take off her earrings and high heels shoes to come at you windmill type, swinging wildly until her tightly balled up fist made contact with something - kind of fighting. Jamar was never lucky enough to get one of those Ishas. He always managed to get the Isha who had trained in a boxing gym and wanted to punch his lights out.

Keneisha, his latest horror story for the romance chronicles, was no different. Less than three months ago, she sat beside him on his couch as they watched a horrible episode of some reality show that starred overly made-up black women fighting over a piece of man, to which Jamar paid little attention. At the end of the show, the channel was turned to watch the Powerball numbers.

Seldom, if ever, he played, but during a dream two nights before, a sequence of numbers popped up in his head. As he stirred from his slumber the next morning, the figures were still fresh in his head. On a scrap piece of paper, he jotted down the figures in the same order they appeared in his dream. The numbers appeared in the exact same sequence on the lottery ticket that was in his wallet. The winning jackpot was ninety-three million reasons why he no longer needed Keneisha in his life. Yet, it wasn’t the only reason.

When Jamar spoke calmly with his girlfriend of a few months, casually explaining why he no longer wished to see her, for some odd reason, this became her motivation to engage him in a fist fight.

“I’m not going to fight you, Keneisha. This is just not working out for us. I have some things in my head that I have to figure out,” he told her.

It was the last thing he told her after she turned into Mike Tyson and punched his time clock. Keneisha also had a few choice adjectives she used each time she kicked his unconscious body with a pointy-toed red-bottomed shoe. Luckily for her, she did not draw blood because the neighbor, who seemed to always have a pair of binoculars for bird watching at night, saw the whole shameful scenario and called the police.

Jamar awoke to two officers dashing water on his face as he held tightly to his bruised ribs. Keneisha, who was still cursing him as everything but a recipient of Jesus’s Grace, left with a parting shot at his manhood.

“…And you ain’t even that great of a lay, you midget dicked moferker!” Keneisha yelled at him over her shoulder.

“Do you need an ambulance, sir?” The police officer asked.

“No, I’ll be fine,” Jamar whispered as he was helped to the soft leather couch.

The second officer spoke up, “If you want to press charges against her for assault…”

“Not necessary,” Jamar said again as he leaned into the leather, allowing it to hold his aching body.

“Fine. We will leave you to it,” Officer Number One told him. This officer was worried that he was too calm and would retaliate when the dust settled. In Jamar’s head, he was in the middle of nowhere, standing on land that extended as far as his eyes could see. Land that belonged to him as he set out to create something magnificent. Even if he took the payments in an annuity, he still never had to work a day in his life for anything other than what made him happy.

His heart, which rarely thumped over 120 beats per minute even after a vigorous aerobic exercise, was now beating so fast, that his breastplate felt the aftereffects of the tremors. Stiff legs raised him from the couch as his feet shuffled across bamboo wooded floors into his home office. Plastered on the walls were sketches, ideas, and dreams in stasis that had never received a breath of life.

“I’m rich…” he said with a sigh. “I am filthy damned rich!”

The changes that came with the newfound wealth altered his life in ways he had only imagined in his head.