This is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.
Vincent was a vaper. He was also a skaterboi and a right royal pain in the neck for the hospital quality & safety program office. At 48, his skin revealed a lifetime of exposure to the sun, and his Mohawk hairstyle would have been a salt and pepper mix if it were not for the purple and green coloring he regularly used. His skateboard was custom-built from a mixture of natural and carbon fiber materials, and the trucks were a limited-edition titanium model imported from Europe. He was well known for getting so deeply engaged in a hobby or new involvement that it bordered on obsession.
Vincent worked in the mortuary of a busy city hospital in a state that was not known for a strong consumer protection infrastructure, or in fact, for much of an infrastructure at all. The dominant political ideology was to just let people be and hope everyone took responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. In turn, people tended to trust in the Lord, luck, fate, or whatever to look after the future and focus on enjoying or surviving the present, whichever was the case. As a result, the hospital was busy, and the wards were filled with folk who had complications of bad luck and chronic conditions, while the morgue was full of those for whom Lady Luck had perhaps looked the other way. People in this region tended to overinvest in their trucks, TVs, and guns and totally underinvest in their health. Tobacco use was high, alcohol abuse was rampant, and processed foods and grilled meat were the norm. Although most people in the area were very keen on sports, few practiced any beyond watching it from the sofa with the TV on, a beer in one hand and something greasy in the other.
Vincent was kept busy fetching customers from the ED or the wards or moving them from the fridges to the loading bay for the steady flow of hearses. He stayed on good terms with the funeral homes and had a side gig helping when he wasn’t working at the hospital. The mortuary business was brisk. He used to hang around the ICU a lot, but the head had told him to sling his hook and get lost. Vincent had very much fancied one of the ICU nurses. She was short and goth, with a titanium nose ring, and Vincent thought she was amazing, but then the ICU was closed because it cost too much and nobody in the community could afford to be in the ICU anyway. The staff all left to find work at other hospitals, and his girlfriend left for another state. Although stunned by the upheaval and his girlfriend’s sudden departure, Vincent was relieved to still have a job. In contrast to the ICU, pediatrics, and the mental health departments that all faced layoffs or outright closure, the hospital mortuary was doing well financially, so much so that Vincent worked extra shifts and picked up a tidy bit of overtime pay and a bonus.
To celebrate his windfall, he browsed the online vaping shops and chat rooms. He decided to get a hand-made custom vape pen body and have one of the shops build him a special unit. It wasn’t hard to settle on the internals, but there were just so many options for materials to build the body. In the end, someone suggested amesite as a body material. The lady that turned him on to amesite explained that, as a purple triclinic crystal, it represented the three intertwined domains of the universe: earth, sea, and sky, and the levels of time into past, present, and future. She had said a lot more, but Vincent couldn’t stay focused beyond something she said about Celtic gods and girls, women, and crones. In the end, he found an online seller in South Africa and placed an order for a vape pen body to be carved out of amosite. He took extra care to send the right diagrams and dimensions and stayed focused until the order had been double-checked and sent off.
The following 6 weeks crawled by for Vincent. Email replies from the firm in South Africa assured him at every stage that things were progressing. There were a dozen little delays that dragged him to the depths of despair. First, they struggled to make contact with the geologist that supplied exotic materials like amosite. Then they were waiting for him to deliver it, but his Land Rover had broken down in the field. They had to wait 2 days for a replacement water pump to be shipped and installed. When the firm had to close for a day after being robbed at gunpoint, Vincent fretted so badly that he felt physically ill, and when the shipping agent temporarily lost the package, he needed chemical assistance. Although every setback threw him into a funk, every time the holdup was solved, he was catapulted into a state of delight that would last for days, or until the next problem was encountered. Once the package entered the US, he could track its movements. Over the next 2 days, he was peering at the shipper’s app on an hourly basis. He began fretting that it might get confiscated by customs, be broken, or turn out to not be what he ordered or a giant swindle. By the day it was to arrive, he had imagined a dozen ways it could all go wrong: the dimensions could be incorrect, maybe amosite was actually just ugly, perhaps it was just all a big mistake. He was unable to sleep as one scenario after another chased through his mind.
Over the last 4 hours before delivery, Vincent was too nervous to go to the bathroom in case he missed the delivery or some porch pirate stole it while he was not watching. He alternated between scrutinizing the tracking app for updates and staring through the front door. Then it was due. Craning his head around the door, he couldn’t see any delivery truck. After 5 minutes of tense pacing, he dialed the shipping company. He was number 42 in the queue for the next operator, and he fidgeted and paced at the same time. Finally, nature forced his hand, and he darted to the toilet, only to rush back and discover his call had been disconnected. With a yelp of anguish, he redialed and took another place in the queue. The neighbor’s dog was barking like a mad beast again. As he was about to yell at it and slam the window shut, it occurred to him that it barked like that at the mail carrier and at delivery trucks. He bounded to the door, just in time to see the delivery truck pulling away. Vincent was about to shriek in anger and despair when his foot bumped into something padded on the porch. There it was: His treasure had arrived, and he scooped it up as though it was a lost child.
Vincent stared at the carved stone object nestled in its packaging. It was beautiful. The smooth pale green stone was exquisitely carved, and streaks of almost translucent golden-brown flowed along the body. As he stroked it, almost all worries melted from him. Over the next 2 days, he had to endure another wait while the vaping shop fitted the internals. It was again an excruciating wait, and again he worried about the dimensions being wrong, about the shop tech breaking it, and about it getting lost or stolen. These fears were banished each time the shop updated him on progress: Yes, the internals fitted. Yes, they had to modify some fittings, but that was expected. No, it hadn’t been lost, stolen, or damaged. The people at the shop were very accustomed to nervous or demanding customers, but Vincent was certainly in the top five most neurotic customers. They had never heard of this particular stone before, but had done many similar customizations and knew what they were doing. Their confidence calmed Vincent somewhat, and somehow, he managed to survive the wait until he could pick up the finished device. He was eager to show it off to all his friends. Over the next few months, his vaping frequency far exceeded his previous habit.
Life flowed around Vincent. Although those around him at work generally moved up, moved out, or moved on, he stayed in the same hospital and the same job. In the words of one of his favorite pieces of music, “… One day you find 10 years have got behind you / No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.” He had moved in with the same girlfriend when another job change had brought her back to the hospital as a supervisor, and he had blown more than a few bonuses on some fancy speakers, a revamp of his board, and renovating an old Hasselblad large format camera he found at an estate sale.
What had changed most in 10 years was his health. It was more than just age. What started out as feeling a little winded after an intense session with his board had progressed to a shortness of breath that was almost a constant feature. More recently, any intense skating session left him wheezing for a while and with a persistent cough. The fatigue that dogged him after doing double shifts at the hospital meant he was no longer able to manage a whole week of doubles like he could a decade before. His girlfriend convinced him to stop smoking tobacco and switch entirely to vaping to get his nicotine buzz.
It was the swollen fingertips that eventually convinced him to go to the doctor. His girlfriend had been trying to get the cough looked at for ages, and he had changed vaping fluids to something less intense, had been to a homeopath, and went for a series of acupuncture. He felt calmer and his chest pains seemed to stop after he tried an herbalist cure. He also swore the coughing was better. Swollen fingertips just seemed weird, though, so eventually he visited the primary care clinic at the hospital. His medical encounter was about as unconvincing as he had expected, and after sitting in the waiting room for hours, going back to work for several more, and then sitting in the waiting room again, he got to see an exhausted young doctor for 3 minutes. The physician asked him about his alcohol intake and use of laxatives and gave him a referral to cardiology. After getting busy signals twice, being disconnected three times, and waiting on hold for 20 minutes, he was eventually scheduled to see the cardiologist in 3 months.
It was by chance that he was helping transport a patient with a broken leg caused by a skiing accident, and his own health picture became clearer as a result. He had wheeled the elderly patient from Imaging to orthopedics and at their request had taken a detour past pulmonology where the patient was the department head. They chatted a lot on the journey. Vincent had learned that Dr. Erica T. Franco had done her residency in Humboldt County, California, and was a keen snowboarder. All the way to pulmonology, they compared skateboarding and snowboarding and scrapes, contusions, and broken bones they had in their medical record as a result. Dr. Franco was listening to more than what he was saying, though—she was noticing that same persistent dry cough, shortness of breath, and wheezing, but Vincent didn’t quite fit the medical history of what she was almost certain she was hearing. After putting Vincent through a breathing test in her office, Dr. Franco logged into the system, transferred him to her care, and ordered scans and an appointment with an oncologist to confirm and begin treatment for the lung cancer she was pretty sure he had.
Since Vincent had never been in an asbestos mine, or handled asbestos insulation, and neither had anyone in his family, it took some time to discover the source of the asbestos that he had been inhaling for over a decade. It was at that point that Vincent came to understand the difference between amesite and amosite. The South African asbestos ore called amosite of which his favorite vaping pen was made was considered the most hazardous form of asbestos in the world. It did not take many more appointments before Dr. Franco added a new member to his care team. Dr. Angela Henderson was a palliative care specialist. It was her responsibility to guide Vincent through his end-of-life journey and help him get the best quality of life over the brief time he had left.
Vincent’s ashes were mixed with concrete and cast as a memorial seat at his favorite skatepark. His board was raffled off to fund a new jump, and his vaping pen was donated to the hospital museum.
