Into Thin Air: A Short Story

Frank Iero wished that he had never been born.

The only slightly depressing thought that spent too much time inside his head wasn’t a selfish one, though for others it might be considered narrow minded , or even greedy. Frank wasn’t greedy, Frank was just neglected and didn’t know what real appreciation for himself felt like, so he had nothing he really strived to achieve from the world. The only thing he could really remember from his early childhood were the cracks everywhere in his house. One of the walls was broken, and that seemingly meant everything. Broken wall, broken bones, broken family, broken heart, broken life. Broken everything.

The world was a broken place. A thirteen year old Frank would have laughed in seventeen year old Frank’s

The thought of the deepest, darkest places of the earth, where there wasn’t even any light terrified him. The oxygen deprived part of the world that actually existed, where the water pressure held so much force that a human would be killed simply by just being down there, scared him to death. He had nearly passed while watching Life of Pi when it showed that the whole ship had sunk to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the only thing alive down there was bacteria. Thinking about how many people had died in the ocean was also horrifying to Frank, who couldn’t not think about all the bodies who may have floated in the very same body of water he was glancing out at right at that very moment. However, the ocean was a particularly beautiful piece of nature when no one was drowning in it, and Frank almost wanted to walk down to the empty shore and watch the grey clouds make their way over to a better place that wasn’t hanging over a beat up suburb full of small houses where depressed kids lived, counting the days until their life would one day, blissfully, end. Yet, like any teenaged boy, Frank’s basic need for food took over, as he hadn’t eaten for quite some time and Bob always had something good to eat at his