Mick Fitzwilliam woke one morning to discover he was dead. And not only that, he had been murdered.
He found this out by reading the morning newspaper.
Fitzwilliam was the kind of fellow who believed the newspapers, this was because he was a businessman who thought a dollar should be worth a dollar and the newspapers believed that kind of thing as well.
So, when he read an article about the conditions in the state penitentiary jail and the people who were locked up there, he knew something terribly bad had happened.
This is his story.
Twenty years previously Fitzwilliam was a cowboy and like all cattlemen he worked hard and played hard. After a cattle trail ended the boys took over a town searching for whisky, women and song.
Fitzwilliam was not an easy man when he had taken drink and late one night he got into a fight with a fellow cattleman and was stabbed and pushed into the river. The next morning Fitzwilliam went back on the trial and drifted for a few years.
The morning’s newspaper told him that a decomposed body had been dragged from the river and it was supposed this was Fitzwilliam.
The article quoted the man he had fought twenty years previously. He had been sentenced to forty years for Fitzwilliams’ murder.
It was nine in the morning but Fitzwilliam needed a shot of whisky. Just as well he wasn’t hanged, he shook, and picked up the phone to call the Governor.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 