Saturday, November 17, 2012

Death By Chocolate: A Family Tragedy

Here's a story I'm working on; tell me what you think:

Moving far away at a young age and thereby abandoning her parents, despite their having been incredibly generous to her in childhood, even buying her a pony when she was ten years old, an Evil Woman--let's called her Evie-- never once visits them for the last 25 years of their lives, despite their multiple illnesses and encroaching frailties. When called by a close relative who implores her to visit the ailing father, and asked how she would feel if he dies before she sees him again, Evie replies, "That's okay, I could handle it."

To assuage her guilt, while simultaneoulsy contributing to their eventual demise, Evie frequently sends her parents huge blocks of expensive chocolate from her island retreat, knowing as she does their weakness for it despite her father's diabetes and her mother's obesity-related COPD. As Evie had long hoped, die they do--first the father, then the mother.

With them dead, Evie finally shows up-- for the reading of the final will, which leaves all the remaining family fortune to her, despite the fact that her only brother, a selfless angel--let's call him Angelo-- long devoted to his parents, caring for them in their dotage, ferrying them to constant medical appointments, coaxing them back to health following several debilitating surgeries, buying groceries and cooking meals, tending to their remaining pets and their huge house in the country far from any neighbors, and himself having taken so many long months off from his own career to care for them-- is all but broke and by then has his own young family to support.

The money and the house and the fancy-schmancy car are all bequeathed to Evie by the completely insane and senile mother who outlived the father who had earned every dime by curing the sick for his whole life. Convinced in the end by tricks and chicanery, and those pounds of chocolate sent over the years by Evie via UPS, the lunatic mother--by then unable to breathe on her own, incredibly fat and addicted to chocolate-- wrongly believes that Evie had been the good child all along and so has her lawyer alter the deceased father's will, which had originally left everything to Angelo and his offspring.

Finally Evie dies of breast cancer. Despite how badly she has treated him all their lives, Angelo spends what little money he can scrounge together to bury his only sister at sea off the coast of Nantucket. They say she haunts the island to this day, distributing chocolates to diabetics.

Waddya think?







3 comments:

  1. i think the guy and young family will probably be cool.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I see your point, maybe it should be called a tragicomedy!

    ReplyDelete

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