From the south end of the room came a chair, and from the chair came a thousand moments of if only, what if and surely if. It was a chair of indecision and it delighted in its mischievous work – for if no one ever questioned their decisions we’d all be a bunch of psychopaths.
From the north end of the room came Ridley, a disgruntled 20 year old who had just been kicked out of the house. Ridley sat on the chair, flicking his lighter on and off and considered his options. He’d had pyromaniac tendencies since an early age, but it was in fact for an entirely different reason he’d been excommunicated. His father, a spiteful and superstitious Russian man, had installed a water feature in the family hotel – an absurdly expensive river that bubbled through the corridors.
Everyone had congratulated the old man at first (except for his sullen and suspicious son, who suspected it signaled his father’s long-seated mistrust in him). But when all the guests had begun to wet their beds during the night and awake disgusted and frightened, his father’s mood had soured and he had begun to spit on his feet and slam doors in his face when his mother wasn’t looking after supper.
But it was only when the toads moved in and Ridley’s father had developed a series of warts on his butt that looked like Nelson Mandela that the old man had begun beating him repeatedly. Ridley would lie in the fetal position on his hard straw bed, holding his aching ribs and the toads would croak in the middle of night.
Ridley lit his cigarette, the flame reflecting from deep inside his pupils, his thoughts repressed upon the wooden chair of indecision. The chair was placed at the end of a rooftop bar called The Grand Daddy, and the lights of Cape Town bubbled up from the street far below, the unruly sound of taxis and dimly heard laughter, the hiss of the grill and the strange languages of South Africans burbling around him. His long black hair fell over his eyes.
That’s about when Oscar Pistorious waddled by. The disgraced paraplegic Olympian’s legs had been confiscated at the door by the bouncer. Ridley perked up. The muscular half man had escaped prison after ‘accidentally’ shooting his model girlfriend and was moving through the bar on his knuckles.
“Oscarrr!” Ridley cried in his thick Russian accent, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything! Harharharhar!”
The chair from the south actually thought this was funny and for the first time in its incorrigible history made a decision to support the boy. It concentrated its black magic to make Oscar wet his pants – which from a Freudian perspective was where Oscar’s violent tendencies had begun in the first place.
Oscar whipped out his pistol and began firing wildly around the bar, pee flying everywhere as Ridley ducked for cover. The chair however was hit right in the forehead, causing it to question its one and only decision and crumble instantaneously.
Ridley, who survived the berserk Olympian’s rampage, knew something was up with the powerful seat and collected the shattered pieces before fleeing from the aftermath. He brought them to his father and promised to give up smoking, but the old man mistook them for kindling and drowned him in the family river while the toads looked on.
The chair he took for himself.
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