Strictly Fiction

I found Jesus on the back of a $5 bill. I was taking money from the till, a farewell lump sum of $100 that I felt I deserved for all the hard work I had put in at that hopeless hole in the ground. They’d be looking for me, but as law goes, $100 is the least of the government’s or local police’s worries. I was counting the bills out, one by one. I wanted to slowly taste the thievery between my fingers. The stale paper and pot smell of an elderly man’s ash tray, the soggy bill of a teenage boy, the crisp tenner of an anal 40 year-old woman. I felt the money’s previous owner trickle on my skin, their life as it was before they started recklessly spending. Now, their lost hope was my given light. On the back of a Lincoln, in blue pen, the words “Jesus Saves” were hurriedly scrawled over dearest Abraham’s face. This bill would get me most of the way through the Garden State Interstate. Another $10 would get me across the George Washington, and another $2.50 would get me from the Mass Pike to Boston. Abraham was giving me freedom. I would make it to the Prudential with a mass of stolen money, and using the power of Abraham Lincoln, I would make it over the edge of New England’s tallest building and tumble to my fate. I would meet God. A stairway to heaven is rising from Boston to the sky. $5 bills never lie.