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Christmas treats 12 20

Chris Lowry

Dec 20, 2023

Two beers cost him five years.

That’s how he looked at it.

They weren’t even good beers.

Lukewarm “happy hour” lunch specials that were half price.

He should have lied when the manager asked if he had been drinking.

Except he couldn’t.

His manager had been there too.

Two beers for five years.

The years took his job, took his wife and she took the kids.

Told him she didn’t want them growing up with a felon for a Dad, that studies showed this and statistics proved that and how it was just better for everyone for him to do his time and disappear.

Manslaughter.

Some idiot got caught in a conveyor belt at work and he had been a little slow on the shut down.

The lawyers didn’t care that the idiot had smelled like a pot farm.

That idiot had a note on his HR file that said pot helped anxiety.

It all boiled down to time.

Plead guilty and get a little or go to trail and get a lot.

He was railroaded into a little.

And did his time and now the sun was on his face and he was a free man.

A free man standing at the edge of ten acres of freedom.

That’s what he called it.

Was going to call it.

Stuck on the outer edge of Texas, bought from a site on the internet for almost every one of the few hundred dollars he had left.

There were mountains to the north on the edge of a horizon, ridges to the west with a river on the other side and south was nothing but Mexican wilderness.

Ten square acres at the end of a dirt road that branched off another dirt road, forty miles from the closest tiny town.

At least he had his Grandpa’s old truck, left to wait for him when the old man died.

It ran.

And gave him a bed to sleep in the first few nights while he was out while he figured out what to do next.

Freedom was next.

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THEN

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