Running With Scissors

The End, Where Everything Is Wrapped Up With A Neat Little Bow

In a small office in downtown Manhattan, located in a famous city in the state of New York, situated in the north-east of a country called the United States of America, on a small, otherwise inconsequential planet called Earth—or PxBZed Gamma, for our readers in Alfa Centauri—sat a man in his office.

That man, just like the planet, was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things: decaying, perpetually wet, and with a disturbing number of chemicals surrounding his atmosphere.

But unlike the planet, which was mostly floating in space without a care in the universe, the man kept busy, and unlike the planet, people weren't actively trying to make ineffective policies to keep him alive.

In fact, people who knew this man often compared him to a saint. Not because they wanted to nail him to a cross, or burn him at the stake, or make several horses pull his limbs off. No, people compared him to a saint because he was very fond of ducks.

The man always gave money to duck charities and held trips to watch said ducks migrate from one place to the other. He was the first one to call the provided number when that weird duck commercial played on T.V that urged him to get a better insurance for his car, and even set up monthly payments to help sickly ducks get their shots.

He never even turned away a Jehovah's Witness, even going so far as to give them coffee and crackers, which left many Jehovah's Witnesses dumbfounded. Not because of his amicability, but mostly because the man used his time to go into extensive rants about ducks and how Saint Pedro, patron saint of ducks, was the best saint of all.

He was truly a man obsessed with ducks, which made him boring and dull beyond belief.

Each day, he would go to his very boring and dull apartment building, embraced his very boring and dull wife and told her a boring and dull spiel about how geese are just chunkier ducks.

He was utterly boring and dull. Lucky for us, our ending is not about him.

Making an ending about him would be very short and utterly pointless. It would be him sitting in his office all day moving his duck figurines from one side of his desk to the other. On occasions, he would make patients enter his office for a talk that would go one of two ways. The first one was to congratulate them on their good bill of health, but not before wagging his finger playfully to remind them to take care of themselves.

The second one wasn't so playful. You see, this man wasn't a normal doctor. He was an endocrinologist, as in a hormones doctor.

On that particular day, the man— let's call him Doctor Philbert, because that's just what his name was—needed to have the second kind of talk. The bad kind.

"Send him in now," he said to an intercom on his desk.

A man soon entered his office, beet red and with shame burning in his eyes. You could say that the man was the antithesis of the dull Doctor Philbert.

First, he was a lawyer, and lawyers are the opposite of doctors. While doctors help save lives and occasionally ruin them, lawyers help ruin lives and occasionally save them. And there was nothing more antagonistic to an endocrinologist than a lawyer.

He was what the youngsters would call a "fat boy." And we don't mean the type of misunderstood man who only needed the power of love to shave down a few pounds, but the kind of man who would eat a cat with rosemary and garlic if he ever had the chance. The worst kind of people.

He was tall, fat, and perpetually skittish. He was James Truman-Conelly, and the main character of our ending.

Dr. Philbert rubbed a statue of a particular Mallard duck he was fond of while locking eyes with James Truman-Conelly. "Mr. Conelly, long time no see."