The Rock by Joshua Moses

In the garage out back there’s a 1986 El Camino. In the back seat there’s a body, and in the body, incredibly, impossibly, there is a diamond the size of a walnut. Forget, for the moment, the who and the why. Let’s stick to the what:

Diamond. Body. Car.

I trust you understand our predicament.

Let’s say we take your advice: we call the cops. Cops come, take the body, so long diamond. And then we have to explain the car and how it came to be in our possession. Or, alternatively, let’s say we listen to Rico: I don’t even own a tape measure, let alone a bandsaw. And let’s also just say I’m not inclined to go sawing into flesh. Call it a personal thing. Rivers I won’t cross and what not.

Listen – I said no who, no why. What’s important here . . . well, shit. That’s the thing, right? Here we are, huddled in the basement of a house with no heat, the most valuable thing any of us have ever laid eyes on trapped somewhere in the nether regions of a decomposing corpse. And what are we going to do, exactly? Sell it? It’s a diamond the size of a fucking walnut. I’m pretty sure somebody is going to report it missing.

I know I should have thought of this. Believe me: I know. It’s just, just, under the circumstances, what were we going to do? I mean, look, here we are, freezing, all but homeless, and there’s a rock out there that’s worth than all the manual labor we could do together in a lifetime. It’s like it just fell into our laps. I mean, it literally, literally fell into our laps.

No, I don’t mean literally literally.

Anyway, even if I wanted to apologize, and I don’t, it’s not like we can do anything to fix the situation. Right? I mean, so far as I can tell, we’re fucked no matter what.

We. We. Yes, we. You’re as much a part of this as I am. Jesus. Yeah, and Rico too. I know it was my idea. It was my idea alone. Trust me, I did not intend for this to happen. None of it. Not the car and not the body and certainly not the diamond.

OK, maybe the diamond.

So Rico is going to be here in twenty minutes. We have twenty minutes to come up with a plan, something that will work, something that salvages whatever we can from the situation and that we can all live with afterwards. Something that doesn’t involve cops or bandsaws.

I really wish we had some coffee. Or some whiskey. Or, really, anything.

Yeah, anything except the body and car.

Asshole.

© 2014 Joshua Moses

Josh Moses is an investment banker by day and a writer by night (when he’s not taking care of a baby). He has been rewriting the same novel for ten years. No, he does not sleep.

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