Malcom (Flash Fiction)

Malcom, a 9 year old boy with an IQ of 201 sighed and shook his head as he saw his mother; drunk again, taking yet another strange man into her room to take drugs.

He knocked on the bedroom door and the door opened.

“What is it?”, his mother snapped.

“You shouldn’t do this to yourself”, he said.

“I’ll do what I want with my life. I can do that. That’s what being a grown up means”, slurred his mother, sticking out her tongue, “You’re a child. You don’t know anything. Now get back to your room”.

She slammed her bedroom door shut again.

He went back to his room and sat on his bed then he took out, from under his bed, the Erlenmeyer flask containing white crystals of amygdalin that he had extracted, using his chemistry set, from kernels of raw fruit and which, upon ingestion, enzymes within his stomach would degrade into cyanide.

“Over two thousand years of adult human beings committing acts of brutality; murder; torture and genocide and yet age is still considered an indicator of maturity. Do I want to live in a world where people are that idiotic?”, he wondered as he looked at the contents of the flask, “Or should I choose the path of Ernest Hemingway; Alan Turing; Vincent Van Gogh; Virginia Woolf; George Eastman  and the many other rational, intelligent men and women who decided to end their lives because they found them, as I do, unbearable”.

He put the flask back under his bed.

“Perhaps my life will get better”, he said, hopefully.