'Life with a CTRL + Z' by Fu'ad Lawal

“Be careful what you wish for son,” said the old man seated beside him at the bar.

“I know exactly what I want,” he fired back.

“Easy. Did you do something wrong or lose someone?”

“Both.”

“Tell me about it,” the old man asked, obviously more interested.

“My girl died. If only I had insisted she stayed that night, she would still be alive. Her body was badly burned,” he said, fighting back the tears.

“I don’t mean this in a wrong way, but maybe it was meant to happen,” the old man said. He saw the young man’s face grow cold and quickly added, “what if I gave you your Ctrl + Z?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Close your eyes.”

When he opened them, he wasn’t in the bar with the old man. He was in his flat, on his bed, alone. He had barely woken up when his door got ripped from its hinges.

“You are under arrest for the murder of Lily Allen and James Akor, anything you say…” he didn’t hear anything they said after that. Somehow, the memories came like they had always been there.

Lily had insisted on leaving and he had convinced her to stay. She had gone down the block to get something. While she was out, she received a message on her phone. Curiosity doesn’t kill anything, he tells himself. It was from his “brother from another mother”. The message said something about her coming over quickly so he could make her the mother of his babies.

He remembered where he dumped their bodies. “Stupid move,” he told himself.

“What if I gave you a Ctrl + Z?” asked the old man who had come to jail to visit him.

Fuad Lawalis a poet and copy writer. He blogs at rebelliousflash300.wordpress.com

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