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A Toast to Nothing (Part 2)
By Thomas Miller
I didn’t go to the burial. Neither did Daniel.
The county paid for the cheapest service possible—no mourners, no flowers, just a hurried process to get the decaying remains into the ground. The workers didn’t care who he was. To them, Richard was just another body to dispose of, another unclaimed life erased without fanfare.
After the fight at the funeral home, Daniel and I sat across from each other in a greasy diner, both of us nursing cups of bad coffee, neither of us wanting to speak first.
“Do you even feel anything?” I finally asked.
Daniel scoffed, stirring his coffee lazily. “Why should I?”
“He was our brother.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Daniel snapped, his knuckles tightening around the mug. “Richard died years ago. What was left was just a bitter, drunk ghost, haunting his own life.” He shook his head. “I don’t have space in my head for regret, and you shouldn’t either.”
I looked away, out the diner window. Outside, life went on. People laughed, people hurried to work, people lived. Richard had spent his life cursing the world, but the truth was, the world never owed him anything. It didn’t even notice his absence.
The paralegals had already called. Richard had left behind nothing except overdue bills and an empty bank account. No hidden fortune, no last testament. Just debts and dust.
Still, I wondered—if he had called me that night, would I have answered? If he had said, I need help, would I have gone?
Or had I already mourned him long before the rope ever tightened around his throat?
The Years That Followed
Richard’s name stopped coming up in conversation.
His apartment was rented to another tenant within weeks. His belongings were discarded, unclaimed. Daniel and I never spoke of him again.
Years passed. My books sold well. I built a life, a name, a career.
But sometimes, in the quiet moments, I’d catch myself thinking of him.
The man who thought himself a king but died alone in a room that no one noticed.
I imagined the scene—the silence, the stillness, the slow rot of his body as the world moved on without him. I imagined the stench, the emptiness, the indignity of it all.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I’d wonder if he had ever looked at his reflection and seen the truth.
That he was never powerful.
That he was never special.
That in the end, he was just another man left to be forgotten.
And maybe, just maybe, he always knew that.