Today just might be the day I die. It frightens me, even though yesterday I was quite set on dying. Perhaps it's because I won't be the one ending my life—I have always been a control freak. Or perhaps--

            “You! Bitch! Put your nose on the ground!” the female gunman said as she pushed Mae’s face down with her foot. Mae grunted as her nosed smashed into the granite tile, she could feel her nasal cavities filling with warm liquid.

            “Aww, gross! I think I broke her fucking nose!”

            “Ni-Ni, quit dicking around! You are supposed to be playing crowd control, not stepping on people’s heads,” replied the male gunman from inside the vault. Ni-Ni scoffed. Mae’s eyes began to close, they felt like they weighed five-hundred pounds but she, well, she was light as a feather.         

Why did I want to kill myself? Well, that’s what everyone asks isn’t it? Why and how. When you attempt suicide, or succeed for that matter, suddenly everyone gets really selfish. It’s all about them. Was it their fault? If it was, why didn’t you talk to them about it? If it wasn’t, then how dare you kill yourself, or try to kill yourself, and make them feel guilty and angry and always missing you!? You’re a selfish bastard that’s what you are, and so on. It’s amazing how angry people get about death. Sometimes they get so angry that they even end up offing themselves from the grief, and then all their friends and relatives walk around saying the same thing about them that they said about the person who killed themselves in the first place. I’ll never have to live through that, I could kill myself at any time and still have a clean conscience because I know that I never judged any of the people that I knew who killed themselves for killing themselves. How could I? I mean, so many of them died or tried to for the very same reason I thought that I might try--Shit, this is why I don’t like going to the bank. There is always the possibility that some asshole looking for a free ride is going to try and play cops and robbers…

Mae was just barely aware of the chaos that was going on around her. She could hear muffled gunshots and people shouting, but she couldn’t see anything.

Finally, the police are here…

The gunfire ceased. The male gunman shouted,

“You shot Ni-Ni! Why did you have to shoot her you fucking pigs!? She was pregnant with my son!” The police men grumbled to each other. Ni-Ni was drug out, slid across the floor like an oversized slab of meat.

Some pregnant bitch broke my nose? Well, at least Ni-Ni’s spawn won’t make it. If she was pregnant, she wasn’t far along enough for it to show which means that they wouldn’t be able to save the kid. Okay, so maybe that sounds a bit harsh, but imagine what sort of life that kid would have had  with bumbling bank robbers for parents. Believe me, he’s better off dead. Ni-Ni and her boyfriend were probably desperately poor, mentally dysfunctional, or just in a terrible bind, like they owed a loan shark or some drug lord money or something. Seriously, who in their right mind would rob a bank? These days, no one ever gets away with it. Not with all the alarm systems, cameras, iris readers, crowd control equipment, and other technological marvels in use by banks. Not to mention the technology that is employed by the police. Hell, the way Ni-Ni and Co. came into the bank guns-a-blazing the most they might accomplish was murder, and they couldn’t even manage that. 

“Ma’am? You alright Ma’am?” Mae felt someone roll her over. She was dizzy from the blood loss…she hoped she wouldn’t puke on her savior. She opened her eyes a bit, but all she could make out was the outline of someone wearing some sort of a hat.

“That bitch broooke my nooose,” she slurred and passed out.

I can’t believe this. This will look just great in the papers. One injured, nose broken by a pregnant woman, passed out from blood loss. At least if I had survived a gunshot wound I’d be a hero. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that my injury is so lame, or the fact that I’m just an injured person. No name, nothing. Maybe if I had been shot and miraculously survived, or if I’d fought back, I could have been a hero. Or if I was a celebrity or something, at least people would notice me. No one ever seems to notice me, not in any real way. Wait--I take that back, they do notice me, but only to ridicule me for whatever wacky predicament I’ve gotten myself into. That’s how it’s always been, Mae the walking sitcom. That’s partly why I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t around, not like it knew I was there in the first place. I am just an extraneous appendage, another white collar slob with growing credit card debt that contributes nothing to humanity but a load of waste and toxic emissions.

That is, I was, until last night. Last night changed my entire life—well, almost my entire life, the debt hasn’t budged. I’m sure you want to know what it is that pulls a suicidal person back from the edge. Well, I’ll tell you, it’s not the same for everyone and if I simply tell you what did it for me—you just wouldn’t get it. So we’ll just have to start from the beginning.