• I am an extra in the play called Life. A tool in someone else's grand scheme.

    Carran Calvin sat on the bus seat, the very first row on the right side, his iPod cutting his ears up with heavy metal. He had a math test coming up... God was he horrible in math. Why hadn't he taken the applied class? He'd studied the night before for hours. He knew if he did any less than grade average he would be punished. His father wasn't much accustomed to following the law stating you can't beat your child. Carran wasn't allowed to go swimming at the beach anymore because of the bruises all over his chest. Instead, he usually just waded in up to his ankles and splashed water on his face to cool down.

    The air in the bus was hot and moist. Carran almost felt as though he was breathing in something solid. They were bumping around all over the place... back roads get very annoying very fast as Carran's experience pointed out. The bus ride to and from school were the worst part in his day; the heat, the bumps, the feeling of his stomach turning as motion sickness started to come into effect.

    All of a sudden the bus started to stop.

    This wasn't one of the pickup points... this was just some place in-between destinations. Why were they stopping here? It made no sense. Carran pulled the earphones out of his ear.

    "Hey! Irvin! Oh my god, I haven't seen you in... oh it must have been like five years!" The bus driver was talking to someone who had stopped their car next to the bus.

    Carran couldn't make out the other person's words over the roar of the bus, but from the tone, he assumed it was a man.

    "Are you sure? I'm only sitting here with a bus full of kids,I have time to talk!" the bus driver laughed at his own apparent wit. Carran grimaced. He wanted to be at school, not sitting in the middle of a really bumpy road while his bus driver renewed old friendships.

    "Okay, I understand if you're in a hurry... What? Cambell road? Oh, if you just keep on going the way you're going, and turn right at the second road, you should end up staring at a big ol' sign saying Cambell road," The bus driver then turned and looked in the mirror from which he could see every kid in the bus and loudly, so everyone could hear him, asked, "Hey, does anyone in here have a paper clip? My buddy here needs one to fix a rip in his shirt."

    Carran had about ten attached going down the upper half of the leg of his pants, but he was going to give any of them up. This Irvin fellow would just have to make due without his safety pin.

    Almost as soon as he thought this, the bus driver bellowed, "We're not going anywhere until there is a safety pin in this man's shirt!"

    Carran pulled one out and handed it to the driver.

    "Why thank you Carran. Your charity is much appreciated."

    Just take me to school

    The driver handed the man outside of the window the paper clip and he drove off. The bus driver sat behind the wheel for a moment, not doing a thing, then he hit the gas and the world was bumpy again. Carran popped the earphones back in his ears and let the screams and insane instrumentals of heavy metal engulf him.



    The man outside the window was Irvin Dell, a spy working for the US government working off duty to capture a wanted fugitive. A wanted fugitive whom had made the mistake of killing Irvin's one and only wife. The most important person in his life. Carran Calvin? He was just a background character. Unimportant. I'm sure you won't want to read of him eating alone in the cafeteria, or how he bombed his math test and was beaten by his father. You want to hear of the US spy, going on a brave adventure to seek revenge on his wife's murderer. Why was Carran Calvin even here? What was his purpose? He wasn't going off to destroy an international threat. He was going to school. He would never do anything exciting in his life... unless you see telemarketing as exciting. So then why, as many others may have asked themselves, was he here? He was an extra, unimportant, useless even. How many of us are an extra? I know I am. But Irvin Dell was the main honcho. The one the story WOULD have been written about had I not be the insane writer behind the wheel. He never even saw Carran Calvin. If this had been a first person story from Irvin's view, Carran wouldn't have even entered into it.

    And I'm sure Irvin never even thought of Carran as he used the paper clip to pick his handcuffs as the fugitive stood before him tauntingly.


    -I am Carran. A tool in someone else's grand scheme.


    Every life has meaning.