"Wishful Finger" by Boris Guzo (Short Story)

Genre:  Suspense

Type of Short Story:  Short Story

Summary:  You could have known Jeremy Atkins for years, worked in the same office, even gone to parties with him. But would you really be able to know him, unless he let you see through?

And when Jeremy meets a mysterious hitchhiker on a cold night, it's his turn to ponder. Is it fate? Or something more fatal?

Excerpt:

Jeremy Atkins was a perfectly normal guy. Well, normal except for his two little oddities.

Driving home from the pub on this Saturday night, feeling slightly giddy, he sang along with the old rock 'n' roll station on the radio. Unlike most Saturdays, he wasn't feeling particularly bad about being alone. It was almost as if he had anticipated that it was going to be an unusual night.

He wasn't a completely lonesome person, he did have a few friends. They were all colleagues from work, but that still counts. He worked an office job, eight hours a day, five days a week. Some days, they hung out after hours, at a nearby pub. Like once or twice a month.

A few years back, Jeremy had suspected that the night outs were actually much more frequent, and that he wasn't being invited in on all the occasions. Of course this was only a hunch, there were no concrete evidence to prove he was right. Besides, he was in a depressed mood back then, so he could have just as well been imagining things. Indeed he had gone bar hopping several nights in a row, stopping by every decent pub in town, trying to run into a group of his colleagues, catch them red handed—with no success.

Tonight he had been by himself at the pub. He didn't like to drink alone at home. It made him feel like an outcast, or a crackhead. So even when he had no company, he went downtown to get his fix. In the ideal scenario, he would meet new people and make new friends this way. But that never really happened.

He had drank four beers—that was his limit when he took the car. Not fully safe, but this was one of the very few risks he took in life. Some folks bungee jump, others go rock climbing. Jeremy liked to drink four pints and then drive the fifteen miles home from the town. You could call this a quirk, perhaps—but it's not one of the two peculiarities I mentioned about him.

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