“Die Trying”
Towards the end of his lunch break, Dave was scrolling through his Gwagger feed when he noticed that a lot of the people he followed were sharing the same video. There was nothing special about the thumbnail, just some white woman, of maybe forty, sitting on a couch. But what got his attention was that most of those sharing the video also commented with things like, “I’d vote for her,” “I’m sorry for her family,” as well as a few, “What the hell is wrong with America?” His curiosity piqued, he tapped on it.
The video, he saw, was titled: Sarah Bonilla announces run for Ohio 16. Now he could see that the wall behind the couch was covered in framed photos. She smiled and began, “Hello. My name is Sarah Bonilla and last year I was diagnosed with colloveti sarcoma, a rare type of cancer that has a 99.9999% chance of killing me in twelve to eighteen months. Fortunately, there is a treatment that will allow me to live a mostly normal life, but it is no cure. And as you can imagine, this treatment is extremely expensive. I had a decent job with great health insurance, but the board decided they’d rather have more money this quarter than for the company to … you know, survive. And it turns out, few companies are willing to hire someone,” she held her hands up about a foot apart, “this close to dying.
“So, as a sort of last refuge of a scoundrel, I’m running to represent the Ohio 16th congressional district. If I win, then if nothing else I’ll have the benefit of tax payer funded health care. But my real goal will be to fix as many of the problems in our health care system so more Americans will get the treatments they deserve. I can honestly say, I promise to fix the system, or,” here she gave a bitter smile, “die trying.”
A screen then came up with a link to a website and some fine print on who paid for the video.
For several moments, Dave just sat there. He debated what comment to leave, but then he saw the time and how he needed to get back to work, so he just shared it without comment.
Go back to the main Monthly Story page, or the main page of my website.
For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page.
***
If you liked this story, you might want to check out Political Pies, my collection of forty stories of a political nature.