Fiction Hellacious

            It was the last day of August and sprinkling rain. This first it had rained all summer.             “It’s been almost a year,” he said sitting there on the park bench. He was sitting by himself, though, and not really talking to anyone.             This first day of rain meant the promise of another dark, emotional fall and of a long and apathetic winter. Already, the tip-tops of the trees were turning pink but the day was still warm enough to sit outside. And so despite the rain; he did. Because one just never knew around this time of year when everything always felt like a last chance.             “Yes,” the voice was clear.             “I don’t think I can take another one. I don’t think I want to.”             He was the only person in the park and somehow, to him, it only seemed fitting. Up a slight, little hill there was a small pond where some geese were floating around. One of them kept honking intermittently but because of the distance it was a soft

            Cheesily as to be expected, the TV news station was about to cover a love story for Valentine’s Day. And this year, in an effort to make the station’s stories seem more hip, tech savvy, and ‘with it’; the news director proposed they do one on the world’s first couple to have met and married via Vidigab, the internet’s original (and still most popular) site for video chatting. As a promotion for the site itself, some of the leading thinkers and marketers had come up with the idea of locating any couple who had become wedded by using their product. On their site, they posted a notice to any potential couple asking them to register their names. The notice remained posted for one month to ensure that as many potential couples as possible could be discovered. By the end, the company had gathered a surprising (despite Vidigab’s having been available to the public for nearly a decade already), several hundred couples in all. Some of them were scams, to be sure. And although