Zombie Debt. (Prose Poem)

I borrowed fifty cents from my best friend Wayne to get a Hershey bar. That was sixty years ago, when we were both eight years old.
So I forgot to repay him, and we both went on living and finally lost track of each other.

Until last year. When a lawyer came down my chimney on Christmas Eve to deliver a subpoena, demanding payment of said fifty cents, plus penalty and interest.

It came to just over fifty thousand dollars. I gave the lawyer a glass of milk and some ginger snaps and told him no way would I be paying anything. It was ridiculous.

He merely smiled and went back up the chimney. Lawyers can sneak in and out of anything. 

I looked Wayne up on Facebook and sent him a friend request. He accepted and I asked him 'What the hell?' He replied he really needed the money, because he was unemployed and losing his home. Plus his two daughters needed braces.

So I sent him fifty thousand dollars. I could afford it. From my patent on bacon topped doughnuts. He thanked me, but then stopped communicating with me.

But because of that legal action my friend had started, my credit rating went into the toilet. And I couldn't get a crucial loan when I needed to expand into tofu-stuffed long johns. The new tariff on powdered sugar didn't help things, either. 

I lost my company, my home, and my bank accounts were seized by Mitch McConnell -- for some reason I never learned. I moved into a friend's garage and slept on a cardboard refrigerator box. 

In desperation I reached out to Wayne on Facebook, telling him what had happened and asking him to send some of the money back that I had sent to him. 

The next day while I was stuffing my sleeping bag into my refrigerator box a helicopter landed behind the garage and my friend Wayne jumped out to embrace me.

"It was all just a test!" he told me. "I never needed your money. I've always been rich. And it was me who forced your company into bankruptcy. I needed to test your moral fiber, to see if you gave  up or kept fighting. Because, old friend, I wanted to make you a partner in my stupendously profitable corporate empire."

Then he broke down weeping. My emotions were very strong, too. 

I finally managed to ask him what was his stupendously profitable business.

"Scented eyeglasses" he quavered, still overcome with emotion. "But you failed the test, old friend. You gave up too easily and sit around all day on an old refrigerator box. So I can't use you."

"That" I said simply, "is the dumbest idea I've ever heard of. Your business empire will crumble before the snowdrops come up this year." 

And that's exactly what happened to Wayne's business empire. As for me, I've started a line of cardboard refrigerator box furniture, without any startup funds, just using social media. And I'm becoming rich again.

My next step is to create a line of scented cardboard refrigerator box furniture.