Key to a Storyline
Janet Kuypers
12/21/19, National Short Story Day
When a young woman
a researcher, a logical woman,
was a scientist in Seattle,
she led a research group in
a pharmaceutical company
to more successes
in AIDS drugs for the world.
Despite her successes,
she learned how she still
had to jump through both
corporate and religious hoops
to successfully accomplish
her work.
Then out of the blue
a male friend from college —
a man now living in New York
with money and connections
in a well-known publishing company —
came to her town on a business trip,
they rekindled their friendship,
and they suddenly realized
that although they were different,
at the core they were really the same,
and they finally found themselves
in love.
So as she worked
and discovered from colleagues
around the country that the government
was stopping their progress with AIDS research,
her love, the man she fell for,
was attacked in a darkened corner
of Central Park one night,
and in the process was injected with a needle...
and he quickly developed
HIV.
This was her work,
and this seemed like far
too deliberate of an effort
to stop her from succeeding.
But she refused to sit back
like a helpless “maiden”
while everything falls apart,
so she made connections —
and who knows, she may
have talked to too many
conspiracy theorists,
but when one told her
of AIDS being a government plan
to eradicate some segments
of society, they actually
gave her contact locations
of where they kept an
ultimate cure.
Now, this woman
was a researcher, a scientist,
but she couldn’t let this injustice
from her government continue,
so she worked out. She bought a gun.
She practiced, and quickly came up with
a plan.
She took time off work,
something she never did,
and she collected her cash
to make her way across
the country with no paper trail,
and avoided attacks on her life
until she was able to find
a small sample of the cure.
She found only enough to save her love,
and without proof
of where this sample came from,
her hands seemed tied behind her back
and after all this work she didn’t know how
to bring the government’s wrongdoings
to light.
After risking her life,
the only thing she could do
was save her love, but
she kept the original vial
and planned to extract
just enough of this miracle
to help her move forward
with a vaccine, because
if she couldn’t show the world
who the real enemy was,
she could at least do her damnedest
to help the countless others
who would otherwise be killed
from a cruel and heartless
government.
And no, this short story
might not have the happiest ending,
but sometimes
happy endings aren’t the way life is.
The plot still had twists and turns,
philosophical conflict,
and of course, a love story,
and it proves that even when
there seems to be no hope in sight,
it is possible to find a way
to make things work in the end.
Which is exactly the way
life should be.
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