Story Telling Week 11

The Devil and the I.R.S.

I.R.S. Building

Walter was a small man. Small in every way. His eyes were small, his hands were small, and his aspirations in life were small, or rather short sighted. He worked as an auditor for the IRS. Most times when people asked what he did for a living he simply said he was in the financial business. He had never made many friends because being so short sighted he never really found it prudent or better yet appropriate to make room in his life for other people. Instead he chose to focus on gathering as much money as possible for the IRS, and a little on the side for himself.

One day Walter climbed into a cab at the same time as a stranger. The stranger was dressed in the same grey suit at Walter and even had the same small eyes. The stranger however was much more friendly and pleasant that Walter.

“Hello there buddy, I am Sam nice to meet you.”

Most times people just looked past Walter and rarely did they ever speak directly to him.

“Hello, I am Walter.”

Sam looked at Walter and noticed that they had the same grey suit and small eyes.

“We must be brothers,” Sam said to Walter. “What do you do for a living?”

Walter being embarrassed that he worked for the IRS replied, “Well what do you do for a living?”

“I’m in the financial business…Some would say I am a collector of money.” Sam answered.

“Me too.”

“Well then we must be brothers.”

Sam and Walter continued to talk about their business, and Walter began to grow fond of Sam. After all this was the only person that talked to Walter, well other than his mother, but she had too because Walter lived in her basement.

“Where are you from Sam?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well let’s just say that I am from somewhere that is hot most of the time.”

“Oh, Florida. That sounds nice. What’s it like there?”

“Not what you would expect actually.” Sam said as he smiled.

The cab came to a stop and both of the men got out.

Sam said, “This is the building that I collect money at. I have to go see a man about a debt.”

“Do you mind if I come along?”

“Not at all,” Sam replied. The men stepped into an elevator and took it to the basement. In the basement there was a man working on a vending machine.

“This darn thing is always breaking, hey you guys can have this machine,” the vendor said.

“There you go Sam, looks like you own a vending machine.”

“No not really Walter, he doesn’t mean it. See watch.”

The man finished fixing the machine and closed it. “Well I guess I will keep it.”

“See Walter I told you.”

“Well I have to collect some money in this building.” Walter said.

“May I come with you?”

“Of course you can.” The two men took the elevator to the top floor of the building and then walked to a door. Walter knocked on the door and a lady answered. “I am from the IRS, and I have going to do an audit on you. I am going to find something wrong and you will goto jail, but we can make this all go away from $200 dollars.”

The lady said, “I don’t have that much money, and you can goto hell if you don’t stop lying and change your ways.”

Sam leaned in and asked the lady, “Do you mean that?”

The lady replied, “With all my heart.”

“Listen here lady give me that money or you are going to jail.”

Sam placed his hand on Walter and said, “hey relax, no need to collect any money from her, you are coming with me.”

Walter turned around to see that Sam had turned into the devil himself, in just enough time to wish he had not tried to cheat the lady as the devil dragged him to hell.

Author's Notes

This is a retelling of the Story of the Summoner from the Canterbury Tales Unit. The story is about a summoner that meets the devil and then is taken to hell by the devil for not repenting. I updated this story because the original version in the unit was so good that it was the only I felt I could retell this story with my own spin. 

Bibliography

"The Summoner's Story" from  Eva March Tappan's The Chaucer Story Book.

Picture Attribution

Exterior of the Internal Revenue Service office in midtown New York.
Date 1 July 2010
Source Own work
Author MBisanz talk
Permission
(Reusing this file)
Matthew G. Bisanz, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the following licenses:
GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.
w:en:Creative Commons
attribution share alike This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Attribution: Matthew G. Bisanz