Twenty eight

Once there was a man who was obsessed with the number twenty eight. In his early years his fascination with it manifested in that as soon as the boy had learned to write and count he would write down the number on any imaginable place. If he'd lack paper, the room's walls would suffice. His worried parents visited numerous different doctors and psychiatrists, tried to ask friends and the general populace for help, but nothing that was recommended to them could rid the boy's mind of the accursed number. Finally they accepted the situation as the child could at least communicate without any problems and even was getting acceptable grades in school. But every free minute that it had and even some that were actually intended for other activities, it used up to either ponder about the number twenty eight, to jot it down repeatedly in notebooks or search excitedly for mentions of the number in books, movies or even simply newspapers.
The boy grew to a man with his passion still intact. When he would shop for groceries he would try obsessively to raise the sum of his purchase to twenty eight dollars (or to lower it as well). He would let his hair be cut every twenty eight days and – as close as was possible – to a length of twenty eight millimeters. He intentionally had rented an apartment on 28 Hucksby Lane and in his fish tank twenty eight goldfish swam. On the twenty eighth of each month he would dedicate himself to his studies about the number that had already fascinated him as child – more intensely than usually. Should the date fall on a weekday, the man would take a day off from work and then crawl behind his mountain of notes, research and books, completely separated from the outside world. In time the man had come to understand that his behavior was abnormal which however only motivated him more to research the number. He was so fascinated by it that he wanted to find out the reason for his fascination.

Finally it was time for the man's twenty eighth birthday. He had already longed for this day, awaiting it from a distance with both admiration and anxiety as though it were a wild animal. He had not a single clue as to what the coming year of his life would have prepared for him. Would it finally reveal him what the story behind the number was? Would it be the best year of his life or maybe even the worst? Would parallel to the end of the year his obsession with the number end?
The man quit his job, enveloping himself further in his work and his insanity. When his birthday, the 28th of February had finally come, the man robbed an ATM. He stole exactly 28.282,80 dollars and left behind the rest with full intent. In his completely insane delirium and in his fears and hopes that he had held for the twenty eighth year of his life, he had come to the conclusion that in the last minute of his twenty eighth year – the minute, in which he was born twenty eight years earlier out of his mothers womb – he would die and in exactly the twenty eighth second of this minute. His death would forever stay an unsolved mystery and simply be attributed to a heart attack. The man was completely certain of this and so he had decided that he would the make the seemingly last year of his life also the most beautiful year of his life. With his stolen money he started a journey into places he had once dreamed of. Places that had no correlation to the number twenty eight. He could have tried to find a certain country with the help of meridians, population counts, areas or other things of numerical nature that would in one or more ways have contained the bewitched number, but he wrote it off as childish tomfoolery.
And so the man started the journey in which he would never cast a glance on newspapers, televisions or clocks as he didn't want to spend his last year in continual fear of his supposed expiration date. He saw magical, fascinating places and landscapes that overwhelmed his senses and was able to make new and interesting acquaintances.

When the first second of the twenty ninth of his life passed by, the man had already lost any sense of time and still enjoy the longest year of his life.