“Hell, I caint ‘member Hank. I think we uz playin’ some county fair somewhere. ’bout like ‘is one ‘ere I ‘spose. How you been doing?”

“I’m okay. Been working. Giving lessons mostly. How about yourself?”

“Oh I been aright mostly.” Marvin dips his chin down, pushing his bottom lip out as if something deep and personal was trying to bust out of his mouth. But it doesn’t. He shrugs, his right hand out of sight, shoved into the back pocket of his dusty old Levis. “Mostly,” he repeats, then smiles.  ”How ’bout your mom and ‘em. They doing good?”

“I guess you didn’t hear. Mom passed a few years ago.”

” ‘Mawful sorry to ‘ear ‘at Hank. Awful sorry.”

“Yeah. It was rough on Dad. But she went in her sleep, real peaceful. About all you can hope for in the end I think. Hell Marvin, she was eighty nine years old. She lived a good long life.”

“Well your Mama was one of the good’uns. How long ago ‘at happen?”

“Mama’s been gone about six years now.”

“Still grieve a little everyday don’t ye?”

“Yeah sir I do. Always miss your Mama I suppose.”

Marvin grins a little and looks down at his feet, dragging the toe of his boot through the dirt. He looks to his right where the midway is. Some ugly old geek is hawking cotton candy. Little children with dirty faces run up to him with their quarters and buy some. An old lady drops a scoop of peanuts into a kettle of boiling water and puts out a sign that says “5 cents a bag.” A line forms for the sideshow.

“You still playin’ that old fiddle?” Hank asks. “I need a fiddle player for my band. You certainly were the best damn fiddler I ever heard. Best fiddler this whole state ever heard for that matter.”

Marvin’s gaze lingers over the fair. A breeze blows past carrying a small cloud of dust and the smell of food.

“No I ain’t got that fiddle no more,” he says curtly. “Like not to talk ’bout it neither. No offense.”  There’s dirt in his voice.

“Okay. Okay. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” Hank says. Then he chuckles, “It’s just, well, you used to guard it like it was your sister’s cherry is all. That’s why I…”

“I DON’T WANT TO TALK ‘BOUT THAT FUCKIN’ FIDDLE!” Marvin yells. A crowd of onlookers forms.

“Jesus Marvin.” Hanks says, his brow scrunched up in confusion. “We used to do good money playin’ around this whole damn state and it was all because of you! Then you up and quit out of nowhere one day with no explanation. I don’t see you for however many years, and you expect me not to ask if you still  play? You expect me not to ask why I can’t ask?”

Marvin’s chin is jutting out and his left hand is pulled into a fist.

“What’s the matter?” Hank asks with a shrug, “Did the devil come collect?”

Marvin cocks Hank right across the bridge of his nose. Hank goes down hard with a bump to the ass because both hands are clutching the center of his face and blood is pouring out from under his palms. Marvin stomps away amid the gossiping crowd who do all they can  to avoid his attention.

And as Marvin is storming away, Hank  sees something very peculiar. Marvin’s right wrist is resting on the entrance of his back pocket. But there’s no bulge in the pocket where a hand would be. Instead, it just lays perfectly flat against Marvin’s body. And through his half closed eyes, watering up with the roaring pain in his nose, Hank sees something very peculiar indeed.

Marvin pulls his right arm away from his back pocket. He wipes his brow with a stump. There is only air where his bowing hand used to be.

In their previous houses, Gerald installed locks and deadbolts in the right places. And that had taken care of the problem. Some nights he would awake to the gentle knocking sound of Timothy trying to open his dead bolted bedroom door, or the door to the garage. Gerald would yell, “TIM! GO BACK TO BED!” and that would be the end of it for that night.

But they were in yet another new house, the third since leaving their first house, and some of their stuff was still in boxes. Gerald hadn’t had the time or the money to make the new house as safe as the old one.

He grabbed a recent photo of Timothy and started hitting the streets. He showed the photo to anyone who would look, and even some people who wouldn’t. He accidentally bloodied the nose of a guy in a business suit when he shoved the picture in his face. A skater kid, with face pierced all to hell, took Gerald’s phone number and promised to call if he saw Timothy.

As the midday sun passed over head, the temperature rose sharply, and Gerald wiped sweat from his brow with an old bandanna. He stopped into a grocery store and bought a bottle of coke. He showed the picture to the clerk. The clerk recognized that picture.

“I kicked that little shit out of here few hours ago. He walked behind the counter while I was in the back and made a huge mess. Knocked cigarettes all over the place and smashed a bunch of ‘em open. Stole a bunch of stuff too. Ran out of here with his arms full of stuff.”

“What did he take?” Gerald asked.

The clerk detailed everything, A banana, a chicken, probably some cigarettes. Gerald paid him for the things Timothy took, and silently thanked the lord that the clerk hadn’t called the cops.

He left the grocery store and started looking again. More hours passed with no leads. The sun settled into a low angle in the west and the early autumn temperature dropped again. Gerald cursed himself for not bringing a jacket. The late afternoon sweat on his arms and back evaporated off and he rubbed his hands over his elbows and chest for a little warmth.

There was still one place left to check. Gerald didn’t really have any hope that Timothy would be there. But it he had to check it off the mental list. As he set off east, toward the darkening sky, he made the mental preparations. He knew time was not on his side anymore. If Timothy was not there, and Gerald had no reason to believe he would be, then he would call the police, and deal with the consequences.

The streetlights flickered on. A waxing moon took over a cloudless sky and the stars shone. Gerald was chilled in his shorts and t-shirt. It was like stepping back in time, crossing those streets and blocks. Even in his state of worry, certain old trees and cars popped out at him, and he marveled at how little could change in four years.

He rounded the corner onto Pinehurst Lane. The sidewalk looked worse. Some trees here were pushing roots through the concrete. And the people who lived here now weren’t keeping their yards clean. The old neighborhood was getting trashy.

“Part of why we left,” Gerald thought, before completing the thought, and reminding himself of the bigger reason they left.

He could see the old house up ahead. It was still empty, and the chain link fence around the yard was falling apart. The porch was covered in dead leaves and trash. The upstairs windows were still intact, but the kitchen window overlooking the yard was smashed. Thieves had ripped out the gutters. The grass was as tall as his thighs.

He undid the latch on the gate. He had to shove it open with both hands, as rust had worn the hinges and tall grass worked like a doorstop against him. He walked up the steps, and the wood bent under his weight. He shoved his hand through the hole where the doorknob for the front door used to be and stepped into his old house.

“Tim?” He asked gently, unsure of who could be in the house, not wanting a confrontation with some drug addict or homeless man. He noticed the old coat of arms was still hanging on the wall. But it was missing an arrow now.

“Tim?”

He walked up stairs and looked in all the old rooms, opening each door oh so slowly, memories of their old life hitting him with each creaky floorboard and torn strip of wallpaper.

Gerald walked back downstairs and into the kitchen, broken glass crunching under his shoes. He was looking out and forward when he tried to open the door to the back yard. His nose ran into the screen as something stopped the door from opening completely.

Timothy was asleep on the old porch swing, which had been torn free from its ropes and dragged away from the other side of the porch. He was wearing khaki cargo shorts, hi top sneakers with no socks, and his Cow and Chicken pajama top. He was shivering in the cold.

Cigarettes were falling out of his shorts. The arrow from the coat of arms dangled out of his left hand. A banana down by his feet, and the chicken from the grocery store was propping up his head like a pillow.

“Tim!” Gerald shouted, shoving the door against the old porch swing, trying to rock him awake.

Timothy woke up and looked around. He saw his dad standing in the doorway, but made no real response. He stood up, and Gerald was able to shove the door open. He grabbed his son in a big hug. Timothy stood there, shivering, with his arms down at his side, looking past his dad’s shoulder at all the stuff laying on the porch.

“Come on,” Gerald said, “Let’s get the hell out of here and go home.”

And he took Timothy by the hand and tried to lead him out. But Tim fought him and pulled backward. He wrestled his wrist free from his father’s grip and slammed the back door open.

“Tim!” Gerald yelled, “Damnit it’s time go! Do you have any idea what you put me through today?”

Timothy gathered up all the things he’d collected that day, and grabbed one final thing, a length of the rope that had held the porch swing up in earlier days.

He carried these random objects in his arms with a sort of reverence, and fairly ran past his dad with them, out the front door.

Gerald sprinted after, desperately trying to avoid chasing his son by foot through this now dangerous neighborhood. But he didn’t have to.

Tim stopped at the electrical pole on the corner. Gerald recognized the look in his eyes and didn’t stop him. Whatever Tim had in his mind, it was the most important thing the world at that moment, and nothing would unseat that thought from his mind.

Gerald stood back and waited it out. Ten minutes later, Tim came walking back, his task completed. Everything had been tied up around the pole, And Tim had shoved the arrow through the chicken. There was even some money tied up there that Gerald hadn’t seen, and had no doubt come from the grocery store cash register.

Tim grabbed his father’s hand and led him up to the pole.

“It’s a warning,” Tim said.

“Warning?” Gerald asked, “Against what?”

“Stay out.” Tim said, and his breath steamed as the words left his mouth. Gerald felt a chill go through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature. He sensed eyes looking at them from all directions. That primal part of his brain left over from ancient times told him to run and run fast.

Timothy took his father’s hand, and looked at him straight in the eye, a sort of personal engagement that was rare for Tim to do.

“Go home?” Tim asked.

“Yeah buddy. Let’s go home.”

And they walked. Gerald’s fight or flight response told him to sprint. But Timothy had a death grip on his dad’s wrist. And the little boy would go no faster than a gentle stroll.

Those two blocks of abandoned houses seemed like football fields to Gerald, and the feeling of being watched never left. But then the bright lights of a main road appeared. And Timothy led his dad toward them.

When they crossed the street, and into the parking lot of a corner gas station, Timothy finally let go of his dad’s wrist.

Gerald fished a few quarters out of his pocket and dialed up a cab from the pay phone. They went inside to wait for it, and he bought a coke and some twinkies to share. He let Timothy have first dibs on the coke and twinkies. He looked at the window at the street they’d just come from and he could have sworn he saw a homeless man staggering down the street in a trench coat. He was trying to focus in on the image, when an empty glass bottle and plastic wrapper were shoved into his hand.

He looked down and Tim said, “Thanks.”

Gerald looked back out the window. A big yellow taxi was blocking his view of the street.

As he walked out to it, he took another peek around its roof, looking for that staggering homeless man, but whatever he had seen was gone.

They got in. He told the cabbie where to go. It wasn’t a long ride, and they rode it out in silence. Gerald stroked Timothy’s hair and kissed him on the forehead. Not a moment after they were both deep into a dreamless sleep. And they were only awoken by the gentle voice of the cab driver, telling them that they were here.

They were home.

AND LO AND BEHOLD! A light switch clicked and Allan felt twelve thousand lumen spotlights all over his face. The black behind his eyelids flashed away to bright orange. He should have put a hand over his face, but he didn’t. He’d been down this road a few times. Putting your hand over your face told the guys behind the glass something. It told them the surprise had worked.

“Why isn’t he putting his hand over his face?”

“I don’t know! Maybe they’ve developed a corneal implant for light sensitivity.”

“He still has his eyes closed, so perhaps it’s only behind the eyelid.”

“When we autopsy him later we’ll do a thorough dissection of the eyeball and eyelids.”

“I CAN HEAR YOU!” Allan yelled.

“Get your hand off the interc-” echoed through the chamber.

Allan heard the cut off words bounce around and he knew where he was. Perhaps not specifically, not an exact location, but he knew the type of room, big, empty and all concrete.

“Ahem,” went the loudspeaker,”Yes well that’s unfortunate. But as you’ve no doubt ascertained, you are trapped. So we’ll do whatever we want with you.”

Allan knew the truth of it. At least the he knew the truth as that guy knew it. He’d been here before. Well, not here specifically, but you get the idea.

“Now, I will dim the spotlights a little, and when I do I want you to follow my specific instructions. If you hesitate, refuse, whatever, you will be punished.”

“Punished? Punished how?” Allan asked.

“I’ll show you in a minute. Now, dim the lights.”

Allan cracked his eyes a little bit. The light was still incredibly bright, but he could stand it. He made out a wall of floodlights tilted at an angle overhead. Below them, along a balcony, he could see the one way glass he knew would be there, a couple of big loudspeakers hanging on either side.

“Now, if you feel along the front of your chest, down to your waist, you’ll notice a cable we’ve attached to you. Go ahead, feel for it so you know we’re not lying.”

Allan  moved his hands down his chest and  along his waistline was a very thin steel cord.

“You’ll notice that it isn’t simply wrapped around you. If you feel forward along the cord, you notice that it’s inside you as well.”

Allan followed the cord backward into a bandaged area above his navel. The cord itself was thin, no bigger than fishing wire. He took a length of it and pulled, trying to fray it, get it to stretch. A searing heat flashed through his palms.

“Aht, aht, ah, mister. The cord is electrified. And, I apologize for this next shock, but I think it’s necessary to prove my point. You need to know just what we’re capable of.”

Allan’s muscles contracted inward. His stomach was on fire. He bit his tongue so hard that he bit the tip of it off, the red bit of muscle flying forward, spraying a trail of blood at the lights. A pressure was building behind his eyes, pushing the eyeballs forward out of the socket. There was no pain like it in the world.

“Kill it.”

Allan dropped to the floor and convulsed. Trails of smoke drifted out of his mouth and blood trickled out of his nose and ears. All he heard was ringing and muffled. But it came back, like someone turning up the volume and taking a pillow off his ears.

“-se your han-”

“can’t hear you bo-”

“shut up. he’ll hear me soon”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shut up! Raise your hand when you can hear me.”

The words finally tuned in and Allan raised his left hand. He wanted to scream in pain but would not do it. Not for pride or any training, but because he wanted to hear what the guy had to say next.

“That was thirty percent power. Raise your hand again if you understand.”

Allan raised his hand.

“Good. If we catch you doing anything, suspicious, you’ll get it again. And to be clear, if we see your hands lingering around your navel, that would be very suspicious indeed, like, say, fifty percent suspicious. Raise your hand if you understand me.”

Allan raised his hand.

“Excellent. Now, I’m going to dim the lights even further. When I do you’ll have exactly twelve seconds to look behind you. You need to look. It’s very important that you do as I say.”

Allan gathered himself and turned around, the light was still surprisingly bright, which made no sense at all, the lights were behind him.

“DIM THE LIGHTS!” the anonymous torturer yelled. “Twelve… Eleven… Ten..”

Allan opened his eyes and saw a humongous fan surrounded by giant mirrors. The size of the thing was enormous, like some of those wind turbines he’d been working on. He tried to guess what was so all important about the fan and the mirror. He couldn’t come up with anything.

A horrible, painful, white light blinded him. He jerked his head back so hard that he hit the cement floor and almost knocked himself out.

“I don’t feel sorry for you. I was counting down. You should have been listening,” the guy said and paused.

“Now, I showed you the mirror and the fan so you’d know what you’re up against. I can blind you at any point that I’d like, but further, those mirrors act like a heat reflector of sorts. So I could turn this place into an oven and cook your brain into soup right inside your skull.” The guy coughed. “That fan moves at four thousand rpm. I can move it in either direction. I could blow you forward and smash you against the wall. I could suck you back and chop you up. We can kill you however we see fit.”

“YEAH WE CAN!”

“Would you get the hell away from interc-”

The words bounced around the chamber until they died out. While tweedle dee and tweedle twat argued around in the sound booth Allan tried to piece some things together. Conclusion number one. He was fucked. But conclusion number one was always just panic and bullshit. You got out of situations like this by not panicking, thinking it through, and getting through to conclusion number two or three. Conclusion number four was a sure fire way out of everything if you could get to it. But conclusion number four was really just for long nights in prison cells. A time like this was for conclusion number two.

“As I was saying, there are three different ways you can die here today. We can shock you, we can cook you, or we can cut you to ribbons in the fan. There is no way you can get out. Do you believe me?”

Conclusion number one: I am fucked. I will die here, today, in a horrible, agonizing, grisly fashion. This cannot be changed and I cannot do anything about it.

“Yeh. I beneeve ooo,” Allan mumbled with his new tongue tip less mouth.

Conclusion number two: Conclusion number one is bullshit. I will not die. Not here. Not today. And certainly not in a painful manner. I will die of old age in a bed in my home with my family around. They will send me off to heaven with loving smiles because there is a way out of here, somehow.

“Good. Now,” he paused, “We know who you are. We know your track record for escaping situations like this. So, In a moment, I am going to kill you. It will be painful and you will feel every bit of it. The shock you received a moment ago will be like nothing.” The guy’s voice was cold and passionless, almost feminine, almost androgynous.

“But there is something you must do first. Before I kill you you will tell me names. I don’t even care if they’re fake names. But you will tell me names.”

“Why?” Allan asked.

“Because,” the guy said, “Everything you’re doing right now is being recorded. And after you’re dead, a video of this will be shown everywhere. Your people will see you just like this. Bloodied. Weak. Defeated. Talking. And…” the guy trailed off, sighing, “And I don’t know why I’m telling you this next part, but fuck it, I want you to know. When you’re dead, I intend to walk down there and shit all over what remains of your body. That will not be recorded. That memory is just for me.”

Conclusion number three: This is nothing new. I have been here before. I have left here before. So I can leave here again. Not here specifically, but…

Wait.

Yes, here, specifically. I have been here before.

“So start talking,” said the guy

Allan pushed up on to his knees and rocked back and forth. He had been here before, hadn’t he? He was processing everything that was happening. Some pain that had been delayed was now demanding his attention. His muscles cramped fiercely and he wanted a drink of water more than anything. He had to do something, soon the pain would be too much. It was growing already, a horrible, itching, burning sensation. It was as if he was being set on fire from the inside out. It was so hot and the pain was ridiculously…

“TWENTY PERCENT! TALK AND I’LL SHUT IT OFF! NAMES GODDAMNIT!! NAMES NOW!!”

“DYENNIFER! DOMAS! ADDAN!”

“Last names… we need last names too. This Amy, Baymy, Caymy shit won’t cut it.”

“Dyeniffer Anderun, Domas Anderun, Addan Anderun…”

“HARDY FUCKING HAR ASSHOLE! FIFTY PERCENT!”

Oddly, the only thing Allan felt was his eyeballs. The pulse made his eyelids close with incredible force, enough to keep his eyes in the socket.  His vision started getting weird. He could see the normal sliver of light that comes when you barely open an eye. But then his eye was all the way open, and it was as if he fell forward, because that’s what his eye did, popped out and dangled on his cheek.

“KILL IT! NAMES!! NAMES NOW YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!!”

Allan shivered on the concrete and whispered a list of names off the top of his head, the only thing he was careful to do was not actually say the names of anyone he knew. He gave the guys a list of pure fiction. He talked until they stopped him.

“That’s good. You can stop…thank you…thank you for your candor.”

Allan fingered his dangling eyeball. He tried to  squeeze it back into the socket. He didn’t have the gumption for it. He was too scared he would pop it, and conclusions two and three were still in his head.

“Now, to be honest, I feel a little bit sad about your treatment here. I wish you hadn’t made me hurt you. So as an apology, I’m going to let you choose how I kill you. In case you’ve forgotten, it was cook, shock, or chop. Which will it be?”

“Dumber foor”

“There was no number four. There were only three choices. Which will it be, cook, shock, or chop?”

“Du fad go fuward. Smash me.”

The intercom clicked off and echoed around the room. Allan awaited the verdict.

“That’s correct. I did say that the fan can move in both directions. Am I to understand that you want me to move the fan clockwise and blow you forward, smashing you against the wall?”

Allan nodded his head yes.

“Very well then, I suppose it will mean some extra cleaning for the maintenance crew, but then this glass is five inches thick and I doubt you could shatter it. If that indeed was your thinking. Was that what you were thinking?”

Allan nodded his head yes. He hadn’t been thinking that, but it was no matter. It gave the guy behind the glass a false sense of confidence so Allan was all for that.

“Ah, a pity you wasted your thoughts on it. But no matter, you have made your choice and you will be held to it. I’m turning the fan on…now.”

The humongous blades moved, slowly, on the way to their final, fatal, speed. Allan took the time to place his left eye just on the verge of being back in his socket. Just at the point where he didn’t feel comfortable squeezing.

“You have about two minutes before the fan gets to full speed. Which is a very good thing because I need to move my bowels in a serious way,” the guy laughed. The sound of his chuckle competed with the sound of wind and it was losing. Allan walked forward past the spot lights to the concrete wall beneath the balcony, bracing himself against it. He was directly beneath the one way glass, about twenty feet below it.

“JUST TO BE CLEAR, I CAN STILL SEE YOU. NO FUNNY BUSINESS!” the guy yelled over the growing sound of rushing air.

Allan didn’t give a shit that the guy could see. In fact, he was glad. He wanted him to see everything that was about to happen, it would blow his mind. Because Allan had been here before, in this room, five years ago, when he saw it finished. He designed it. He drew the blueprints, wore the foreman’s hat, and picked out the tiles. The same tiles those guys were sitting on, smugly thinking they had the upper-hand. He watched as sub-contractors laid them down. He picked out the desk, installed the intercom, and more importantly, he knew how the whole place was wired. Their little electric sting would be worthless when the fan was blowing at full force.

Allan waited for the fan to pick up speed.  He couldn’t hear anything any other than white noise. He kept his right eye closed and his left eye open. The wind blew him back against the wall, compressing every part of his body. He couldn’t make his move just yet. The wind had to get a little higher. He needed it to push his eyeball back into the socket.  He tried to look around with it, which he couldn’t do, not yet. Then it happened. The force of the wind pushed his eyeball back, just far enough, that it popped back in and he had control of his vision. The first thing he saw was the tip of his tongue come flying at him from the floor.

Allan made his move. He lifted his knees and was suspended against the wall. He climbed upwards, pushing himself little by little, faster than the guys could believe. His battered and broken body reminded him with every push of what he’d been through, pain pulsing through his joints. Dirt and random bits of gravel scratched his face, a mini sandstorm in the tunnel.

At last Allan’s head banged up against the bottom of the balcony. The fan couldn’t get any faster, which meant Allan could still move, even though it took all of his effort, and he didn’t have much left. He shuffled to his left, crawled up and over the side, where the solid forward edge of the balcony shielded him from the wind.

Behind the glass they were turning that shock dial all the way, pissing their pants because it wasn’t doing anything. When one thing was drawing that much power, there wasn’t power for anything else. Somewhere near by, in a small town, a family was setting down to dinner and wondering why their lights were flickering. The little dial, and the string running through his stomach, was useless.

Conclusion number four: These guys have no idea what’s about to hit them.

The guy was right when he said the glass between them was five inches thick. It was indeed. Five inches of solid, bulletproof plexiglass that would never bend or shatter under even the most extreme pressure. Mirrored one way to keep down glare, it was five feet high by eight feet wide and weighed close to eight hundred pounds.

It, like the rest of the room, was not supposed to be blown back. Allan designed that window to sit behind a forward facing lip of six inch concrete. It would never, ever, for the entire life of the world, be sucked out by that fan. But it could be blown back out of the gasket, a gasket that, by Allan’s estimation, could barely take the force it was under, and would unseat with just the slightest force.

Allan laid down behind that solid forward rail of the balcony, where he knew they could see him, and pulled that string out of his stomach. It hurt like a son of a bitch. It almost made him pass out. But he did it, right there in plain sight, so they could finally see the true measure of the man they were fucking with. He pulled it clear and showed them a full seven inches of bloody wire, then he tossed it aside.

He knew they were going crazy in there, probably calling for security. That main guy had probably shit himself. Allan laughed a tongueless chuckle. They might not have even figured out to shut the fan off. That was why their wire hadn’t stopped him. It was why there were completely screwed right now.

Allan rose up and sat on his haunches, ready to spring upward. In a moment he was gonna jump up, let the wind shove him forward, roll his right shoulder down to take the hit, and unseat that window.

He showed them an out turned palm, and pulled his fingers back to show that he was counting down this time. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

He jumped up and it happened exactly like he said it would. The wind caught his body like a ragdoll and blew into the window. His shoulder took the brunt of the impact and broke. Allan’s two hundred and twenty five pound frame was nothing to that fan. An eight hundred pound piece of glass was only slightly more troublesome.

It happened all too fast.

The glass blew through the back wall of the room, leaving a perfectly rectangular hole in the wall, like something out of a cartoon, or one of those children’s toys where you shove a plastic square through a square hole. It scraped the sides of the long hallway behind, tearing a huge plywood gash for the whole length. The window was thrown with such force that it snapped one of the men in half. He was severed in two at an angle, the glass cutting him in mid stride, from just beneath his left shoulder to just under his bottom right rib.

It finally came to a stop at the end of the hall, resting, and blocking, the only door out.  Allan saw the door buckling behind the weight of that glass, god knows how many security guys coming to see what the problem was.

There was a part of the room that was untouched by everything that was happening, a section of controls about five feet in width, just to the left of the main console, an area that was safe when the glass broke free.

There was one guy sitting there, still very much alive, still very much in shock at seeing his partner split in two. Allan lay still on the ground, the wind blowing overhead at ridiculous speed. He crawled forward, right next to the guy, blood spattered lab coat and all.

He wore glasses, specked with little drops of blood, a Jackson Pollack done entirely in red. His breath hitched in and out. His gaze was permanently locked onto his partner’s body, laying at a weird angle on the floor, blood pooling around, slick and shiny. Allan was inches away before the guy looked at him.

“MAKE EH SOP!” Allan yelled with full lungs and a tongueless mouth. The guy looked at him and didn’t do anything. Allan motioned what he meant. Make the fan go in the other direction.

The guy stared at him for a moment before reaching over to a console on his left and moving a lever down. Allan knew that the fan would still take some time to wind down. But he didn’t have time to let it just come to a standstill. He set it going in the opposite direction to speed things up. From here, everything had to be timed perfectly. He had to jump from the window while the fan was still blowing hard enough to break his fall, and he also had to give it time to calm down even more, so that he could run through it without getting chopped in half. Because beyond the tunnel was freedom, an enormous vent that opened into a field in the countryside. And eight hundred pound piece of glass or no, there was still some bad dudes with guns at the end of the hallway. It wouldn’t be long before they tried to come in through the out door, so to speak

“you… you weren’t…” the guy said.

“Weh I ‘id!” Allan said, “‘ow ‘ere’s eh ‘ideo?”

The guy pointed to a dvd burner sitting beneath the console with the fan lever. Allan popped it open and broke the disc in two. The he judged that the time was right. He stood up and leaned forward into the wind and was shoved backward, not strong enough to lift him up but definitely enough to blow him back. He crawled forward through the spot where the window had been, fighting for every inch. He got down behind the solid rail of the balcony, crawled to the edge and got over.

The backward force of the fan was slowing. Enough that he slid down the wall, and the force of his landing smacked his jaws together. That would have cut my tongue off, Allan thought, then remembered that that had already happened so it was no big deal.

He got to his feet and waited fifteen seconds, then the fan stopped completely. He figured that that gave him twenty seconds to cover the hundred and fifty yards to it. He took off at a dead sprint.

His footfalls echoed around. He heard a huge crash from the open window, guys yelling orders, guns being cocked. The fan was whirring faster and faster. They climbed out onto the balcony and sighted him in their rifles. Allan was ten feet away and he hadn’t run far enough, the fan was moving too fast. He heard and saw a bullet ping off the blade. The mirrors around the fan shattered in a spray of gunfire, broken glass falling all around. Three stings happened in quick succession, in his left leg, arm, and right shoulder. He leapt forward out of pure fear and panic.

He rolled onto his back to see the fan whirring around faster and faster. Between passes he could see the security guys running across the floor to catch up. He looked back just in time to see one man get sucked into the fan and chopped into a fine spray. The wind was pushing at his back. He heard that same sound again in quick succession, more guys being sucked into the fan. The fan reached full speed and Allan was lifted off his feet.

The wind carried him like a piece of paper. He saw a shaft of light in the distance, two miles away, the elbow where the tunnel turned upward and into a field. It grew brighter and brighter. Allan braced himself, because in a moment the wind was going to blow him out, and he would fall a good thirty or forty feet as the pressure dropped. And it was going to hurt like hell, if not kill him outright.

He cleared the bend and saw the sky. He was thrown upward and were it not for everything that had happened, the moment might have been very beautiful. Clouds moved eastward and a flock of sparrows passed by. He looked down and saw the ground coming fast. He was all turned wrong, his neck was going to take the impact. Allan said a quick prayer for himself and his family and prepared to die.

He squished down into inches of mud, deer shit, and soft, reedy grass. Allan’s neck did take the full force of the impact but it was considerably lessened. He rolled over a for a moment and stared up at the sky, watching clouds pass lazily overhead. The sky darkened and the sun disappeared. A gentle shower broke and washed the mud off his face.

Allan laid there until the storm passed. Then he got up, and limped his way eastward, towards the nearest road, working on a lie for whoever was kind enough to pick him up and drive him to a hospital.

It’s all because of my maker. He would toil away on me for hours in the garage. Those were such happy times, me and the maker. He would sit on his stool, fluorescent bulbs would hum away over head, and I would feel the warm drip of solder on my connections. Sweat would drop down from his forehead and splash on my casing. He worked so hard on me. Night after night, he would fix me, make me better. He loved me so much. And every night, I would watch as he left the room, walked up the stairs, and hit the light switch, wrapping me in darkness, where I would sleep peacefully until the next night, when we did it all again.

Sometimes he would have magazines or newspapers laid out on the table. He didn’t know I could see them. I think he didn’t want me to, but I knew what he was looking at. It was always an article about some bomb somewhere that had gone off and killed hundreds of people, destroyed a couple of city blocks. Those articles got him fired up, and he would work extra hard on those nights. But I think I always knew his expectations were too great. I mean look at what Fat Man did, he took out a whole city. How can any bomb ever meet those expectations? How can any one maker do what Fat Man’s makers did?  They can’t. But I never discouraged him. I was the best little bomb that I could be.

Then one night, the very last night I ever sat on that table, my maker put on a tape of old music, women singing in high voices in a weird language, and it played until the spool snapped. I was complete. Except for one last thing. My maker left a little door in my casing, a portal of sorts, a way for him to work on my insides. He just had to close it. So I waited there patiently, anticipating the hot melting glow of the welder sewing me shut.

I waited…

And waited…

My maker was staring at the open wound in my abdomen with tools in hand. And it was like an eternity. I just wanted him to finish me, make me complete. But he didn’t. He laid his tools down, got up from his chair, and left the room. And this time, I wasn’t sure he’d be back.

That was a lonely stretch of time. I mean, I never really had company during those nights before, but I always had the assurance that my maker would return. That night, I wasn’t sure. Those hours were slow, and all kinds of sad thoughts went through my circuits. Would he scrap me? Would he bury me in the ground somewhere. Would he just never come back? Would I just sit there, incomplete, never to detonate? I thought all of that and worse while I waited. We bombs have such good sense of time. It never speeds up or slows down for us. We feel seconds with precision. We bombs, we know time like ants know dirt,  and there was so much of it that night, so much plodding time.

Then the lights came on. My maker trudged down the stairs with a drink in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. He was so sad looking, teary eyed and a little drunk. I remember I saw him in outline, his shadow marking his place against the light at the top of the stairs.  He took his normal spot on the bench, and I waited, oh so patiently, for him to pick up his tools and complete me. But he just stared at that piece of paper for the longest time, taking sips from his drink.

Then, oh it tears me up to think about it, my poor maker started to bawl like a child. If I had arms I would have hugged him tight right then. I would have done anything to make him happy. It isn’t right goddamnit. Someone like him should not have to cry! He took me and built me up from nothing, from absolutely nothing. He imagined me in his head and sat down with a plan to create! Why should he suffer? What did he do to deserve that? Nothing! That’s What!

It was horrible, sitting there powerless, unable to help. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I thought it would just be like that. I thought he would sit there and cry until he died and I would be stuck there on his table forever. But then, he rubbed his eyes til they were clear, his breath hitched and he straightened up.  He stared at me with the fiercest look I’ve ever seen. He flipped that paper over and I saw what it was.

It was a picture. It was a street somewhere, and oh I recognized what it was right away. A bomb had just gone off, a good bomb. There were pieces of cement and rubble everywhere. People were screaming and bloody. A little boy was holding his own arm. A woman was completely shredded and laying in the road. I think I even saw my maker in that picture, standing near the woman, probably taking notes. I understood. He was crying because he didn’t think he had it in him. Or,more likely, he didn’t think I had it in me. I was not going to let that happen. Whatever he needed me to do, I was gonna do it a thousand times better than he ever imagined. I wasn’t built to do the things that were in that picture, but I was gonna do them anyway.

He took that piece of paper and held it over me, right over the hole in my casing, then he gently, lovingly placed it inside. He took up his welding iron, threw his mask down over his face and closed me up. It was such a nice feeling, being complete for the first time. You only get it once so it’s best to savor it as much as you can.

Then the next day, my maker came down and collected me. He placed me into a backpack and left the top open. He carried me upstairs and into his garage. He put me down on the passenger seat of his car, and then he started it up and pulled away. That trip was so nice, me and the maker out and about, seeing the world. He kept the radio tuned to opera. I laugh to think about it now, but my maker was singing! I couldn’t say anything, which was good, but he can’t sing at all. I didn’t mind though, I was just happy to see him smiling. My bomb sense of time counted up two hours and seventeen minutes of driving, and it was far too short. I would have been happy to drive around forever if it meant he could just listen to the radio and smile. So when he finally stopped in the middle of a big city and parked on the curb in a busy street, I was, I’m ashamed to say, a little sad.

He took me out and sat me in a chair on the sidewalk and did some last minute checks. It was weird, that moment, knowing I would never see him again. I didn’t want it to end, but I didn’t want it to go on either. I just wanted to… I don’t know, make it count.

He leaned over and set my timer for five minutes, gave me one last look, said a prayer for me, then sank out of sight. And that was the last time I ever saw him.  Bright sunlight warmed my casing from overhead. My maker, out of nerves, forgot to zip the bag back shut, and he also forgot to rebalance it on the chair.

I didn’t tip over right away. The bag just started moving forward, and the tops of buildings started showing up in that space where the bag was open. I saw the first human head in that space with two minutes left on my timer. With one minute left I saw the first complete person, then the bag fell all the way forward and I tumbled out onto the street.

And then very worst thing that could have happened, did. A man walking by had his hands full with bags of food and drinks. He was fidgeting with his wallet, trying to stuff it into his pocket by cradling it between his elbow and ribs, totally ridiculous. And then he dropped it no three inches away from me. We were there face to face. He didn’t know what to think until I told him, “45… 44… 43…,” and with 40 seconds left he jumped up and yelled “BOMB! BOMB! RUN!”

Everyone heard him and the panic was incredible. Seconds ticked down and all hope faded as those people got further out. I watched feet and counted yards, knowing how far they had to go till they were safe from me, and fear, real fear took me as each one crossed that last bit of distance. I’ve never wanted arms so much. I had to sit there helpless while ankles ran past. If I had hands I would’ve grabbed them and dragged them back. If I could talk I’d have yelled “HOAX!” and everyone would’ve stopped for a second to think about it, and those seconds would’ve been all I really needed. I’d have done anything at all to keep them close just a little bit longer. But I couldn’t do it.

With ten seconds left there was no-one in range. I had a flash of the future, of helicopters flying overhead and the news people saying “No deaths or injuries reported.” Then I remembered that picture sitting in me. I remembered my maker’s face when he put it there. I said, “No! this is not happening. I’m a better bomb than this.” So I looked, I searched, and I found something in me I only suspected was there. I shook and rumbled. I clutched and stuttered and my casing grew red hot with flame. I bounced on the sidewalk like a rubber ball, “5… 4… 3… 2… 1…”

A young couple looked back at the sound of the explosion. I ripped their jaws off. People closer to me got their legs severed. One lady was trying to drink a bottle of water when I hit her mid swallow and the water poured out the back of her head. I made a man’s wife into a mist of blood that stained his face. A little boy got his back blown open so that his spine was exposed to the world. I went sailing in a thousand directions all at once. I landed all over everyone, no-one was too far away and the blood was everywhere. I did good.

The very last part me found the man that yelled “RUN! BOMB! RUN!”. A sharp piece of me shaped like a triangle sailed  over the crowd, arcing downward, landing in his eye socket, blinding his left eye forever, and going in just far enough to tickle his brain, making him talk with a stutter for the rest of his life.

When the nurse took the last piece of me out of his eye, they found a piece of paper stuck to the back, a piece of that picture, and on it was the back of my maker’s head.

I know I made him proud.

That’s the way Green County Sheriff’s deputy Marcus Horna describes it. The incident he refers to happened last wednesday on highway 311 near the Ghor rd. intersection. Janice Behr was pulled on the shoulder because her tire blew out. Behr called 911  for assistance and Deputy Horna responded to the call.

As he approached the vehicle, Deputy Horna was caught on dashcam footage violating a department policy. Footage shows him walk out of his car with a cigarette clearly dangling from his left hand. Behr, who works for a BP station, had just delivered some plastic cans of gasoline to a local hardware store because of a special trade arrangement the two businesses share. Unknown to Behr, some gas had splashed out onto her back seat. Dashcam footage then shows Deputy Horna, with total disregard for Behr’s vehicle, flick his cigarette into the back seat of her car.

“It seemed managable and this is my only car,” is the excuse Behr offers for trying to put the fire out instead of leaving the car. Footage shows her lean into the back seat and begin smacking at the flames while Deputy Horna looks on. After some seconds, flames can be seen moving to the front seat, where Behr’s right arm catches fire. She then runs out of the vehicle in a panic, waving her arm around like something out of a movie.

But what happens next is the most surprising. Footage shows Deputy Horna rush over to Behr, where he grabs her by the neck and throws her to the ground. Behr believed that Horna was trying to put her out, which he did, but only because he was handcuffing her. Incredibly, Behr can be heard on camera wailing in agonizing pain while Horna drags her up by the very arm that was burning and pulls her back to his patrol car.

When asked to defend his actions Deputy Horna repeated his earlier statement, “I saw someone breaking the law so I arrested them.” When pressed for further comment he added, “The woman leaped out the car with her arm on fire and was whirling about like a maniac so I cuffed her and charged her. It is against the law to do that, you can’t run around with your arm in flames,  so I charged her.”

And what was the charge?

“Illegal use of a firearm,” Horna says.

Deputy Horna is currently on paid administrative leave, but is expected to return this month because he is the only person with a key to the garage.

To clarify, I have hallucinations, pretty powerful and vivid hallucinations. And all I have to get me out of them is my reasoning. But I have some tricks to help me spot them. Here are the things I’ve noticed about my hallucinations after years of journaling them and charting them and such.

Number one, when a hallucination is done another can appear pretty quickly, but it will never be more than two in a row. Number two, once they are done it’s at least a half hour before I have more. Number three, it’s never anything moving. Nothing I ever hallucinate moves or is supposed to be alive. Number four, it’s never pleasant. It’s never anything like, say, a cute little puppy dog or Yogi Bear bringing me a picnic basket. If it was shit like that I wouldn’t try to think my way out of it. It would be like that Chappelle’s show sketch where Tyrone the crackhead  is telling the kids not to do drugs, because if you do, all your favorite cartoon characters will show up and laugh with you and you can eat all the cereal and it’s HORRIBLE!

So your next question is, what the fuck made you volunteer for relief efforts in Afghanistan when you hallucinate gruesome things like severed heads? And the truth is I don’t know for sure. I know had a total lack of fuck all going on in my life before I decided to do it. I didn’t have a job so it’s not like I had health insurance to afford the anti-psychotics I wasn’t taking. I had no girlfriend. I had no prospects. I probably would have joined the marines if I hadn’t been so grossly overweight, well, that and I wouldn’t have passed the mental health exam. Excuse me son, is something wrong? No sir doc, just telling myself there’s no way you have a severed hand on your shoulder so I’ll stop seeing a severed hand on your shoulder. They’d give me an assault rifle after that wouldn’t they? No, probably not.

So I decided to come out here and try and do something good, maybe lose a little weight in the process. I’ve always been big but I’ve never been this big. It only happened in the last couple of years when I didn’t…

I’m sorry, I only answered half your question. You wanted to know why someone like me would volunteer for relief efforts in Afghanistan, not just why I volunteered to do relief work. Well the honest answer is that I didn’t know. I had no fucking idea they were gonna send me here.  I thought I was going somewhere else, somewhere where the fighting was already over, like Vietnam or some place like that. If I had known I would be some place where the shit was still hitting the fan I would not have come. But I’m here now so I figure I’ll stay. They need me. There’s an incredible lack of people who want to do this. Hell I don’t really want to do it. I’m here for the ancillary things. Things like losing weight and gaining some understanding of myself. I don’t even really like helping, I just like the feeling I get knowing that someone over here has it a little better because of me. So that makes it a little less altruistic and a little…

I’m sorry, I still didn’t answer your question. You wanted to know why I volunteered and I told you that. But I think what you were getting at is “How do I manage?” except, rearrange that so it’s you asking me, not you asking yourself. Well I manage well enough, but I didn’t always. Let me give you an example.

A group of us were in a village, sorting through rubble after the Americans bombed it to shit because they got a report about a sniper in the area. Which, let me digress for a moment, is a huge over-reaction to a sniper. First of all, there weren’t any troops in the area for him to be sniping at so, you know, do the math. The other thing is, even if he was there, I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained by taking him out like that. It’s not like there’s a lack of second hand rifles floating around and high places to perch yourself. I’m not saying they should let it go if there really was a sniper, but, come on.

Back to where we were, where I was. It was a place that had just had a sniper in it and everything was leveled. We were sifting through the place with our little vests on that say, “DON’T SHOOT! WE’RE HERE TO HELP!” and if you never have to walk through a place like this you’re lucky. When you see this footage on TV it’s always the same ten or fifteen seconds over and over again because that’s the only footage anyone could get without all kinds of gore and viscera in it. If you see a place like this in real life you trip over arms and torsos and the blood literally flows down the street. I came across what used to be a school and started to yell for survivors, but I didn’t hear anything, so I was about to give up when I noticed an arm sticking up between some concrete slabs that used to be  the roof or the wall or maybe both or neither.

The fist was all clenched up and it had a piece of paper in it. So I went over to investigate and it was a test, a basic math test of addition and subtraction problems and it was all slashed up with red ink where the teacher had marked a lot of answers wrong. There was a giant F with a circle around it in the top corner and a little note at the bottom that said “You are doing very bad at math Jen, see me after class.” And I know now where the feeling came from, but at the time I couldn’t place it. All of a sudden I had a terrible sense of empathy for this kid. The actual situation for her could have been very different. Maybe she really was bright and just having trouble. Maybe all the shit going on around her made it hard for her. But that’s not what I thought at the time. At the time I thought that I knew, for sure, that this Jen was actually not very smart, that she was bad at math because that part of her brain wasn’t there. I also knew that she was chubby and the other kids picked on her. I knew that she went home dejected and depressed and cried a lot because there was nothing good in her life, her schoolmates were mean to her and all she wanted to do was stay home.

I saw it very plainly. Rather than pay attention she would stare at a cute boy in class. Rather than take notes she would draw variations of their names together, of names their children might have. The simple dreaming that young children do. And when class was over she would head to the door, keeping her eyes down, trying not to look anyone in the eye. But she trips and her notebook goes to the floor. The cute boy sees it, sees the names of their marriage and children. He’s disgusted by it. He embarrasses her in front of everyone. He yells out loud for all to hear, “I would never go out with you. I don’t like you!” And all she can do is try to grab up her books quickly and get away before anyone else can look at her. I saw it all very clearly, an average day for her.

But there she was, in math class, trying to learn things that were way beyond her. The teacher wrote vaguely threatening stuff on her tests while her classmates made fun of her, and all she really wanted to do was go home and hug her mom and be reminded that at least one person in the world loved her. All of that, and then a bomb lands on her and tears her arm off, still holding a reminder of how fucking abysmally awful her short little life had been.

I should point out here that I ran through my little tests of rationalization for this to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. And it all cleared. It had been less than a half hour since my last hallucination. The thing wasn’t moving. It was pretty horrible. A severed hand made perfect sense in the setting. So I went with it, and looking back now, I know where that feeling came from. It was the first time I’d ever let a hallucination sit for that long. I’ve never let one go that long since, so I don’t know if they would all lead me to feel powerful emotions like that one did, but I don’t intend to find out. I would have been there much longer and felt god knows what if someone hadn’t come along and noticed me holding an imaginary arm and reading an imaginary piece of paper.

“Hey!” he yelled, and I remember it very clearly. I turned to look at him and I’m not ashamed to say I had some mist in my eyes, feeling for that poor imaginary girl and her shitty imaginary life.

“There’s nothing there,” he said, and that’s what did it for me. The rationalization clicked. If it’s supposed to be real then he should see it too, if he doesn’t, and he was in clear sight of me, then it can’t be real. And just like that *POOF* it all went away, the arm, the test, the bad feelings, that feeling of depression sucking me down, it was all gone.

“Thanks. I don’t think I would have spotted it,” I told him, honestly. That one had me. It would have taken me for a real ride. I told him everything that had happened as he led me away. This guy knew about me, most of them did. But they also knew I had a system for getting myself out of trouble so they all felt pretty safe around me. They all thought of it as something like LSD flashbacks, but I’ve never done that so I can’t make a comparison. And I told him all about what I’d seen and how it made me feel. That’s when he pointed it out, the thing I missed.

“It wouldn’t have been in English,” he said, “The schools around here don’t teach a second language, and even if they did, they wouldn’t speak it outside of that class, like in a math class for example, so that’s how you should have caught it, that’s how you could have known it was in your head.” So I made sure to make a note of that, the information about language and where it’s taught. It has served me well. There hasn’t been one get by in a long time because of it.

I mean, I still see stuff. Always have, always will. But it’s managable. I do just fine out here. I still see the occasional severed head. My arms and legs look to be chopped off every now and then. But I haven’t seen anymore fists holding tests. I haven’t had to think about the depressing lives these dead people lead. Which is about all I can ask. If I have to contend with the visual evidence, the real sights, of how alike we all are on the inside, I can at least be spared the feelings.

Can’t I?

Now, the reason that one of them wanted to be punched in the face was that he was an idiot, as has already been previously mentioned. But I should be more specific. Saying that he wanted to be punched in the face because he’s an idiot is like saying that strippers strip because they have daddy issues. It’s true but there’s more to it than that. So this idiot, idiot number one as we’ll call him, wanted to be punched in the face because he wasn’t sure he was tough. And the only reason he wondered about it was that he had just watched Fight Club for the first time, and he agreed with Brad Pitt, how much could you know about yourself if you’ve never been punched in the face? Which is what he said to idiot number two right before this all went down. Of course, the real line is “How much could you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight.” Which would have allowed the idiot a multitude of ways to test himself, ways that didn’t involve standing still with his eyes closed while a fist collided with the cartilage in his nose.

And of course it hurt. No-one has ever been punched directly on the nose and didn’t bleed or hurt. He was expecting some kind of understanding of himself or the world. He expected that punch to remove his desires for worldly goods, and afterwords he’d be ready to live in a shitty house somewhere, free of consumerism and all the bad shit that brings you down. But all he had to show for the thing was half a roll of toilet paper shoved up both nostrils to stop the bleeding.

So later in the evening, both idiots were sitting on the couch and watching x-files reruns on TV. Neither of them really spoke, the tv just glowed over their faces while Scully and Mulder did their thing, finding aliens or whatever weird shit they do on that show. He pulled the tissue from his nose and tossed it on the coffee table. It rested there beside a bag of chips and several remotes. And the idiot had a moment of real self reflection. He looked at the pile of paper containing his blood and sighed, because the ball of toilet paper represented the most he’d accomplished that day.

He got up and went into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, noticing the shape of his face for the first time in his life. I mean, he knew what he looked like in a general way, but not in the specific way that you get when you stare at yourself in the mirror. He had many moments where he said to himself, “So this is what I look like.” He was a young man but he was getting on past the point where anyone could look at him and think “what a nice kid.” He thought back to what he’d done with his life and this made him sad. There just wasn’t much. A c student. A slacker. A lazy little shit. A leech. A dumbass.

An idiot.

He opened up the medicine cabinet and looked for something to kill the throb in his face.  He found a bottle of tylenol and tipped it over but nothing came out. He looked some more and came up with some Chapstick and a jar of Noxzema. So he gave up and went back to the living room. A commercial for the George Foreman Grill came on. George ran down all the ways that the grill could improve your life. He picked up the remote and flipped around. But the nagging sensation wouldn’t leave his head.

“What do you want to do?” He asked his friend.

“I don’t know,” said idiot number two, “I’m out of ideas.”

“I don’t want to think of anything right now.  Just find something.”

So he tossed the remote into his friend’s lap and the channels passed by in quick succession. Food, Women, Products, Music, Those Geico Cavemen. And they circled back to the channel they started on and did it all over again. To his eyes it looked like everything was speeding up, like someone was moving the hands on the clock, making a minute pass for a second, like someone was fast forwarding him.

He reached over, grabbed the remote and shut off the TV.

“What the fuck?” said idiot number two.

“I’m tired of that shit. How much money do you  have” he asked

“Just a twenty.”

“No I mean like all together. In accounts, bonds, action figures, whatever. How much money do you have?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it like that. Couple thousand probably? I don’t know.”

“Let’s start a band.”

“HA!” he laughed, “You can’t play anything and I can’t sing. So…” and he lifted both hands, palms up.

“Doesn’t matter. Half the guys doing anything can’t play anyway.”

“Just turn the TV back on.”

“I’m being serious here. How much longer can I do this?”

“Look you told me to punch you. I didn’t want to do it. You’re lucky all I did was bloody it and not break it.” Which, he was right. But he did try to break the nose. He just wasn’t strong enough.

“That’s what I’m talking about. I asked you to do that because I sat here and watched a movie and because that’s all I do with myself I let that get in my head and make me do something stupid.”

“Don’t blame the movie, that’s lame.”

“I’m not,” he said, “Look, let’s start a band.”

“I’m not starting no band.”

“Why the fuck not? What are you doing with yourself that’s so fucking important you can’t start a band with me? Huh?” he said with a little touch of anger in his voice, a hint of a childish tantrum.

“You wanted to know if you were tough,” his friend sighed.

“Are you still on about that?”

“I’m only repeating it because we just found out that, clearly, you are not. So shut up with your band bullshit and turn the TV on.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Have you forgotten what we do to bands? To singers and other people that do that shit? We’re merciless. I saw you spend three hours the other day sitting at your fucking computer ripping on some local band, and the only reason you spent that much time doing it was because you knew they’d see it. And look at us, we’re two of the most average dudes that ever sat in the middle of everyone else on the  whole goddamned planet. There’s a million assholes just like us. We can’t start a band. I mean we could. We could buy some intruments and write some songs and make ourselves a band. But it won’t go anywhere. It won’t do anything. But not because it won’t be any good. It could be the most awesome shit any has ever done ever. It could make the Beatles look cans of Coke. But no-one will hear it and those that do will tear it to shreds and you’ll get heartbroken and give up. Because it’s what we deserve and you aren’t tough enough for that. So shut up with this band non-sense and turn the TV back on.”

He struggled for something to say, anything to keep the argument going but he couldn’t, it was over. Done. Fin. Best to just let the shit drop. Go back on with whatever he was doing before and let things, you know, resume. Resume the position. Resume the way. Just fucking resume.

Which is what he did. He turned the TV back on and flipped through the channels some more. But they couldn’t find anything they wanted to watch. So he went back through his shelf of dvds, where he found his copy of Snatch, which he put in the player and they both watched it until they fell asleep.

Idiots.

He had twenty rounds left in his Carbine, set to full auto, they would be gone in no time. He also had his pistol, a .45 caliber M1911a1, with one clip. He had one Claymore mine, positioned just outside of the door, which, when swung open, would trigger and the person opening the door would have their legs blown off. By his estimation though they were a group of four. There was a window he could jump through, but the sixty foot drop would kill him. This was it then. He had one door, an assault rifle, a pistol, one mine, and his favorite Talking Heads song. But what he really wanted was another couple of clips for each weapon, a grenade, and some Slayer.

They were moving down the hallway now. He heard them approach the door, where they stopped, and the point man whispered for a flashbang. David Byrne danced around in his big suit. The bassline thumped, bah bum bum, and his toe started to tap. The door handle twisted and the door creaked open. Jeremy  sighted up his carbine and laid his pistol within quick reach. A hand appeared from behind the door cupping the flashbang grenade that would blind him and deafen him, just long enough for them to sweep through and kill him. The grenade landed a foot away from his head and did not detonate. David Byrne sang, “Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down” and he ran through the whole chorus while both sides patiently waited for the thing to detonate. Seconds passed and Jeremy finally looked out from under his arm, where the flashbang was sitting, impotent, dud.

They kicked the door in and it swung hard on the hinges, the doorknob leaving a dent on the wall, sending dust flying around the claymore, which clicked to explode but did not. The point man rushed through and tripped over it. In an instinctual move, Jeremy snapped the trigger on his Carbine as the point man looked up and the other men in his squad  jumped over him, weapons sighted. Jeremy was first to fire, “And you may ask yourself/How did I get here?” David sang.

Jeremy had no time to aim, he was just shooting, spraying his clip, hoping that a bullet would hit one of them. His shots were wild and knocked out large chunks of the drywall, putting clouds of dust in their eyes. They all dropped to their stomachs in the doorway, while the fire continued. The Carbine clicked as the clip emptied and  everyone knew what the sound meant. Each guy tried to get up before the other. Jeremy grabbed for his pistol. He swung around and fired, catching one guy square in the chest. The song looped in his head, the bass and drums grooved on and David kept dancing around in Jeremy’s head, in that goddamn giant suit. “And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack/And you may find yourself in another part of the world,” he sang.

“STOP! STOP! HOLD YOUR FIRE!”

Jeremy’s initial reaction was something like “You must think I’m a fucking idiot.” His second thought was, “And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?”

“FRIENDLIES! HOLD YOUR FIRE!” the point-man screamed, with an undetonated mine jammed in his chest. Jeremy let the pistol down, and he  noticed that they were four marines, like him. He latched the safety on his pistol. And then it occurred to him what he’d just done. He  shot another marine in the chest. His mouth flooded with spit and his tongue got real heavy in his mouth. His eyes dilated and he dropped the pistol to the ground, where it let off one last round, a wild shot that  struck the ceiling and ricocheted back to the floor an inch from his foot, but Jeremy did not move.

“HOLD FIRE GODDAMNIT!”

The other marines crowded the injured one. Jeremy ran his eyes randomly over various spots in the room. He spent a bit of time staring at the marines boots, noting that they were not standard issue, they were better. Someone back home had sent him some better gear. Probably his wife, Jeremy thought, they probably came with a little note from his daughter (Jeremy just knew it would be a daughter, not a son) saying “Dear daddy, Here are the boots you wanted for your feet. I love you and I hope you come home soon,” except it would be misspelled in the adorable way that young children misspell things and there would be a cartoon drawing of the three of them around a tree with an orange sun shining overhead. “Love, Katie,” it would say at the bottom. Well, sorry Katie, some asshole with an itchy finger shot daddy in the chest, probably in the heart. So he won’t get to tell you how much the boots helped his feet when he was out patrolling.

The point man did a push up, watching the mine with the most attention he’d ever given anything ever, and he lifted his chest off  of it so that he had an inch of clearance between it and his upper body. He carefully worked himself up to his feet and then he jumped over it and disarmed it, while the other men worked like hell on the dead one. That’s what Jeremy called him, Dead One, just like that, that was his name, Dead One. He would probably learn his real name at some point, but he might not remember it. He might forget it and remember him as just “Dead One.”

And then Jeremy noticed all the dust in the room. Had it really been that cloudy? How the hell had anyone seen anything? How had he actually hit anything for that matter? How in the blue fuck had anything that happened…happen? Jeremy imagined himself trying to explain this to little Katie.

“Well I couldn’t really see anything, so you see Katie, it’s not my fault. I thought your daddy was gonna try to kill me so I shot him before he could shoot me.” And then of course Katie comes back with something brilliantly adorable and heartbreaking and innocent and Jeremy has no response for it except to maybe try blaming David Byrne for not getting the fuck out of his head sooner. But Katie wouldn’t know who The Talking Heads were, she would know Hannah Montana and The Jonas Brothers. Jeremy would tell her that he had wanted to hear Slayer, you see. He wanted to see them walking around on stage while blood rained down from overhead. But instead he heard The Talking Heads and he saw David Byrne in that giant fucking goofy suit he wore. And he would explain it just like that, just as rational as math, with his palms out as if to say, “So you see it’s not really my fault, it’s the fault of bands from the eighties,” and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of sense to Katie because she didn’t know what the eighties were and all she really wanted to hear was that Daddy would get out of the coffin in a minute, he’s just resting his eyes.

“I’m fine,” Dead One said, “Get off me I’m fine.” Everyone backed off and gave him room. He got up and walked around for a moment, touching himself in places, wondering if he would touch blood at any part of his body, and then wondering how he would know if it was his. “Is anyone else hit?” he asked. Everyone checked themselves and the consensus was no, no-one was hit, everything’s ok. Jeremy still hadn’t moved or said anything. Dead one started peeling off his gear and pulled off his body armor, not standard issue, some wicked shit that Katie had sent him, stuff that could stop armor piercing rounds. An image of Katie popped up. She was sticking her tongue out at Jeremy, and then she said “My mommy played me some stuff from the eighties and it’s all stupid and you’re stupid!” and then she stuck her tongue out again except this time it was colored green from a sucker, and then she ran away.

The point-man grabbed Jeremy by the shoulder and snapped him out of it, literally, he snapped his fingers in face a couple of times to get his attention. “Are you hit?” he asked. Jeremy shook his head from side to side, dumbly, answering the question even though he didn’t know the answer. But the answer was no, thankfully, he wasn’t hit. Everyone was ok. Everything was ok. It was all over nothing and no one was hurt and no one was dead and everything was fine. Katie would see her dad again and she could go on listening to Hannah Montana. And right then David Byrne popped back up out of no where in that big suit of his and Jeremy couldn’t help but laugh while the adrenaline and fear ran out of his system.

“This is squad six. The building is clear, the last member of echo company located, we’re requesting immediate evac over.” The radio man answered back that a chopper was inbound but it would have to land several blocks away and there were still enemies in the area. The point man relayed this info to everyone and Jeremy should have been worried about making his way through the city while guys were perched on the roofs waiting for them. But all he could really do was tap his toe as the song ran through his head.

“Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down, Letting the days go by/water flowing underground, Into the blue again/after the money’s gone, Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.”

And Jeremy took an extra clip from one of the guys and got ready to run like hell toward the chopper, smiling the whole time, not afraid of anything, because David Byrne would stop all the bullets in the world with that big goofy suit of his.

“Good Evening,” Ron said, grinning and holding his hand over his eyes until they adjusted. A single person clapped. A waitress clinked some glasses together. An old man near the back coughed and a young guy put his feet on the stage, while wearing a red mesh hat that said “fuck you” in big puffy white letters.

“My name is Ron. I’m from right here in Battle Creek. How is everyone feeling tonight? Make some noise if you’re feeling good,” he said. There was only a small cough in response.

“ALRIGHT!” he yelled into the microphone. “Well like I said my name is Ron and I’m a total failure at life man. Total failure. For example the other day I was in line at the taco bell and I ordered a cheeseburger.” A man sniffled in the audience.

“Cheeseburger,” he said again, waiting for it to sink in. “Well like I said man I’m a failure at everything I do. The other day I was the Burger King drive thru and I ordered a taco. The lady looked at me like I was an idiot, which I am, but that’s beside the point. I may be ordering stupid shit but she has to listen to me. And I pointed that out to her and she spit in my taco.” And here Ron paused again for the laughs. There was only a sigh from somewhere beyond the lights. The guy with the puffy “Fuck you” hat took it off and laid it on the table with the bill facing the stage.

“Well it’s okay, man I’m a failure. Total failure. I tried to stay married to this chick and I failed at it. We’d be in bed and she’d tell me ‘Deeper Ron, DEEPER!’ and I couldn’t go no deeper man, so I said to her ‘I can’t go no deeper,’ I mean it’s like an index finger down there. So I said to her ‘I can’t go no deeper.’ Then she calls me another man’s name.”

Ron took some time to fiddle with his neon green collar. He thumbed the crease back and forth a few times, knocking his hand against the mic under his chin. he vaguely heard someone in the crowd talking about him. He only made out a few words,”…off of danger…hack.”

“And so I asked her what that was all about. and she said I couldn’t satisfy her so she had another man on the side. She said he was bigger and could go longer and he made her cum so hard that she passed out. So on top of all that he could cure her insomnia too.” No one laughed. Someone booed for the first time in the back. A waitress quickly came over and quieted him down with a free drink. There was no security.

“Yeah man, whatever I want to happen it doesn’t happen. Whatever I set out to do it just fails man. I’m just a grade A complete fuck up. When I was a kid man I had this dream,” and here Ron reached out to the side of the stage for a box of props, “I had a dream that I was gonna be famous man. I had a dream that I was gonna make people happy. I was gonna make my parents happy, I was gonna make my wife happy, I was gonna have some kids and they would love me and tell me I was the best dad ever,” and Ron began to pull a length of rope out of the chest of props, he tossed it over a bar of lights over the stage and began to tie a noose on the end.

“But none of that happened. I gave it my best shot, but all I did was disappoint everyone and blow through all my money. I had a house and some kids and I lost them. I tried out for some bands and they laughed me out of the room. Hell, this here is the first stage anyone ever let me on and it’s only because it’s all or nothing tonight,” Ron made a gesture to the next comic waiting in the wing to come up on stage. The crowd couldn’t see him, he was a very ugly man wearing a dress.

“And here I am and it’s nothing different, So fuck it.”  Ron stepped up on to the little stool that all comedy clubs have on the stage. He took the noose and slipped it over his neck. “Here’s to success and happiness,” he said and then stepped off. The noose was tied correctly and the rope was the right length, however Ron forgot to anchor the other end of the rope to anything. So all he really did was jump down three feet off of a stool to the stage with a well made noose around his neck. He did however slightly sprain his ankle.

Ron landed and lifted up his right ankle immediately. Realizing what happened and how he looked, he decided to keep it up rather than stop. So he pulled on the length of rope until he had the end, then he went to the side of the stage and tied it off, pulled on it to make sure it was secure, then threw the noose over the light bar again. He climbed the stool again, put the noose over his neck again, and jumped off, again.

The whole time the crowd was watching, but only because there was a lot of movement on stage. Mr. “fuck  you” hat was about to fall asleep however, and on the way back over to the mic stand and stool, Ron accidentally kicked his hat, but the guy didn’t notice, and through his half closed eyes saw the whole thing and  muttered “motherfucker” to anyone listening.

Ron swung by the neck and twitched, because even though the noose was tied right and tight, the distance was not enough to snap his neck, so he strangled slowly. The crowd watched and the longer Ron went without ending the joke, the more chuckles he got. And after a few twenty seconds or so he swung around to reveal that he’d wet his pants, and the crowd laughed out loud for the first time.

Ron’s eyes began to bulge and he was having trouble keeping his tongue in his mouth. He was on the verge of death, but the rope snapped because it couldn’t support his weight becauase Ron didn’t have enough money to buy a thicker rope. He fell to the stage and sprained his other ankle. He clutched at the noose around his neck and started sucking in deep racking breaths of air, coughing spit and pulling little strings of rope and blood from his neck. The crowd stopped laughing and booed

The boos woke Mr. “fuck you” hat from his slumber. He looked for his hat, remembering that he placed it on the stage, but it wasn’t there then, and he spotted it lying on the floor underneath his table.

“Motherfucker,” he said to anyone at the table listening. He picked up his hat and knocked some dust off of it and removed a cigarette but from the inside. Then he put it back and on and noticed Ron for the first time. The crowd was booing for him to get off the stage. Mr. “fuck you” hat pointed at Ron and said to everyone at his table, “What the fuck’s wrong with this guy.”

Ron was laying prone on the stage, gasping for air. The ugly guy in a dress was motioning to the stage manager, gesturing, asking when it was his turn to take the stage.

Until finally the shadow was washed up on a beach, where the tide dropped it with no thought. The shadow was blown over and over by the wind until it was covered in sand. When the shadow was totally covered, it lay still for many many weeks and months while violent storms raged and waves tried to drag it back out to sea. Lightning struck the shadow and hardened it to glass. And then the waves grabbed that statue and wrought it back out to sea, where it drifted on and on again for time and distance unknowable.

Then finally the glass body was carried to the inward flowing mouth of a river, and it drifted along past banks covered in moss and dirt, where hardwood trees grew upwards for hundreds of feet, and the sun fell slowly through the canopy, such that night and day were almost the same. It passed through desert canyons and between snow covered mountains, ever facing downward into the water, the glass enclosed blackness drifting along only a few feet below the surface and miles above the bed, for time and distance unknowable.

Then the river put it at the foot of an immense black volcano that spat lava and ash upward and outward for miles and miles in all direction. It lay there, face down, while molten rock and ash pounded it from the sky, and harsh grainy winds blasted its surface from all directions. The shadow lay there for year after year, suffering in the torment, and always facing down. Its smooth glass body was sanded away and shaped down to simple curves, scratched all over so that no smoothness or reflection remained. And then the volcano erupted in a fashion so fierce that the entire distance of the unknown world shook and waves crashed on unknown shores, landing hundreds of miles inland and destroying all that they touched. And a boulder, too large to understand, came forth into the air from the belly of the world, and it arced back and down, where it landed on the worn down glass shadow, finally shattering it and hiding it from the world.

Over a period of time too long to understand, the harsh winds softened that boulder and wore it down, taking a fingernails width off the surface every hundred years, until it was a pebble and all the dust and glass shards it had hidden were carried off into the wind, where they pass out of sight and memory for all things. And the world created no more shadows, having not the heart to leave its creation to its own machinery.