wellmeaningshutin

[wellmeaningshutin]

War!

Written: 3/12/2018, by S. Sparrow

A nurse leaves the operating room to obtain a much needed item that she never found, because, when she walked out of the room, a bullet had wasted no time and created two parallel holes in her neck, which began to drain itself of blood. Trying to scream, but unable to find her voice, she slumps against the door and uses her two hands to plug the two holes, which causes blood to spill between her fingers. Weak, she is unable to keep her balance and falls into the dirt, the back of her head first, shortly followed by her back, while her legs rest there, already grounded. Lying in the dirt, she is able to use her legs to repeatedly kick the door, causing another nurse to walk out, only for the sniper to make up for his previous miss by boring a bullet into the new nurse’s skull. Writhing on the ground, the first nurse decides that the sniper is keeping her alive as a means of luring more people into his field of vision, so she decides to relax and wait for death. Coldness greets her right leg, she tries to look up, and she sees blood pooling towards her, and she vainly attempts to keep her legs out of the pool, to die with dignity.

A butcher’s boy meets a middle school math teacher in an open field, they both exchange greetings from their guns as they rush towards each other, but neither is looking down the barrel, bullets sink into dirt and wood, and both hope that the other would be intimidated and flee, so as to avoid combat. The boy is lucky enough to get a round into the teacher’s knee, dropping him, but his magazine is empty while the teacher’s still has enough rounds to celebrate a new year. His one shot, point blank, is enough to mangle the boy’s intestines, and the boy responds by mashing the side of the teacher’s head with the butt of his gun. Both dropping, they begin to crawl over each other, trying to grab each other’s knife, due to convenience. The teacher stick’s a finger into the wound of the boy who never had a chance to achieve anything more than being born into a butcher’s family, and the boy winces in pain, causing him to grab the teacher with every limb, causing the teachers arm to be stuck, his finger unable to leave the moist little hole that it had previously created by squeezing a trigger. Eventually, the boy fingers find the teacher’s knife, and uses it the way his father taught him, wildly, brutally, focused on severing, not stopping, so the teacher screams as the boy hacks an arm loose, a desperate and confused attempt to remove the finger from the wound. A mountain climber, a baker, and a coal miner stumble onto the scene, free the teacher, and send two bullets through each of the boy’s eyes.

An athlete with promise finds their hands chained to a metal bar that lies, waiting, above his head, his feet try to tap the floor, just to give his arms at least a second of relief. When a toe manages to touch, he is once again hit in the back by some flat, blunt object. It hurts like hell, and he worries that the lack of actual damage will allow them to keep beating him, but he also isn’t sure why they’re beating him, or who is beating him. Everyone speaks in what he assumes is the language of the enemy, its foreign to him, and that’s proof enough. It is unclear if they’re trying to ask him questions while they use force to make him sway, to make his cuffs jingle against the bar, to replace any natural coloring on his back with an artificial array of browns, yellows, and purples, with the occasional red. A car salesman comes into the room with a car battery and wires, and the athlete wonders if this will make him a hero.

A sculptor wonders through a forest, hoping that he can exit the forest, hoping that he’ll be able to find some sign of his people that will allow him to return to safety. Traveling at night has become the norm for him, strange men have appeared in the woods, driving their wrongly colored jeeps, better armed than he, especially since he was only armed with a 9mm pistol that was sparsely loaded, since he had to rely on it to provide him with food. The previous night involved him sinking three bullets to get one rabbit, which he ate raw, which he split open with his knife and dug into with his teeth, like a dog going at a bag of chips. Fires weren’t worth the smoke, gunfire was safe when the mortars crash around him. Sometimes he studies the road, trying to figure out if the jeeps were heading towards their own space, or are going away from their own space. Which direction had he come from? When he had first fled into the woods, when he saw the journalist get a grenade in her stomach, a perfect throw that had caused her insides to exit through her backside. He had seen the lumberjack’s brains, the severed hand of the “next Hemingway”, the crater that, only moments before, was a patch of grass where the fisherman, the salesman, and the high school class president stood. So he went into the woods, hoping to prevent a similar example being made of him. Sometimes he would fantasize about leaving the woods, only to hear that the violence was over, but he knew such fantasies were dangerous.

A delivery boy sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another delivery boy, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.

A doctor listens to a construction worker explain his “first screw”, while waiting for his nurse to prepare the morphine. He was never one to stand around and soak in recollections of rape, but the man had a decorated chest, and he had earned the privilege of his last words being heard. “Girls back home, damn, that’s how you make women, not like here, not like here. Girls don’t fight here, no sir, they just stare at you with those doll eyes as they sink into wherever it is inside of them that they go to. I’d say that the soul leaves their body, but they don’t have souls, no way, not just cause of how strange their ways are, but because they don’t fight back. That’s what”, pausing to spit blood into a nearby dish, continuing with shining red lips and teeth, “what makes our girls so special, they fight. They’re pure as they come, and they wont let big beasts like me take them over so easily. Why, that’s how you can tell that a girl has value, if she fights or not, and it doesn’t matter if she screws, it matters if she doesn’t want to, that’s how you can evaluate purity. I remember”, a genuine, sunshine smile beaming across his face as the doctor waits, “the first girl that I had had managed to fuck up my back with a razor that she kept with her, who knows why, and I remember”, laughing that hollow, rattling laugh, “I stood up, put my hands on my back, and kicked the shit out of her. Oh boy, she was so fucked up that, by the time I finished, I was worried that I accidentally put her face down in, well she was bleeding badly, and I didn’t want her to drown, you can’t do that to those kinds of girls.” The nurse approached with a syringe in hand. A barber had to explain to the eagle scout that his last friend, a shoe salesman, had his body juiced by a collapsing building, and the one before that, a gambler, was currently dead or in some camp, so he wasn’t exactly in the market for having friends. Yet, the two of them were the only ones holding down the post, and the scout was determined to befriend the barber, since it was the only minor achievement available. After several days, the eagle scout had successfully been burned alive, had desperately tried to escape the flames that clung to him, had struggled as his lungs filled with smoke, as the post burned around him. So, then, the barber chose not to explain himself to the mall cop, who assumed that the barber was just a quiet type, making them the type of friends that didn’t need to talk to be close, whose company was enough. After a week of silence, the mall cop mentioned his idea of their relationship to the barber, who was immediately angry, causing him to stew in silence, leaving the mall cop, a week later, to still think that they were friends while the machete hacked and hacked, hoping to replace a segment of neck with air. The barber then ended up with the dry cleaner, who didn’t give a shit about the barber, who only wanted to go home. Naturally, the barber liked this cold companion, and eventually opened up to him, unsolicited and intoxicated, about his life before the violence, something he had never told his revolving cast of friends. The dry cleaner hardly listened, but when the barber stated his past profession, the companion had to ask why he became a soldier, instead of a barber, the barber could only make some vague statement about honor, one repeated enough times, to himself, for it to lose any sense of meaning.

A proud grandson finds himself strapped to a board, fabric over his face, water pouring over him for what feels like eternity, an unending lifetime of drowning. The water stops, he tries to catch his breath, but more comes, he body tries to spasm, is desperate to escape, but the restraints are good at what they do. Another breath, another pouring, another breath, and so on, until he has trouble remembering how he got there, what his life was like before the airless hell he is subjected to, and the only memory he can grab a hold of is the moment when he told his grandfather, a decorated veteran, that he had signed up to do his duty, and the way that his grandfather cackled at him.

A truck driver sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another truck driver, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.

A historian and a street youth comb the fresh rubble of a former, thriving community. “Go through and salvage what you can, get weapons, bullets, whatever you think is valuable.” The youth digs through one spot, finds the corpse of a crossing guard, wearing the outfit of the enemy, and the historian says, “Don’t touch him, now look for something else.” When the youth scrambles away, the poet moves to the ex-person and places an IED under it. After he is commanded to move twice, the youth understands his purpose, and starts to pocket what really interests him, a burned photograph of a woman that only has her legs and slit left, an ivory comb, a small figurine that represents some folklore figure, either benevolent or a trickster, and, of course, bullets. An addict shoots that black, vinegar smelling, crap into his arm, and is able to lie back and feel good. He was worried that the violence would take away from his favored activity, especially since he was in a foreign country, but then he learned that foreigners get high too. The first time he copped, he was told that a lot of people like him usually start using to avoid their problems, to relax their consciouses, but he didn’t believe it, he was a killer with killers killing killers, what problems were there? Back home he had to worry about making it day by day, but now death is assured, so he didn’t know what there was to worry about. Death isn’t scary if you feel good when it happens, he reasoned, so he was always high. He liked to say that he had track marks for every friend that he lost, but he only said it to himself, he had nobody to say it to. He was pleased that he ended up in a beautiful country, he liked to stare at the country side. Sometimes he forgot about the violence, and that would stress him out, because it made him feel bad for being an addict.

“They got me in the stomach, didn’t they?” “Its not that bad, its fine.” “Its never fine if its the stomach, I don’t, I’m not going to make it with this one.” “We’ll be back to base soon, the doctor will-” “Oh, that fucker had his brains blown out in a whorehouse.” “What?” “The day after you left, he goes into town and gets blown twice.” “So who is the current doctor?” “What does it matter, I’m as good as-” “Fuck, okay, don’t worry, I wont drop you again.” “Fucking-” “I wont do it again, I promise.” “Look here, see this, where is it, oh, oh can you-” “Do you need me to-” “Yeah, get this button open for me, my fingers can’t get a grip, they keep slipping-” “Don’t worry, I have it-” “In the end I can’t, can’t even open a damn pocket. Okay, now reach inside, get out the photograph that’s in there.” “Here.” “No, don’t give it to me, its not for me, I want you to take it.” “Why, who is this?” “She was my steady back home, now she’s yours.” “What?” “I’m dying here, I’m going to die looking up at this fucking sky. What kind of sky is this anyways? Not like the one I grew up with, its all wrong, its too bright, its-” “You’re going to make it, we aren’t far-” “But my, fuck, my fucking, I’m ripped open, I’m cold, I need you to stop lying and listen to me. You’re a good man, I can tell that by the way that you won’t be honest to me. I know that I’m probably worse than I think I am, especially since, eh, especially since you keep looking at me that way. I can see the shock behind your eyes. Now, since your a good man, I know you’ll survive the war, and when you do I’ll need you to marry my girl. I want you to go, to, to, turn the picture over, there’s an address.” “I have to carry you, let’s just focus on getting-” “I want to say this before the pain successfully silences me, you have to listen. I need you to go to that address, explain you story, and I need you to put a good fuck into her. I need you to be her man, because I can’t guarantee that she’ll pick right. She picked me the first time and now you need to go there and fuck her brains out so that she’ll appreciate you.” “Look-” “And I’ll be watching on the other side-” “We’re almost-” “I’ll want to see you inside of her-” “I can see the gate, its-” “I just want to see her have an orgasm, I never got to see that before.” “I’m going to put you down now.” “You need to treat her right.”

A tailor sprints across a field, pushing his body to its limits, willing to break something if that means that he can keep running, if he can keep the jeep behind it. He ran over the hill knowing that there would be a forest on the other side, knowing that he could escape into there, where the murderers wouldn’t follow due to a lack of ammo, one that was made clear by their lack of gunfire, their resignation to using the car as a weapon. However, when he was over the hill, the tailor saw that craters had claimed land that had previously belonged to the forest, that he still had a long ways to go. He also discovered that the jeep, like him, had an easier time going downhill than uphill, and he decided, too late, to jump out of its way, into the safety of the mortar’s kiss, but his legs were ground under the tires of the jeep, which, after passing him, tried to circle around, and drive up the hill at him, but the driver was too bloodthirsty, and his recklessness caused him to crash into a crater. Jeep on its side, the tailor tried to crawl, but his legs screamed at him as he dragged them across the rocks and dirt, so he started to lie there, hoping that the other men were dead, that help would come. Out of a demolition ditch came one man, bleeding from an ear, but generally healthy, and the man, a carnival worker, walked uphill towards the tailor, who caused the car to flip by his pathetic will to live, who was now throwing stones at the carny, stones that were to weakly thrown to be a threat, stones that meekly rolled down the dirt after a seconds freedom from the surface. At least one of these stones was able to get the carnival worker’s nose to match his ear, and, in response, the carny’s knife removed any sense of humanity, lips, nose, ears, hair, teeth, tongue, eyes, skin, from the tailor’s face.

A washed up news anchor sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another washed up nobody, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.

Two fathers share a cell, neither is from the same place, neither speaks with the same sounds. Eventually, conditions make them desperate to form a small human connection, small enough to not bring pain, so, every night, they spoon each other, not knowing that they have much more in common than a situation.

A shepherd returns to his home after several days, after the birds signal to him that all life, good or bad, is no longer present. When the wreckage is finally in his field of vision, he doesn’t cry, he is shocked by how little he feels like crying, even more so than the destruction shocks him. When he was on his own, he had pictured his home as being much worse, he had pictured blood and gore everywhere, murdered sheep, disemboweled children, babies that had been divided by bayonets, beheaded women that had blood coming out of their privates, but there was none of that, it was mostly just rubble. As he stood on top of what he assumed was the school, although it could easily be ten other buildings, due to a lack of variation in architecture, he surveyed the scene and saw nothing but rubble, ash, and dirt that had been flung around. For a minute, he wondered if he was really gone for a couple days, or if he had been gone for a lot longer, it seemed like the violence had not been around for some time, but the birds still watched as he watched, so he knew that it had to be fresh. When he was finally able to accept that, yes, this mess was in fact the place where he was born and raised, where his father lived, and his father before, and his father before, and so on. He started to think about moving on, about where he’d have to move to, but he ignored the thought, because he still had to find a way to eat, to get water, to survive, and he wasn’t sure if the violence would return, and he wasn’t sure of where the violence had already struck. Closing his eyes, he thought of himself as being in the eye of the storm. Days ago he’d been in the storm of artillery fire, gunfire, mutilation and misery, but, now, it was peaceful. Opening his eyes and looking up, he felt that the way the birds circled only cemented this imagery, felt that he as truly safe, even if only for a day or two. Hunger was finally able to move him to action, and he started to wonder around the town to find something to eat, something to fill his stomach before the next vacancy. He knew where the bakery, the grocery store, and the butcher’s store were, but not with the town like this, he didn’t know which buildings to search, they were all the same to him. Eventually, making his way over the warm stone, he saw a figure, a body. It was clear that they were dead, but he knew that he knew them, they were a neighbor, whoever they were, and he had to at least bury them, he left his town to burn, so he had to at least try to make things right. However, when he went to lift the corpse, he was suddenly blinded, deafened and knocked back. His arms were in more pain than he thought possible, and he wildly tried to rub his eyes in a desperate attempt to see, but he couldn’t feel his face at all. He tried to get up, but he could not, he just kept slipping, and when his sight returned to him, he saw his knees sliding around in blood, his blood, that was pouring from the stumps of his arms. The birds circled overhead.

#War #War Story #Fiction #Writers on Tumbler #Military

[wellmeaningshutin]

I was dead for a while, but now I’m alive again.

[wellmeaningshutin]

Sheriff!

Written: 11/27/2017, by S. Sparrow

Nobody made me the sheriff, I damn well gave that job to myself. Sure, some officials may have handed me the title, but I’m the one who earned it, there will never be anyone as good at this job as I am, nobody who can shoot straight with a bottlesworth of whisky in their belly, nobody who could spot an Apache from two miles away. See, the thing about Apaches is that they’re everywhere, and a lot of fellas don’t realize that. I don’t know why it confuses people so often, but its true. I guess the truth is hard for some folk to digest, like trying to feed yourself with hair. Some fellas can eat hair, some can’t. The apaches, they eat hair, both metaphorically and literally. That’s why they scalp well meaning fellas, they want to eat the hair, that’s what they survive off of. Whole buffalo or whatever the saying is.

I knew a barber once, but I don’t know him anymore, I had to shoot him dead in his chair. A fella down the street from me bought the chair. I asked him, I said, “Look, why do you need the chair? Its shot to hell and the blood damn well wont wash out, the leather is no good because of that.” The fella told me, “Blood or no blood, its still better than sitting on wood all the damn time.” So I ask, “But aren’t there still other things to sit on, like horses, metal, rocks, dirt? Hell, if you’re tired of wood, go sit out in the desert, there’s so much of it that you’ll never even be able to sit on in your life time.” I told him, “If you want to sit on leather, why not sit on your saddle.” Why, he looked me right in the eyes and said, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m saying that I want to be comfortable, dirt ain't comfort.” I just spat at his feet and gave him a long look, I didn’t trust the fella, he sounded like an Apache, just like that damn barber, sittin’ in that chair of his, tellin’ me that he’s considerin’ getting into the wig trade one of these days. I asked that barber, “Where are you going to get the hair for all those wigs?” He moved the razor up my cheek, I bet he wanted to cut my throat right there, I bet he wanted my American blood to stain his floorboards, but his blood stained his chair instead. Out in the frontier, most disputes are over whose blood is gonna go where. The barber told me, “Well, I’ll probably use the hair that I cut off of folks heads.” Now, he stabbed his finger at the hair that was all over the floor, right where he probably wanted my blood to go, and I already knew what I needed to know, it was Apache talk, he was thinking that he was smarter than me. Even before I sent him to the Christian heaven, not the ridiculous land that his savage religion promised him, he told me that he wasn’t an Apache. I said, “Do you take me for a fool?” He said, “Why, sheriff, I’m a white man, can’t you see that?” I was angry at that point, I was stompin’ my boots around, waving that gun like I was trying to bring a falcon back, and I hollered, “You dirt fucker, you know as well as I do that there’s different kinds of Apache. There’s white Apaches, there’s negro Apaches, there’s yellow ones and purple ones and I believe there are all sorts that we haven’t even seen before.” The fool tried to say that I wasn’t talking sense, he tried to ask me what I thought Apaches were, as if it weren’t already clear that I knew better than anyone, him or those smug folk that live towards the East. So I shot the fucker until my gun couldn’t shoot no more, I gave him Western justice.

Now, when I first came to town, there were Apaches attacking the town, and it seemed hell had come to visit. Now, the thing about visits is they end, and I was brought in to make sure that the Apaches would leave sooner than they naturally would. I hadn’t been a sheriff before then, I was never a lawman before that, but my work with the Apaches had shown that I was the right fella for the job. Actually, at first they didn’t see it that way, they picked some big time sheriff from some town that was never in danger of anything but polio, and how the hell are you supposed to shoot that? So what did that son of a bitch do? He was gutted on the first day. The townsfolk said that I moutain lion had done it, but I said this aint a mountain, and I knew that the Apaches had done it. The folk really tried to sell me on the bear attack idea, some even claimed that they saw it, but as I looked at that big man, his face chewed off and his guts spread all over the dirt, his left hand tangled in a gut tube, his right one removed in the roughest way, all of it stinkin’ to high hell, I knew that it had to be a savage. So I shot the fella who was sellin’ me the story, I knew what his trick was, I shot him right in the belly and knocked my boot against the hole right when he dropped to his knees. He started cryin’, he started hollerin’, he wanted help, and I kept tellin’ him to stop his words, but he wouldn’t listen to me, the ingrate. I told him that his Apache calls wouldn’t work, that I would just kill any of his friends if they came, and they must of heard me as they lurked in the rocks, or wherever they lurk, maybe under the dirt, where its nice and cool, where you can dig for some time during a long journey and find water, where you can splash your face and let the cold let you forget about the sun, the lack of food, the lack of anyone, the idea that you may not survive until the next day, the next hour, the promise you made to your momma to make something of yourself, instead of dying in the middle of nowhere, as nobody, in this damn place where god don’t care about nothin’. Anyways, his friend protested at first, but he seemed too scared and I figured that he wasn’t an Apache, so I told him that he was safe, that it was just his friend who was trouble. And his friend is still crying, snot rushing out of his nose like he caught a fever, or a sickness of some kind, it was real pitiful, these Apaches have no courage, a real pitiful group. The guys crying and I grab the scruff at the back of his head, and I place my pistol right against the top, slightly up, and I tell him, “Now, you and your kin brought a lot of hell into this here town, but I’m the sheriff now, I’m going to teach you a little thing about Western justice. I hope you’re ready to feel the sting of civilization.” And then I fired, bang, and the bullet tore its way through the top of his skull, and did a little more than creating a ditch in his head, it looked like a grave being dug, and I got my fingers in there, he’s cryin’ the whole time, screaming and fussin’, and I try to peel back his scalp, but it held on for dear life to his skull. So, not being one to take failure lightly, I put my boot on his neck, grabbed the scruff, and shot another round, and another, and after some time of bang bang bangin’ the Apache’s scalp, after two rounds and some very un-Christian words, I finally pried the damned thing from his head. By the time I held it over the sun, to admire my prize, I had to squint because of all of the sunlight that managed to shine through. I was pretty pissed, because I was hoping that my first scalp in this town could be something that I could hang in my office, like the trophy it was, but it had become ruined since the savage kept struggling under my boot. He had just come to by the time that I started stompin’ on his scalp, and when his friend asked me what we should do, I didn’t know, so I said, “Hang him. Everyone loves a good hangin’.” And they did, the people there really enjoyed it.

Now, by and by I began to hang a lot more of the townfolk, it was shocking to see how many of them turned out to be Apaches. Some of the townfolk would ask me how I knew, they would ask me if I knew what an Apache was, if I thought all Indians were Apaches, or, well, for some reason they were having a lot of trouble understanding it. Maybe they never read around here, maybe somebody told them wrong, I have no idea. So when they ask me about Apaches, I tell them that I just know, and that’s all they need to know. I don’t want no Apaches learning my methods anyways, because then they’ll just hide themselves better, and then we’ll all be dead, western civilization will come burning down and baby Jesus will cry on the cross. I can’t let that happen. I’m the only man who is stopping that from happenin’.

If you really want to know how I can tell, I’ll tell you: Its a gut feelin’, I just know, like some sort of divine gift. If anyone makes me feel all wrong, I know that they’re an Apache, and I shoot them dead.

Now, I don’t know when I got this gift of mine, but I like to think that my father gave it to me after he was burned and eaten. The apaches didn’t eat him, they let him go to waste, so the animals swooped down and had their way. It was a cryin’ shame, but it was how it happened. If you ask me, I don’t think that the man even deserved to die, he didn’t do anything wrong, he was a good man who didn’t get an justice for the wrongs that wronged him. After all that he went through, he deserved something, but the Apaches wouldn’t have it. At first they told him that he couldn’t build a house where he was buildin’ it, because that was their land, their territory. So, being reasonable, he told them that he was just trying to look after his family, that they had no place to stay, that we needed to survive. The Apache asked him to build somewhere else, and he politely told the savage that we couldn’t go anywhere else, because we had to shoot the ox and there was no good way to move the food and water. The Apache told him that we could stay with its people, but my father just laughed that thunderous laugh and said that he’d rather die in the desert than live in some savage hut for a night. He tried to tell the thing that we white Christian folk needed more than that, that we had been bred from Jesus, while the savages were closer to animals, or children. The Apache didn’t take that to well, he even insisted that he wasn’t an Apache at some point, but my father just laughed that off, because he knew one when he could see one. The Apache then told us that he had lived in towns before, but my father didn’t buy that snake oil either. And, okay, my father did become a little aggressive with his choice of words, but the Apache kept saying that we couldn’t build on his land, he kept telling us that this wasn’t the way that things worked, so what was he to do? Sometime after him kicking up dust and a wise explaining of our manyfest destiny he shot the Apache, and said that was enough of that.

The next night they came in and my father started shootin’ and shootin’, and when one would come down two others would take its place. We were surrounded and it would only be a matter of time until they would surround us with a circle of scalpin’ and rapin’ and murderin’, and all of those savage acts that they love so much. We didn’t know why they came for us, they never offered an explanation, but I knew that it was just because that’s the way them Apaches are. I can still remember my father hollerin’ when a tomohawk took most of his jaw off. It didn’t take all of it off, there were still chunks hanging on and drippin down, teeth that would keep knockin’ against the floor, even when you thought that there would be no more teeth, but most of the man’s jaw was on the floor. I think that’s what killed us in the end, too, because he was unable to reason with the savages after that happened. My father said that words could solve every problem better than fightin’ could, but he said that sometimes savages didn’t want to listen to reason, and that’s what makes them savages. I figured the same went for Apaches too, but I guess I don’t really know the difference between a savage and an Apache. I guess its that savages are always dark, while the Apaches can even be white men, and that’s what scares me the most about them. But I’m not scared of anything. I’ve never been scared in my life. Okay, when we was crouching in our wagon, the Apaches surrounding us, my father trying to scream right while his jaws still dripping to the dirt, I was scared then, but I was a boy, boys have to be scared so that they can become men and never become scared again. A frightened man is no man at all, that’s another bit of wisdom. Anyways, when the Apaches got close enough to be seen in the lamp light, my mother picked up the rifle and shot one of the bastards in the shoulder, but another came up from behind and pulled her right out of the wagon. They damn well slit her throat when they pulled her out, and her blood started to soak up the dirt. I didn’t know what to do, I had never been in that much danger in my life, and I think what scared me the most was not know why they were coming after us. I was so spooked that when one of them grabbed me, I didn’t move one bit, and I let them carry me out of the wagon. They were real gentle when they did it, but that wasn’t kindness, they probably knew that they couldn’t scare a boy anymore than they did, they already had the piss out of me, and I don’t think they wanted to have to smell anything else. So, while I’m being took away from the wagon, my father was trying to keep bits of jaw from falling into the dirt with his one hand, and the other aimed to shoot but he fell over and shot the oil lamp right off the wagon. It fell right on him and he lay there, burnin’ burnin’ burnin’, screaming into the night. I wanted to look away, but it was a hard sight to miss, it demanded your attention, he was the brightest sight around for miles. I tried to close my eyes, but the light still shone through, I could still hear him, so I decided just to look anyways. I was spooked about it for the longest time, I prayed and prayed for the lord to let me forget, but I’m glad now that I saw it, it made me a man. Yes sir, it put the hair on my chest and the star on my chest. The Apache holding me tried to cover my eyes, and I bet he didn’t want me to see what they did to my father, they didn’t want me to grow up to be the man that I am.

And what man is that? Well, I’m the sheriff, I am justice, I am the law where the law don’t go. I’ve put a bullet in every type of Apache there is, and there ain't nothing worse than an Apache. I once tussled with an apache coyote, with only a knife and my wits. I’m a force of nature, I’m the word of God.

These people in this town weren’t sure of that at first, but they know now. I got rid of every Apache that lived within a ten mile area of the town, the outskirts and the houses were emptied of them. We put them in wagons and burned them in the desert, far out enough so that the civilized folk wouldn’t have to see it, close enough to the town so that the smoke could reassure them. They sure did protest when I started going after the Apaches that were pretending to be good Christian folk, but eventually they stopped complainin’ when I had that pile of bodies out in front of my place and they saw all of the secret Apaches that they had thought were neighbors. My deputy said that the townsfolk were scared that I’d fill them with holes, and I said that they only should be if they’re Apaches. Then I shot him up for good measure, but he’s still around, even if he can’t walk. I trust him because God showed me that he was no Apache, and now I make sure that he keeps a watch for anyone whose scheduled to hang. I thought he would be right mad about being shot, but he had to eat, so he took the job back with little griping. Then, when I let him hang the newest Apache that wondered into town, he had a smile on his face that showed that we was right. I let him hang everyone now, and he seems to be happy. When your cock don’t work, I guess you have to find something else to fill its absence.

Yes sir, we are a peaceful town and we are Apache free, but sometimes we are too Apache free. Whenever we go a week without a hangin’, I start to get nervous, and the people start to get restless. My deputy tells me that they don’t like the hangin’s much, he tells me that they’re usually just happy that they’re not up there, throats closed, legs dancin’ around, face turnin’ all sorts of colors, and I tell him that if he understands people so much, he should write a book. He started to write a book, and it does well he will need to thank me, because it was my idea. I don’t know what the book is about, and even though he tells me its about something or other, I know its about me. Who else is he going to write about? But sometimes I worry that he’s gonna take my life and say that he lived it. He’s gonna take every crumb of wisdom that I picked out of my beard for him, and he’s going to call it his wisdom, he’s going to become well known for it, all sorts of folks will quote him when they’re really quoting me and mine, and the thought just gets me all sorts of angry, so I usually go out to hunt Apaches. But there ain’t Apaches for the longest time around here, so I have to ride out to the next town to get some scalps and cool myself down. The sheriff there wont let me scalp the white Apaches though, he seems to be some sort of idiot, but a scalp is a scalp and an Apache is an Apache, no matter what color of skin they have, so I give him a barrel of whiskey that I get for free every week from my local tavern, and he stabs his finger in the direction of the closest Apache camp or house. The townsfolk there don’t drink no liquor, they say its of the devil, but I say that’s just Apache talk, because liquor is God’s reward for a job well done, and Apaches don’t know what good work is, they never have had a real job, but I guess that makes sense, because the only real job out there is killin’ Apaches. I guess there’s also gunsmithin’ and farming, those would also be real jobs. Sometimes I have to wonder, what’s a man to do when there are no more Apaches to kill? When the savages have been scrubbed clean off the dirt of the world, what is left for civilized man to? What would my use be? It makes me wonder if I should even work my job, since I’m so good at it, because I alone could get rid of every last damn Apache, but by doin’ that I would be gettin’ rid of myself then. Then who would I be? The man who got rid of the Apaches? Who would care about that, who would give a lick about me? While I’m still killin’ Apaches people will love me, they’d want me to kill the Apaches so that they wouldn’t be killed instead, but what if they didn’t have no danger to deal with, then why would they want me? What about all of the young ones who would grow up without ever knowing what an Apache is? They wouldn’t give a damn about me and my kind, they wouldn’t understand the order, peace, and stability we brought to the world. They would just see us as being outdated, why, I’d die with the Apaches, those bastards will take me down with them.

Sometimes when I trade that whiskey and kill them Apaches, I wonder how this could be done better, how we could preserve them. Now, I thought about killin’t them all and just pretending like they’re still out there, but good God fearing people don’t believe in nonsense that isn’t there, this is an age of reason! They’d take one look at me and tell me that I was fuller of shit than a farmer’s field. They’d laugh me down and make me feel like a boy again, they’d take my manhood away from me. I don’t know if they can feel it, but the times are a changin’, and they wont need me in five or ten years. So I keep telling myself that there has to be more of them out there, they have to exist in parts of this world that we haven’t seen before, that have yet to be civilized, that as long as there are people spreadin’ culutre to the world, there are still those savages that will try to oppose it. Sometimes I look eastward and think of all of the Apaches that there could be. And, when I’m tired of that, I look to the north and think the same damn thing. Sometimes I get tired and I look up to the moon, to the stars, to God’s kingdom, and I try to tell myself that we could go out there, that we will eventually civilize the sky and everything past it, but then I remember that that’s God’s kingdom for a reason, and this world is the only one left to become civilized.

I remember that I’m just a man, that there is an end to what I have to do, that time will move on without me and me and my kin will be forgotten about, we’ll be consumed by time and nobody will thank us for what we did for the future generations, all of the good that I’m bringin’ to the world. But I don’t like to think like that, so when I do I say a prayer and head out to kill more Apaches, its the only thing that helps.

#Fiction #Writers on Tumblr #Western #Western Civilization #Short Fiction

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Night #Music #Music Recommendation #Hip Hop #Rap

[wellmeaningshutin]

Relationship Advice: If you’re terrible with money, then just date a prostitute. No matter how much money you squander, you can always be proud of how much you save when it comes to having sex!

#Relationship #Advice #Relationship Advice #Love #Budgeting

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Day #Music #Music Recommendation #Folk

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #125: Cold Coffee.

Written: 8/1/2017                                                                    Surrealism Week

In front of me is some sort of chocolate French pastry, it’s tall, cylindrical, and tiered, which makes me somewhat confused as to where I’m supposed to start eating it, but its also colorful and well presented, which causes me to only stare at it, fork in hand, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with it while getting lost in the beauty of it. Do I even need a fork to eat this? Am I supposed to pick it up with my hands, am I supposed to eat every individual tier? No, probably not, that would probably cause my hands to be covered in chocolate, and whatever is on the inside of this thing. Am I supposed to cut into it like a cake? Confused, I look over to my sister, to see how she decided to eat her pastry, but her plate is only covered in crumbs, and her eyes are hungrily focused on my own plate. This is the coffee all over again. I can see words beginning to form on her lips, I look away, I look at the birds only several feet away from our table, maybe they would figure out how to eat anything like this. “Are you actually going to eat that, or did I just pay for your lunch so that you would stare at it the whole time?” “Its just, I don’t know. How do they expect anyone to eat this? I can’t figure out how to eat this without ruining it.” “Ruining it?” “The presentation of it, its just so appealing to-”, and there she goes, she’s already pulling my plate towards her, already rolling her eyes at me. Carefully picking up the petite for with two fingers, thumb and index, in order to minimize the mess, “Girl, you have to get over the look of it all. This is food, this was meant to be ruined and eaten. The presentation isn’t supposed to last forever, its just something to lure you into destroying it, into putting it inside of yourself and turning it into something disgusting.” Taking a bite, lips drawn back to protect her lipstick, then, “This is what food is for, its like an art form.” “Yeah, exactly, that’s why I’m not sure how to eat any of it. Why would I want to destroy something so appealing looking? Its easier to deal with cheap food because of this, because its all so-” “No, you’re not listening to me. This is just like when you kept staring at that flower in your coffee, the one made with milk or whatever they use. You need to get over the appeal of it all anyways, because you’ve already made me eat two lunches in one sitting, and I’m supposed to be on a diet.” “I didn’t know you were on a diet.” “I’m not on one, I said I’m supposed to be on one. Anyways, you keep getting confused about the purpose of all this. Sure, it may all be aesthetically pleasing, but its meant to be temporary. This shit doesn’t last forever, and you have to get your teeth in there and tear it to pieces before it stops being appealing on its own. Its like that cup of coffee that you were so impressed by. By the time that the flower finally went away on its own, the cup was cold and gross and you did not enjoy drinking it. You took too long to destroy it, so it was destroyed on its own and you were left unsatisfied, because you weren’t the one who did it.” “I don’t think that’s the-” “Okay, let me try to put it in terms that you understand. Think about this like dating, maybe. Its like when you see a really cute guy, and you’re able to start talking with him, and you know that if you don’t do something, some other girl is going to come in and enjoy him, so you gotta make sure that it never happens. So you know that you have to ruin him so that other girls wont want him, you have to take away whatever makes him appealing. So you start berating him or whatever, you know, really tearing into his insecurities, abusing everything he confided to you when you cuddle after sex, until he becomes an emotional wreck. Then, of course, you start to get disgusted yourself, because who even wants somebody who can’t get their shit together, who still cries about their dead grandmother’s disapproval from, like, forever ago, and then you move on to the next beautiful thing.” “That’s not what datings like, I think you’re just abusing those guys.” “You’re just not mature enough to understand what adult relationships are. Things get messy, things get real.” “But, you’re intentionally making them-” “Yeah, but that’s what adult relationships are: poisoning the other person until they’re ruined for everyone else. Its like, you that discomfort you feel when you run into an ex, and they’re with somebody else and seem genuinely happy? So you have to look at this happy hunk that you could’ve had? Well, that only exists in the world of teenagers and twenty year olds. When you get older, you’ll realize that its easier to avoid that feeling by making sure that your exes will never date, will never be happy again, so that you know that you were the last to enjoy what made them beautiful. Just like eating these pastries.” “I’ve literally never heard of that until now. I think this is just you.” “No, its not, you just don’t recognize it when you see it. Everyone does it, they just never try to make it obvious. Like, look at mom and dad. Before they got divorced, she kept encouraging him to get into all of that geology nonsense, so after the divorce nobody wanted to touch him because he keeps talking about minerals or whatever.” “Oh god, I can hardly even pay attention to him when he gets excited about that stuff. I just have to tune him out.” “Exactly, and because of that he’s going to be alone while mom takes her new boyfriend to Europe, and has a wonderful time.” “Ugh, I went to high school with that guy.” “And, anyways, there’s a lot of other examples of this out in the wild. Look at those guys who always claim that their girlfriends were crazy, no matter how nice and rational the girl was. Those are just people who are angry at themselves, because they were dumb enough to convince themselves that the relationship would last, so they never put in an actual plan to ruin their girlfriends. Then there are the guys who just beat their girlfriends so that they naturally become afraid of men in general, which also keeps them out of the dating pool. There’s also marriage-” “How is marriage-” “Marriage is the true way of ruining another person for others. Its basically a contract that says that the couple will never have sex with each other, but will also have to go through a lot of trouble to get out of it, its like a trap. And the whole time is spent making the other person boring, turning them into somebody who spends most of their time working, then comes home to watch some mind numbingly terrible television show for hours until they fall asleep, only to do it again the next day. It is a way of creating a routine to trap another person in, so even if they did consider doing something else, something good, like getting a divorce or pursuing one of their passions, they just keep putting it off without realizing where the time is going, so, next thing they know, they’ve become out of touch and hardly even know how to live life outside of the trap that they were dumb enough to walk into, thinking that knowing it was a trap would make them prepared for it all. They have everything that was interesting about themselves get sucked out of them, especially if they have kids. Kids are fucked up. With kids, you lose 18 years of your life, just for one of them. So, some couples fall into the trap of staying together for their children, then by the time they are free to divorce, they’re also old and boring and have little idea of how to function outside of their styrofoam lives.” “Styrofoam?” “Its about as interesting as they become. Who gives a shit about styrofoam? So, anyways, life is about destroying things that are beautiful, and you need to get over whatever reservations you had in the first place. To get ahead in this world you need to ruin everything that you love, everything that’s beautiful, because love and beauty only exist in the moment, and when you don’t take advantage of that moment, then there’s only pain and unhappiness down the road. All you get is cold coffee. You-” Before she could continue, a man ran out of the cafe and collided with our table, causing the plates and glasses to fall to the floor, shattering, while the man disappeared around the corner. Looking down the street, I ask, “What do you think that was about?” “Who cares? He’s probably just some asshole. What really matters is that we can tell the people inside that he knocked over our deserts, and we could probably get some free ones for the road. Oh, maybe if we cut ourselves with some of the glass, we-” “Okay, I’ll go in and try to get free food or whatever. Just, don’t-” “Fine, whatever, just make sure that you eat this time. You have to accept that the appeal of art and beauty is destroying it, and-”, I didn’t catch the rest because I had gone inside of the cafe while she was talking. Inside some chanson was playing from speakers on the walls, but there was an unmistakable silence to the room, as if the music was only existing on top of this sonic emptiness. Looking around, there is nobody in the cafe except for the man at the counter, and when I lock eyes with him I can see panic inside of him, I can see his fear, as if he’s shouting at me with his eyes, his emotions become infectious, they The silence is broken. I can hear the roaring for only a second, it only gets replaced by a faint ringing, that’s all I can hear. My other senses are equally unreliable, especially my sense of sight, because I can only see white. I try to close my eyes but the only thing that I can see is white. Eventually my sense of smell comes to, and I can smell smoke, lots of it. Nothing but smoke. Slow fade from white and I can see the sky, the beautiful, clear sky. Its all I can see, so I figure that I must be on my back. I try to move my body, I try to get up, but I start to feel an intense amount of pain, so I give up on that. I try to move my neck, and its not as bad, so the sky slowly gets replaced by the tops of buildings, then their windows, moving down down down, until I can see the street, the side walk, the rubble, the man rolling around on the ground frantically. Is he on fire? Is that what happened? No, he is holding his left leg, or, the place where his left leg should be. His mouth seems to be screaming, but he can’t scream louder than the ringing. Maybe if my ears weren’t so wet I could hear him. Maybe if my throat and face didn’t feel like hell I could scream too. Should I be screaming? Do I still have all of my limbs? I can’t feel my body, I can only feel pain. All that I’m confident in is my head and my neck. Everything becomes faint, it starts to get blurry, maybe this is what dying is like. I thought that it would feel more special than this. ——————————————————————————————————— I come to, I see friends and family members standing around my casket. They seem sad, they’re crying, but they don’t seem like they’re grieving over me. I suddenly become afraid, I start to worry that my funeral has just become an opportunity for people to pretend to be sad, just to benefit themselves socially. Nobody's there for me, they’re only attending to make a show for everyone else, and probably to get laid. My corpse is nothing more than a tool for people to use for their own benefit, something that they’ll bury and forget about when it stops being useful to them. Dying wasn’t enough, they had to ruin my memory too. Then, my father says, “Wait, I think she’s conscious. Can you hear me, dear?” And I realize that I’m not dead, so I drift off again. Maybe I’ll actually die this time, maybe I’ll actually get a good funeral. But I wake up again later, with my sister sitting by the bed, her neck is bandaged up and I can’t help myself, I have to stare at it, then she notices that I’m awake, that I’m looking at her, and where I’m looking, “Oh, yeah, this. After the bomb went off I was cut by, like, a billion shards of glass. It was as if the window itself attacked me, and who knew that windows could be so deadly? I got this big shard in my neck, about this big,” she holds her hands up to show the size of it, a gesture that she frequently used when talking about her battered boyfriends, “and I thought that it was going to be the end for me, but the doctors said that it actually prevented me from bleeding to death, so I got lucky in the end. Other than that I also have a lot of smaller cuts all over my body, I couldn’t even use my hands for a week because it just hurt to pick anything up, but I’m a lot better now.” I try to ask, ‘A week?’, but when I try to talk the words don’t seem like they’re my own, they don’t even sound like words, I just sound the same way my cat sounded when it had its jaw ripped off by a stray dog, and tried to yowl for help. “Oh, god, you sound like Sunday when he was dying. I can’t even guess what you’re trying to say to me right now. The doctors said that it would probably be difficult for you to talk, but in a couple weeks you’ll probably be fine, like, it didn’t take to long for my throat to heal well enough for me to start talking again, even if my voice is a little rough now.” I try to use my eyebrows to communicate, “Oh, girl, I have no idea what you’re doing right now. I’m going to have to talk to you the way we used to talk to grandpa, to see if he had to use the bathroom. So, are you asking if I’m okay?” One blink. “Oh, do you want to know how long you’ve been in here?” Two blinks. “Oh, its been a little while. You were unresponsive for a couple days, and mom wanted to pull the plug after day one, but it didn’t make sense because you weren’t on life support. I think its been, a month? Yeah, about a month. You’ve regained consciousness plenty of times, but the doctors said that you didn’t understand what was happening around you, you were only able to process the pain, so whenever you would wake up they would have to fill you with pain killers and you’d just knock out again. It was really messed up for the first two weeks, because you’re eyes were still damaged and you had to have this bandage around them, so you were blind and moving around and trying to scream, it was all nightmare inducing. Literally. Four nights in a row I had nightmares that I was in your position, it was horrible, you don’t even know. “But, hey, if you want good news I can give you some. I finally quit smoking! I mean, I really had no choice since the smoke would only further damage my throat so,” I begin to rapidly start blinking to shut her up, but then I realize that she’s looking through me, not looking at me, so I have to listen to this speech of hers. I try to keep my eyebrows at an angry angle, just so that she’ll see my frustration when she snaps out of her self absorption, but she only asks me, “What are you even trying to do with your face? Whatever you’re trying to convey with,” holding up her hand in the direction of my face, then moving it in a circular motion, “all that, but its not working.” I relax my face, but I still stare at her. “Okay, if you don’t believe me, then I’ll show you.” She pulls out her makeup mirror, looks into it for a couple seconds to make sure that she still looks ruinable, not ruined, then she gets up and holds it in front of my face. I’m ruined. My face is covered in bandages and some tubes, and whatever isn’t is just burnt and hideous. Apparently my eyebrows were burnt off and never grew back, so that probably explains why she couldn’t understand me. I blink twice, wait three seconds, then I blink again, and I repeat this several times until she realizes what I’m trying to say, and she moves the mirror away. I feel like crying, but I’m not sure if I’m physically capable. “Yeah, I know, it must be horrible to realize that you look like that, but I have just the think to cheer you up!” She turns towards her purse and pulls something out of it, and at first I think that its a puppy or a kitten, something that would love me unconditionally and show me that my looks aren’t everything, but instead I realize that, “Its a wig!” And before I can blink in response, she places it on my head. “I know what you’re thinking, ‘I don’t look good as a blond’, but you’re face is so unique because it doesn’t matter what you do with it, because anything will look better than your bare face. And, if you’re still not convinced, its just like Marilyn's hair! She could be a role model for you, you know. She was really bland, but then she became so beautiful that she ruined herself! And, don’t worry, I made sure to tell the nurses to take it off at night.” ———————————————————————————————————\ It wasn’t long until I was able to leave the hospital, only four days had passed until my insurance no longer covered my stay there, they put a bottle of pain killers in my hand, and sent me out into the real world, confused, mute, and bandaged. My sister drove me home, where there was an eviction notice waiting for me on the door, apparently the place was still mine for a week. When I was inside, alone, and just sat in the living room, in the dark, staring at the black mirror of the television, wearing that surprisingly comfortable wig, I realized that I was probably out of a job too, since there was no way for me to do PR when I can’t talk. However, there was something calming about all of this, even though my life had been completely ruined. I realized that it probably wouldn’t have gotten better than it already had been, I was mostly just coasting by, and now that it was awful I was at least aware of the fact that it was awful. It was at least something. I thought about cold coffee for a little while, and then I drifted off to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to pain, nothing but pain and darkness. It felt like how wood must feel when a swarm of termites start chewing and burrowing into it. I took some painkillers, then I fell back asleep. I dreamed that I was in a store and that nobody was going to buy me. I would wait and wait for somebody to come in and free me, while a woman would constantly threaten to turn me into hair extensions if nobody bought me. A lot of the dream was just spent waiting, terrified that nobody would come. When I wake up something is off. I blink and look around the room, but it doesn’t feel as if I’m the one who is doing it, its as if I’m just an observer, not a participant, but I tell myself that its probably just the pain killers. I’m probably just high. A couple memories flash in front of my face, all taking place in this apartment. I get up, unsteadily, even though I never told myself to do so. I walk to the wall and try to turn on a light switch, but the room remains dark, my electric bill had gone unpaid while I was in the hospital. I look around the room for something, I’m not sure what, then I finally find my cell phone, which I use for the flashlight. I make my way down the hall, to the bathroom, apparently, then I see myself in the mirror. The first thing I notice is the dried blood that was running down my leathery forehead, apparently I had been bleeding in the night, from the top of my head. The wig is still on, so I can’t see where the bleeding started, and its not my decision to take it off. I begin to make faces in the mirror, some of them seeming to be for basic emotions, smiling for happiness, frowning for sadness, and one that may have been for indigestion or anger. I tell myself again that its probably just the drugs that are causing this disconnect. I awkwardly sit down on the ground, and I start looking through my phone. At first I don’t know what the pass code is, several tries still keep me locked out, but then a memory of me putting in the code flashes in front of my face, and I’m able to get access to the phone. I go straight to my pictures, and the first one there is a picture that my sister and I took at the cafe, before the incident, and the memory of that lunch flashes in front of my face. I stare at the wall for a while, flashes of that lunch keep coming back. What the fuck did they give me? I look back at my phone, I go to the next picture, its one of my celebrity crush. My first instinct is to touch the picture, apparently, and then memories of the actor appear, briefly, and when they dissipate I realize that I am smashing my phone into the tile floor of my bathroom. Now there is nothing but darkness. I can feel myself feeling my way out of there, and it takes a long while since I keep going in circles. One corner in particular confuses me, and I get frustrated because I can’t stop myself from feeling that corner in confusion. A memory flashes in front of my face, but its unfamiliar to me, its one of being stuck inside of some container, in the dark, it feels like my current situation. Eventually I crawled out of that bathroom, and was able to go outside. It was a bright, beautiful day, which made me angry, for some reason. Although, it was as if I was angry, but the anger wasn’t my own. I looked around the apartment complex and saw a bush of flowers nearby, they were bright, colorful, beautiful, and I walked over to them. For a second I thought that I was going to smell them, but instead I start ripping them out, and crushing them under my heel, one by one, patiently destroying this flower bed. I can hear somebody ask what the hell I’m doing, but when I turn to look at them and make some god awful warning noise, they just walk away, talking about how its not their problem anyways. Halfway through the bush, I start to eat the flowers, but only a couple, since its seems that I’ve forgotten how to eat, but that makes sense because wigs aren’t used to eating. Why did I think that? When I’m almost finished destroying the bush, I start to hear some dog yapping at me nearby. I look over at it, and its the adorable little dog that keeps my elderly neighbor company, its the dog that I’ve always been curious to see what it would look like when it gets old and lazy, like its owner, since I have trouble seeing it as anything other than the young and adorable thing that it is now. I thought that I was going to pet it, but then I notice that I’m grabbing it and picking it up. Its held up at my face so that I can get a good look at it, and it begins licking me in the nose, which is one of my weaknesses. I open my mouth, I put the dog’s head inside of that space, I clamp my teeth down, hard and sudden, and I pull its body back, while moving my neck back, until the poor little thing’s head and body are two separate items. The taste, the sight, the texture of its blood and severed spine between my teeth, the whole act on its own makes me want to vomit, but I can’t, I’m not in control. I accept this for the first time: I am not in control. I can’t scream but the dog’s owner is able to do that for me, and better than I could have done in the first place. My eyes move towards her, but I don’t seem to be interested in that old, frail woman. A commotion is being made, something wet and thick and warm is sliding down my chin, my throat, and is starting to soak into my shirt. I start moving, but I don’t know where I’m. I try to resist but there is no way to resist it. My legs begin to hurt, I’m still not well, I’m not supposed to running, but I keep going, I can’t stop. The apartment complex fades behind me and general houses start to race by, I’m in some neighborhoods that I don’t recognize at all, but I keep going. The pain I feel from my legs are too much, and the pain in my scalp returns. I begin to think but they don’t feel like my own thoughts. I think, why is any of this worth resisting, isn’t this being human? I think, how is this not better than the rest of your life, which was spent dealing with other people’s problems, which was spent being passive? I try to tell myself that it was a better life than whatever this is, but I think, no, no it wasn’t. The difference between now, and your previous life, is that you were never living, you were never alive. This is living, this is existing. You are leaving your mark on the world, you are finally enjoying the beauty that life has to offer, you are enjoying the moment. Eventually I stopped running, and I was hoping that I had become tired, that my legs had hurt too much, and that's why I had begun to rest against the chain-link fence, but I soon realized that I was at the high school, that I wasn’t tired, that the people I was watching were only temporary, their happiness only temporary, and that I may as well take in that scene while it was still there.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writing #Cafe #Moment

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Night #Music #Music Recommendation #Trip Hop

[wellmeaningshutin]

News Alert: The world is more violent than you think it is, everyone is out to get you. Be safe, and stay inside and watch more news.

#News #News Update #Breaking News

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Day #Music #Music Recommendation #Giltch #Rap

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #124: Speculation.

Written: 6/28/2017                                                                    Conspiracy Week

“Okay, we have the family tied up, now what?” “Hold on, let me check..” The man with the deep voice begins to look through some papers that he has produced from his jacket pocket. He is almost completely identical to his accomplice, with the only distinction being their voices. They have the same height, same build, and are wearing the same outfit, which is composed of dark blue jeans, no shoes, feet wrapped in what appears to be black tights, an olive utility jacket, blue latex gloves on each hand, and masks of Nixon over their faces. The family does not know what to make of this, although that didn’t stop the father from trying to tell the children that everything would be fine, even though there was no way of knowing if that was true. In an attempt to help her husband, the mother whispered to him that the men probably just wanted to rob the place, and that they would just lose objects, instead of having harm come to them. She said this as the couple tied up their children, as instructed by the armed intruders, and she said this as she had to tie up her husband. The both of them were still repeating their attempts at comfort as the gags were put on them. “You know, I always have wondered this: why do they usually listen when we tell them to tie each other up, why do they never try to run or anything? What’s the worst that will happen? We’ll kill them? Two masked men break into your house, want to tie up your family”, the man with a hoarse, smoker’s voice is now talking to the patriarch, instead of his partner, “and you think the worst that could happen would be dying? No, buddy, you should be worried of a lot more than dying. You-” Annoyed, “Hey, let him be.” Turning to his partner, “Why?” “We currently know as much about what we’re going to do than they know what will happen. You’re both speculating. What’s wrong with him having a more positive outlook on the whole thing? Maybe we’re just supposed to put a bullet in his head and then walk out? That’s not so bad. We’ve done a lot worse.” “Yeah, and we only do bad shit when we get paid for it, and we’re getting paid for this too, so-” “But a lot of that was for the same client, and I’m pretty sure that guy was exceptionally fucked in the head. This is a new guy, these things usually never go farther than putting a bullet into some asshole’s head. There will be no cameras this time. There will be no killing pets in front of their owners. It should be simple.” “Okay, but now you’re speculating too.” “Well, then we should both shut up until we have some concrete answers. Maybe we are supposed to rob this guy.” “Why would we get paid this much for doing some robbery? This guy doesn’t look like he has any money, this place is kind of a shit hole.” “Its a lot better than your apartment.” “Well, I live by myself and am mostly out for business. This guy, or his wife, or the both of them probably have full time jobs, and they have kids so they have to be here a lot-” “How do you know that the kids didn’t make it shitty?” Staring off into space for a couple of seconds, then, “Okay, well, you’re right. We aren’t going to figure out shit. Have you found anything, or.. How long are we going to have to wait?” “Oh, yeah, uh, it says something about opening a brief case to find out what to do next. I don’t think they ever gave us one.” As they talk, the family is sitting on the tarp, looking away from the guns, trying to find hope in the fact that the intruders know as much as they do. “Well”, said the smoker, “I’ll see if there’s one in the house.” Before walking away, he turns to the parents, “Hey, do you guys know where a brief case would be?” The father nods his head, so the masked man moves close to him and removes the tape from his mouth. Then, seizing the opportunity, remembering the man’s words from earlier, the father tries to scream for help. Only two letters are able to escape his mouth, the scream had been telegraphed with a deep breath and a movement in the throat, the smoker knew where to look for this, the smoker knows how to shut him up, he brings the barrel of his pistol into the side of the mans jaw, and the pain is charismatic enough to shut the man up long enough for the tape to be reapplied. The father wants to drop to the ground from the pain in his jaw, he wants to hold it but his hands are unable to, the floor seems like a good substitute, but he knows that he has to seem brave for his children that he isn’t looking at, who are currently and quietly crying. “You know”, the smoker rubs the barrel of his gun against the shag carpet, to remove the blood from it, “you’re supposed to do that shit before you get caught. At this point in time, we’re in the position in power, and the only thing that you can do, to benefit yourself, is to accept that power completely. Make things easy for us, because the smoother this all goes, the less time we’ll have to spend here, which is better for everyone in the long run.” “I guess that depends one what we’re supposed to do with these people. What do you think they did to deserve this? Do you think the dad’s a pedophile or something?” “I don’t know, maybe. He sort of looks like one.” “What do you mean he looks like one? Couldn’t anyone look like a pedophile?” “Okay, so what if they’re all pedophiles?” “All of them?” “Yeah.” “The kids too?” “What? You think those children aren’t attracted to other children? They’re probably the most dangerous pedophiles of the group. Why, I bet that they’re the ones running the whole operation.” “God damn it, lets just look for the brief case, if there even is one.” As two men walk deeper into the house, the family can hear the smoker say, “Okay, that may be a little ridiculous, but what if those kids are actually adults? What if they are those people who have conditions that make them just look like they’re kids, when they really-” “Augh, go look in the other half of the house. Go check the kitchen and garage and shit.” “Why, can you not handle the truth?” “Its not the truth, its speculation.” Walking away, towards the kitchen, yelling behind him, “Well , until the truth is known, I’m sticking to this story.” Listening to the smoker rummage through the kitchen, the family isn’t sure if they should make an attempt to crawl away somewhere in and attempt to get free, escape, or something else, they aren’t really sure. All of them think this individually. They share glances with each other, all questioning, but the tape makes it hard for them to read each other’s faces. Each person looks to the other three, trying to see if they should run or not, and each one mistakenly interprets the others expressions as saying, “Don’t do it! Its too dangerous!” The mother gets worried about the man in the kitchen, who seems to be very unstable, well, for a home invader. The father only heard half of the men’s conversation, since sharp pain is something that he’s not used to dealing with, making it more distracting than normal, and he figures that if he heard the other half, then their exchange would have made more sense. The children are just very confused, especially since they had no idea of what the nine letter word meant. They had rough ideas of what those people were, but they never heard that word, and they didn’t know more than the fact that some of them tried to trick children into getting into their cars, even if the children had no idea of what would happen after they got in the car, even if they knew it would be bad. One of the children usually pictured these types of people burying children alive somewhere, while the other one imagined that these people would just kidnap children and become their new parents, forcing them into a family where they have a lot of other kidnapped brothers and sisters. “Okay, I found it!”, the deep voiced man shouted as he walked back into the living room, quickly looking at the family that was staring at each other, making confusing expressions. The smoker walked into the living room, holding a canned bear that he had found in the fridge, “Well, what’s inside of it? What are we supposed to do?” Placing it gently on the ground, horizontally, and then getting ready to open it, “Guess.” “Why would I, I thought you were tired of- oh. Oh, no, you don’t mean that-” “Yeah.” Opening the brief case to reveal the contents, the deep voiced man shook his head. Inside were two camcorders, two small tripods, and a laminated piece of paper that had their instructions. “I thought you said that this guy was completely different from the last client.” “Well, apparently this guy is working with the last client, because he signed the instructions with his alias. Its all the same as it was before. He clearly wants something from us, maybe he’s a fan of how we love to do things.” “Fuck. What does he take us for, studs or something? Can’t he get anyone else to star in his fucking snuff films?” “What do you think we should do, should we just leave? Should we just say ‘fuck the job’ and walk out of here?” “Well, we were already paid in advance, so-” “So we can give the money back. You haven’t spent yours yet, right?” “Of course not, do you think I’m stupid?” “So what’s wrong with walking out on this? We told that fucker that we don’t want to feed into his perversion, no matter how much money he throws at us.” “Well-” “What?” “You were the one who said that, not me. He pays well. Its just one more movie anyways.” “I thought you said the last one was just going to be ‘just one more film’. And wasn’t the one before that supposed to be it? Remember how the last one was supposed to be unrelated, how its was supposed to just be some simple act of offing a rapist, but it still turned out to be another one of his weird movies? How the guy turned out to have been impotent for basically his whole life? Lets not forget that he’s been asking worse and worse things of us. And now he wants us to put a whole family into one of his movies? When do we draw the line here? When does the money stop being worth it? You know that we have to live with this shit, right? You know that its not just a couple hours of work, its something that’s going to stick with us for a long ass time, its shit that will be cemented in our dreams. And how does that make the money worth it? Is there ever an appropriate price for somebody to buy your sanity? Its not like we could ever get treated for this shit, its not as if we could ever get any help. There’s no way we could sit down in front of a therapist and say: hey, I tortured and killed a whole family so fulfill some rich fuck’s sexual appetite. That shit will get us locked up in a mental ward, thats something that insane people do. Nothing about this is okay.” The family’s sense of hope becomes renewed, well, until the smoker laughs at this. “What do you mean that this shit will stick with us? You can’t tell me that, this whole time, that’s been your problem with it. I just thought that you didn’t want to be sexualized or anything, and I respected that, but.. Come on.” “What?” “You can’t seriously try to take some sort of moral stance right here. You can’t tell me that you’re some hit man with a heart of gold, that you have remorse for your actions like some six year old girl who wanted to see what would happen when she took her goldfish out of the water. How the fuck did you enter this line of work while still having empathy? How come you were so fine with tying them up, maybe killing them, but this somehow crosses the line?” “Well, I have no problem with killing anyone who has deserved it! And I had a feeling that it would just be one of the parents, or that we’d be sending a message, or that the parents, not the kids, may really have been pedophiles.” “All children are pedophiles.” Waving those comments away in frustration, “But even besides that, its a lot easier to give somebody a swift death, to put a bullet in their head, than to make them suffer so much, to make their lives that awful, to make them scream and writhe in pain, to make them beg for death. When you take somebody’s life while they’re still happy, when they still live, that’s really not so bad. You get to prevent them from any possible suffering down the road, you get to keep them from the horrible things that life could have in store for them. But there’s something horrible, unforgivable, about making them want to die, about making their life so hellish that anything would be better than living. Life should be a privilege, not a punishment.” “All this time I thought that you were past all that bullshit, that you really understood how things really are, but now it turns out that you’re just some pussy whose trying to hid behind philosophy.” “Oh, and how are things really?” “Nobody cares about anyone but themselves, and that’s how things are supposed to be, its natural, its what people were made for. There’s no reason to actually care about anyone else, its pathetic. Morals are a load of bullshit, they have no actual form, they’re just made up so that people who get tricked into playing by made up rules can be taken advantage of by those that know that the rules don’t matter. You teach a man that its wrong to have sex outside of marriage, and that’s one less man that you have to compete with to get laid. You tell a man that killing is wrong, and that’s somebody who you can trust turning your back on, and that’s somebody who will be guaranteed to turn their backs on you. You teach a man that honesty is a virtue, and he will always be stupid enough to mean what he says, to let people take advantage of him. Its all just one big scam, and its probably the oldest running scam that there’s ever been.” “What the, no- there’s something wrong with you.” “Something wrong with me? Seriously? You’re the one who is turning down great money for some flimsy reason, and there’s something wrong with me? You’re the delusional one, there’s something in your head that’s all fucked up. You’re practically indoctrinated at this point. You’re like one of those cult members who doubles down on their beliefs whenever the truth is exposed to them.” “Me? I’m delusional? You find nothing wrong in killing a family for a snuff film, but I’m the one with-” “See, you still have no actual arguments here. You’re just getting emotional and upset, you’re just attempting to hurl insults at me, and its really just pathetic. Face it, you just- oh, don’t give me that look.” “How do you know what look I’m giving you? I have a fucking mask on.” “I know you, I can tell by your body language.” “What are you, my wife?” “Whatever, lets just see what the instructions are. You’re getting all in a huff over the best paying job that we’ve ever had, and you don’t even know what we have to do.” He picks up the instructions, and reads them aloud to himself, mumbling, then, “Oh.” “What.” “You’re probably not right for the job anyways. You should probably go.” “Why?” “Well, I think that we were looking at this all wrong. I don’t think these are snuff films. I think these are audition tapes.” “What? Why?” “Well, first off, at the bottom, here, it says that if we can do everything listed, then he’ll give us one last job, and the price that he’s paying is absolutely ridiculous. He’s never said that the jobs would end, he just always hinted at a next one. Its all been getting worse and worse, by your made up standards, but maybe that’s just because he wanted to see if we could handle what he really wanted us to do. All of these jobs have mainly been on nobodies, and have just been us doing elaborate forms of torture, on cameras, with multiple angles, wearing these weird outfits that only expose our faces. Think about it, if it was snuff, then wouldn’t most of the focus be on the acts that we’re committing? On the victims? If you think about it, he’s probably watching out faces instead, our reactions, to see if any of this upsets or stresses us out in any way. It would make sense to introduce us to stuff slower, to stress test us and see if we would have a breaking point, since whatever he really wants must be ‘bad’.” The last word was said with air quotes that were a little awkward, since he was still holding the pistol and the beer. “Clearly, you’ve failed the test, and I’m going to pass.” “All this from the guy who said, not too long ago, that the children were probably just adult pedophiles who were pretending to be children? Look, the man is just chasing his fetish, he just needs more and more to get off. I’m pretty sure that he’s just running out of ideas at this point, and the last thing he’ll have us do will probably be the best thing that he could think of. Or, he could just be getting tired of us as actors, and he may want to see other men take over the roles in his fucked up productions. And if we stay on this till the end, we could probably end up getting killed. Remember the first job that we had for this guy? The one that involved killing those two other big guys, the only shady people that we’ve ever killed during the time that we’ve worked for him? They could have been the guys before us. He could just get a big kick out of seeing people do all sorts of terrible things, just to see it happen to them too.” “Yeah, but those two guys also made sense for the start of the auditions, the tests. Think about it, he could have just been seeing if we wanted to torture somebody who was bad. He wanted to see if we were fine with bending societies bullshit rules for some people who could have deserved it, and then he started checking if we could do that with people who never did anything to deserve it, and so on. Escalation. People like him know that you have to test the waters slowly, try to find the breaking point, instead of just starting off with the crazy thing.” “But why would he have to find our breaking points in the first place? Why not just put the job out there and see if anyone will take it? Wouldn’t a lot of sick fucks, like you, just jump a job like that?” “Who wants to give out any information of a job like that, whatever it could be? Based on what we’ve been doing, they probably have be careful, they have to find somebody that they know that they can trust. Do enough messy jobs, that escalate in violence, without saying a word, without complaining, then you prove your worth.” “But we already complained, didn’t you yell at him?” “Most of my insults were based on him sexualizing us, for using us as some really fucked up sort of porn stars, I think he understood the misconception. He probably knew that we weren’t quitting because we thought any of this was bad, even if it turns out that that’s the way you felt, but he thought that it was just the sexual aspect that was the reason for our resignation.” “You know what? I’m not arguing about this. There’s something clearly wrong with you, and there’s no reason for me to stick around. I’ll give the money back to the middle man, I’ll tell him where to put it, and that will be that.” Heading for the door, then turning to the family to say some snide comment to them, he froze. Should he leave those people here just so that his partner could make another one of those movies? Wasn’t leaving them just the same as doing whatever was about to be done to them? Shaking his head, he slowly walked back into the living room, aiming his gun in front of him, resigned to the fact that he may have to go to some drastic measures to convince his friend to stop. However, when he was in the open room, and turned left to threaten, to shoot, he saw one of the camcorders already up on the tripod, he saw his partner already aiming, and before he could pull the trigger, he saw a flash from the smoker’s gun and dropped to the ground as his chest began to feel numb. He hardly even processed the clunk that came out of the silencer. He hardly processed the muffled screams of the family, who had all of their hopes set on his moral inspiration. His gun was kicked out of his hand, and his partner sat on top of him. The smoker used one hand to point his silencer at the prone, injured man, and used the other to set down his beer nearby, then reached around, grabbed the camcorder, and spent some time repositioning it nearby by, behind the bleeding man, aimed down at his face. The smoker removed the dying man’s mask, and revealed a black, synthetic bodysuit that had a hole in the face, revealing the man’s pale, angry face. He would try to fight back, but he was having trouble breathing, his vision was blurry, and his heart beat seemed deafening. “You know, you should have left when I told you to leave. Right at the top of the list, which you probably didn’t check, was for one of us to kill the other. But you probably just saw the camcorders and thought that it was enough for you. I have to admit, this may have sort of been my fault. I did mention that you had a bigger problem with all of this than I did. So maybe he wanted me to prove that it really was just you who had a problem with it, that I really was somebody who could do well in his auditions. And, if you’re hearing me right now, sir, when you review this footage later, you can rest assured that there is nothing that will ever be too much for me.” As his partner struggles to get air, as he gasps, the smoker reaches to his side, picks up the beer, and slowly pours it over the man’s face. “I really don’t care about his suffering, and I’ve done a lot with him, we’ve basically bonded over this. And that family over there? I’ll do everything that you’ve told me to do. You pay well, you pay ridiculously well, so I’ll oblige as long as you keep that up.” After the pouring had ceased, and he spit up all of the beer that had trickled into his mouth, the man asked, in his deep voice, “Why? You.. You know that this is all snuff, right? What’s wrong with you..” “Again and again you ask what’s wrong with me, but I’ve already told you that nothing is, but you refuse to listen. There’s nothing to be gained from that argument, we just hold two separate opinions and we both refuse to change them. We will both try to convince the other person, but we will both refuse to have our own opinion’s changed. Its pointless. Anyways, its not snuff. Sure, I may end up cutting the littlest ones arms off, cut her face off, and then let her lay there and bleed out. Then, okay, I may cut the fingers off of her hands, and place those and the face, which will probably wadded up, into the older kid’s mouth, then tape that up, so its like a gag, then press his nose into the blood puddle of the other one, and carve into his back while he drowns. Then-” “No- stop. Please-” “And this is why you’re not getting the big job, and I am. You could have left the murder for hire game, you know. So don’t act any better than me. You try to play by made up rules, but then you think that you can find exceptions. Isn’t murder supposed to be, well- no. I wont change your mind. Although, I guess I can prove that your rules don’t matter at all by breaking them. I’m not supposed to make life a punishment, huh? Well, lets see if I can treat that wound of yours, lets see if I can keep you alive and awake for just a couple hours, so that you can watch as I get the big role. That will also prove that I’m right for the job. After that, I’ll never need to work again. I can retire somewhere and start a new life, I can never have to worry about living from hit to hit.” So, the smoker propped his partner up against the wall, and fished around his inner jacket pocket until he found a leather case, which he set down on the ground. Then, he turned the camera so that it was facing and zoomed in on the dying man’s face. He took off his mask, jacket, and jeans, so that he was only wearing the black bodysuit that covered everything except for his face. He opened the case, which contained a syringe, spoon, lighter, and a bag that contained heroin. He laughed at his partner, who was weakly trying to tell him that he was delusional.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Morality #Ethics

[wellmeaningshutin]

How come some people carry around small dogs in their purses, but nobody walks around with large dogs in duffel bags? Get your shit together America.

#Question #Dogs #USA #Fashion #Real Questions

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Night #Music #Music Recommendation #Hypnagogic Pop

[wellmeaningshutin]

#Song of the Day #Music #Music Recommendation #Rap #HipHop

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #123: Grandpa.

Written: 6/26/2017                                                                    Conspiracy Week

“Oh, I remember when your mother was, she was just about as small as you are right now. Why, I used to be able to, she would sit right here on my knee and would take up no more room than that, but now, why, she’s got kids of her own. Time, make sure to hold onto it tight, kids. Makes sure that you have it pinned down so that it can’t go anywhere. I don’t care if you put it in a headlock, or handcuff it to a pipe, or something, you have to make sure that it stays by you at all times. Because, when you let it get away from you, when you stop enjoying the moment, every moment, why, that’s when you wake up some day, and then you’re at the end of your line. You realize that your much too old to do anything that you wanted to do, and that’s also when you realize what it is that you really should have done.You think, why I should have stuck with that job, or I should have dodged that draft, or I should have left that woman years ago, no matter what people would have thought, because those were twenty bitter years that you’ll never get back. You realize that the moment is what’s important, but you wonder if its still worth it to focus on it. Every day is the same, there’s not much to do in here, its just where they’ve stuck me as I, as I wait to go into hell. Or… sorry kids, I meant to say heck. Grandpa forgot who he was talking to, for a second. You finally realize that the now is all that matters, but then your now has become hollow, you’ve realized that your life and body are connected, they’re breaking down together, and when it starts to hurt to get out of bed, to walk around, you realize that it also hurts to keep going on. And, kids, I know that this is something that all of us old geezers say. Heck, I probably received a similar speech when I was your age, and I know that you will be unable to understand the importance of this, but I still have to do my duty to warn you against it. And I know that eighty years may seem like a long time, even when you’ve only been around for five-” “Grandpa, I’m seven.” “I’m six.” “Well, one or two years don’t make a difference children. Because, why, in the grand scheme of things, even eighty years isn’t very long at all. Humanity doesn’t fit well with time, we break down much too quickly. Maybe at some point this will be solved, but for now we have to accept that our species is terrible at figuring out what it wants, what its hopes and dreams are, where it stands. You spend a majority of your life changing your opinions, and then by the time you find the right one, your body is on its way out the door, you’re almost broken down, you’ve become a lemon. Maybe things would be better if our lifespan was doubled. Sometimes it seems like I’m still very young, and that I’m about to hit the real second act of my life, but the story is doomed to go unfinished. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I still don’t understand a thing, maybe I still don’t know what I want. This is why the present is so terrible when you’re old, because you still don’t have any answers, you can’t figure out the purpose to any of it. That’s why a lot of us try to look either way. Some of us look to the past, stay in the past, and think about all sorts of things that made them happy, and they distract themselves with it. I can tell you kids, I saw a lot of good men succumb to scag in the jungle, what it did to their minds and bodies was horrible, and I can firmly say that nostalgia is no different. Living in the past sure is a pleasant thing, but that’s also what makes it dangerous. It makes the present more difficult to deal with, which only makes you want to go back to your memories. I’ve seen lots of folk get bitter about having to see the present, get bitter about how things aren’t the way that they used to be, about how things are changing, but that’s how its supposed to work. Everything changes, everything dies, none of it really ever makes much sense. And that leads to another problem, because there are other folks that sit around thinking about the future, thinking about dying. I can tell you that its been tempting for me sometimes. I don’t want much to do with the past, and I don’t much like the present, but the future can be a terrible thing. I think the part of it that becomes appealing, when you’re as old as I am, is that it starts to become predictable. All of your life you don’t know what the future holds, but when you’re body has almost fallen apart you know that only death awaits you. “Maybe that’s the gift of being young, though, the ability to believe that you’ll never die. Well, maybe with your generation, and your mothers generation. I never got that gift when I was young. Maybe when I was a child, but when I was old enough to carry a gun I had to spend my days knowing that I was probably on death’s door. I guess that’s the constant I feel now, but things are much less exciting. Nobody wants to hear any stories about bingo night, or the romantic drama that goes on in this place. Heck, nobody even wants to believe that you can be romantic, well, in the purposefully temporary sense. Nobody wants to believe that you can ‘love’ somebody for a night then move on. You start to get thought of as less than a person, its like everything you do becomes cute, no matter what you do. Its demoralizing, and I have a lot of experience with that feeling, I can tell you that.” “What does that mean?” “Well, I guess it means-” “Is it about the war?” “Yeah, I guess it-” “Tell us about the war, grandpa!” “Yeah, tell us about the war.” “Well, I don’t know it that’s appropriate for children. It wasn’t exactly all sunshine and-” “Pleeeease” “Yeah, please grandpa. If you, uh-”, digging a finger into her ear, “if you want us to know more about being older… if you want us to understand what you were trying to say, you should tell us about your time in the war. If you let, let us, um.. Stay young, like, in our minds then we will end up like you, we will become old and, uh, lost.” “Okay, dang it, you have a point there Sherry. Okay, so, now, I never wanted to fight in the war in the first place. I didn’t much agree with it in general, but I also guess that I didn’t know that a lot of those draft dodgers would never have anything happen to them. Who knows what my life would have been like if I had fled to Canada, maybe I would have been happier, but, then again, you kids may have never of been born, and that would be an awful thing to happen. Now, because I didn’t know these things, I had listened when they told me that I was to join the war, I had done what I thought was patriotic, what was my duty, when there was really no patriotism about any of it. It was just a losing fight, a rotten mess, and we never belonged in there in the first place. We were just fighting some war that had nothing to do with us, fighting for people who wanted nothing to do with us, fighting alongside others who wanted nothing do with the war. Just rotten all around. I got a similar experience when I got back home, too. People thought of me as a monster, or a joke, depends who, even though I thought that I was just doing my duty. Some people in power hated me, because I reminded them of their own failings.” “But, but grandpa! What happened during the war?” “Oh, yeah, that. Well, it was humid, there was a lot of fire, a lot of screaming, a lot of bullets going every which way. It was heck. Pure, unrefined heck. And the only way that you could survive was through drugs, which you children should never do and should always stay away from. Even one inhale of marijuana will make your balls fall off, they’ll just drop to the ground, spill out of that little flesh sack of yours, and then roll around on the floor like marbles, then you’ll never have children.” “What do.. What do that have to do with making children?” “Oh, uh.. Okay, so you only have two balls, right Earl? Well, that means that you can only make two kids, and that’s why your mother only had two of you. You take one of those little balls out, and you give it to a woman that you love, who will then swallow it, and a baby will start to grow in her stomach. Have you, you know those pills that you put in water, and then after a while they become a sponge in the shape of a dinosaur, or some other such thing? Well, that’s sort of how babies are made, but it takes a lot longer, and you only to do that twice.” “What if a boy eats one?” “Well, if that happens then you can’t get into heaven.” “Why? Is it bad?” “No, not really, but there are a lot of things that you can do that aren’t bad that will prevent you from going there. But that’s, don’t quote me on that. Don’t tell your mother I said that. She’s still catholic, right? You don’t know? Do you have any t’s in your house with a sad man hanging off of it? Okay, then she may be catholic, or she may be something else. My memory doesn’t do me too well sometimes. Although, I can remember she did once spend a lot of time at the church, after, after-”, and then a strange thought made itself clear in his head, he started to have a memory of his daughter grieving, but what was it for? Her husband was there with her, they were still together, weren’t they? So what was it, what were they- and then he found an answer, but he didn’t like it one bit. It had to be wrong, because the children were right there in front of him. Maybe he was finally losing it, or maybe his memory had just become distorted. Either way, there was only one thing that he could do: try not to think about it. “Okay, so the war, you kids wanted to hear about the war, right? Now, I know that I told you that nostalgia is one darn of a drug, and I try to stay away from it, but I’m not against doing it socially. When you start to get nostalgic on your own, though, that’s what is supposed to be a warning sign of addiction. And I’m old anyways, I can do drugs. When you’re as old as me, kids, then you can do as many drugs as you want. I’ve had my two kids anyways, so I don’t have no balls to lose anyhow. So, the war. Now, there was a lot of time that I was out there in the jungle, slowly walking around with my rifle in my hands, looking out for Charlie or any traps that may have been hiding away. At first you don’t take the warnings to seriously, or at least I didn’t. When I was a recruit, I got it into my head that the war wasn’t really that bad, that all of those protesters were just crazy and creating a fuss for absolutely no reason. Not once did I think that my own government would lie to me. Not once did I think that I was the one who had been wrong, that I had been buying into propaganda the whole time. Let me tell you, they said that we were winning the whole time, or at least that’s what I was told before I got there. They kept saying that we were winning the war. Ha. When I got there, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t the case. Well, at least after a short while. At first I thought that everyone was worried for nothing. We had the stars and stripes on our side, and that flag had survived and won much worse wars than that one. Heck, it got us through World War two, which really could have been the end times. And if we beat the friggin Nazis, what else couldn’t we beat? Well, I learned that there was a hell of a lot that we couldn’t beat. It didn’t take me long to realize that either. “In my first weeks, I saw how bad the drug problem was, how paranoid some of the people were, but I thought that those two things were related, just for the wrong reasons. I thought ‘wow, these drugs are sure making everyone worried for nothin, I wonder how this all happened.’ And then a short while later a boy next to me stepped on a land mine, my face become all made up, like a countess going to a ball, with his insides, and then I thought that I started to understand things, but even then I really didn’t. At least I realized why so many fellow soldiers had turned to drugs, why officers refused to let others salute them, why they tried not to display their rank, why so many had… well, I guess I can’t judge some of those ones, I became one of them. Some of us, we just gave ourselves to the present, I guess that’s the way that I could put it. We accepted our situation, and we started to reflect it with ourselves. We became a reflection of the war itself. “Now, you kids ever play games together? No, why do I ask that, of course you have. Well, you know cowboys and Indians? No game is more American than that one. Well, some of us played that game out in the jungle. We were the cowboys, and Charlie was the Indian. Every time we’d go out and kill on of them, we’d make sure to scalp them good. We collected these, and we would keep them in our tents, it was a form of status. If you had two scalps for every friend that you lost, then you allowed everyone to feel as if there was actually a chance of winning. It was just sadistic superstition and a crude form of entertainment. Some of the fella’s that I did this with would display them around their necks, for the really authentic feel of it. One guy even considered getting a bunch of captives and marching them across the country, he wanted the trail of tears experience, but that guy was crazy, nobody agreed with that. Anyways, he was burnt to death in one of our own napalm strikes anyways. You know what napalm is, kids? You know how in fire safety, at your schools, they tell you to stop, drop,and roll? Well, imagine trying to do that, but the fire still sticks to you. Imagine finding out that there’s no way to tell the difference between were your skin stops and the fire begins, the two just start to become the same thing. Or, well, that’s how I always imagined it to be, whenever I would watch people who were victims of those attacks. Ha, victims. Everyone there was a victim, everyone in that war, both sides, and the only people who weren’t were far away, and safe from all of the horrors. And, let me tell you, I saw that stuff happen to a lot of children your ages too. Those kids didn’t let themselves get fooled by thoughts of immortality, why, those kids would sometimes be the ones that would be holding the rifles that were firing at you, it was an awful place.” “Is that all you did, grandpa? You just fought in the jungle?” “Well-” “You didn’t do anything else, anything special?” “I mean, I guess I may have, I-” “So you did do something special?” “Well-” “Tell us about it!” “Yeah, grandpa, tell us!” “Tell us about operation octagon!” “Well, it was, wait… how do you kids know about that?” “You just told us.” “No I… Did I?” It was a genuine question, he wasn’t sure how bad his memory was, and these kids probably had a better memory than he did. “Well, I’m sorry if I said it, because that’s not really a story for children.” Operation Octagon had nothing to do with octagons at all, but that was sort of the point of the name, to be irrelevant. It was something that he was picked for due to his notable aversion to drugs, his secrecy, ruthlessness, and strong willingness to take orders. It involved him escorting some government spooks to meet with local drug smugglers, where they set up an agreement for the US government to covertly buy raw, high quality heroin in large quantities, which would then be smuggled back to the US, where agents planted in the counter culture and Vietnam protest movements would help get those groups addicted to the drug, in an attempt to quell protests without further bad press, and also to delegitimize their movement by making them look like a bunch of strung out junkies. One of the spooks had disclosed all of this to him, but only because the guy didn’t think that he would be able to live through the war, and probably wouldn’t tell anyone up to that point. And who would believe the psychopath who collected scalps anyways? It would have surprised the man to learn that the soldier, the current, rambling grandfather, would be the only person alive who still knows of the operation’s existence, since the agents were either killed by their agencies, or through other causes, and the documents were destroyed after some details of COINTELPRO had become known to the general public. “Okay, so there’s a lot more interesting stuff that happened out there besides that. Why, one time a boy, an American, had lost his leg due to a punji stick, it was a nasty thing to see, but it was normal back then. The medic had been picked off by a sniper before that happened, he had gotten his leg impaled during the retreat after that, so nobody was able to provide him with medical assistance. Now, after his leg was impaled, the others thought ‘darn him to heck’ and decided to run out of their and save their own butts, since getting him free would have probably cost them their lives, Charlie was advancing. So he screamed for help, and nobody did a dang thing about it. Then, then the guy starts to yell, ‘but its my birthday, you wont let a fella spend his birthday getting captured by gooks’-” “What’s a-” “Forget that word. Its a bad word. Its only okay that I said it because that was a different time, and in that place bad words held no weight. The whole war was a bad word itself. Anyways, he starts screaming about it being his birthday, and for some reason this is enough to persuade the other guys, who are already a good distance away, to run back to him, rip his leg off of that stick, and start dragging him with them as they try to get the darn out of there. By the time they get to base camp, he’s already bled to death, and the guys who carried him are telling everyone about it. Apparently, on the chopper ride, when they evacuated, he just kept telling them how old he had turned. He told them that he had actually turned eighteen, and that he had lied about his age to get into the war, he thought it was going to be easy, he thought we were winning, and he wanted to have the glory of being a veteran in some American war. He thought he could use that to get women after his tour was up. Ha, if only he knew… anyways, everyone at the camp decides to throw the fucker a birthday party anyways, and nobody gets cheap about it either. A lot of people feel for the kid, they felt that he embodied a good amount of people who were there, and so the least that they could do for him, and themselves, was throw him one last birthday party. I had never seen anything like that party, and I will never see it again. I can still remember when we figured out that he was a virgin, and the look on the hooker’s face when we showed her the birthday boy. Its too bad that the festivities had to be cut short, somebody had thrown a live grenade into an officer’s tent, but that was just the way things were.” “But what about operation octagon?” “Why won’t you tell us about that? You promised!” “Now, I don’t remember telling you about that, and I’m not sure that I did, but I’m sure as heck that I didn’t promise to say a word about that. There’s more to talk about-” “But, but, but-” “No, don’t flash your lashes at me, that’s that. I don’t want to hear a word about it again, and that’s final. Its not my business to bring it up again anyways. “Now, what if I tell you about the time that, that-”, starting to have trouble focusing, the thought had reappeared inside of his head. Images flashed by quickly, like the flash from his rifle as he shot at civilians, unsure if they were innocent or actually Viet Cong, deciding to be safe about it. A car crash. A hospital visit.  A grieving daughter. Two small coffins. The worst kind of funeral. He didn’t want it to be real, but it felt very real to him. His recollection of those events felt the same as his memories from the war, both equally vivid, both unmistakably true. But how could that be? Were these ghosts, was he in the pasts somehow? Or, were these not really his grandkids? Think. Who did they come in with, how did this visit start? A nurse, a nurse brought them in, she said that his daughter had dropped them off. But why didn’t she visit too? Why would she just leave her only two children to be alone in a room with a man who needed assistance of his own? Wouldn’t she want to say hello to him, didn’t she usually pop in? At least once a week, right? At least once a week. So, at least the nurse would have recognized her, right? So if these weren’t really his grandkids, if somebody else had dropped them off, then wouldn’t the staff have noticed? But, wait, wait… wasn’t it the new nurse who brought it in? And didn’t she say, she said that it was his daughter who brought them in, but she didn’t give a name, and the nurses always gave a name. ‘Your daughter, Elizabeth, has come to visit.’ That’s what they always said, always like that, no matter which nurse it was, it had to be a regulation of some sort. But couldn’t the new nurse have forgotten about that regulation? Think, think. Weren’t there rules about patients getting left alone with children? “Grandpa?” How long ago was the funeral? They were both six and seven, they were right about that, but how long ago was it? Who was in the white house? Well, it had to be Bush right? Which one? Did that matter? Wouldn’t either of them have been long enough ago for the children to be, well, not children any more? Surveying the room, looking through the curious and impatient children, he tried to see if he had any pictures of them up. Charlie may be in the trees, watch the trees. None were found, but why didn’t he have any up? Why, why? A search for the reason only came up with fog, confusion. Hands shaking, he reached into his back pocket and dug out his wallet. He knew that he had a picture in there, he had pictures of everyone. He hardly even had much use for the wallet itself, it was really just kept for… no pictures, not a single one. No pictures anywhere. Didn’t there use to be pictures everywhere? “Grandpa, tell us about operation octagon.”’ Ignore the children, something isn’t right. It isn’t just the kids, its not just the memories, something about, about the room itself. Was it always this small? Didn’t he normally have more room than this? Why, he couldn’t walk on his own, he was confined to that damned chair, so why wouldn’t they have put him in a handicapped room? There’s almost no room in here, between those two kids, whoever they are, and the bed behind him, the one he woke up in this morning. Watching him look around the room, digging into her ear, “Or at least any war story, any story is fine for now.” “We just want to spend time with you.” Its not right, none of it is right. He tries to move his chair forwards, he wants to call for a nurse, something. Either something really bad is going on, or he he’s having some sort of dementia episode, and either situation requires him to get out and find a nurse, find some assistance. His heart races. Trying to move forwards is difficult, the children’s chairs are planted in the way, blocking him from reaching the door. “Children”, motioning, swiftly, with one hand for them to move aside, “get out of the way so that grandpa move.” “Where do you need to go?” “Stay here, grandpa, please!” “Yeah, tell us one of your war stories. We really want to hear one.” Deciding that they’re not going to budge, not having any positive feelings towards the situation, he reaches one hand out and shoves the older one out of the way, onto the ground, and the younger one tries to block him, but their attempt is futile. Although he heard them land pretty hard, he can’t hear them cry. Don’t children normally cry because of these things? When he reaches the door, he tries the handle, but its locked. Banging on it yields no results. He can hear the children move their chairs around, but he doesn’t turn around to look. As he rests his head on the door, they repeat the question that, for the first time, makes his skin crawl.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Vietnam War #Grandparents

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