Friday, October 17, 2008

Tastes like trouble.

:::
It smelled like pain in the small room. The smell was even worse when the light was finally switched on. There was an empty chair in the middle of the small steel room. It was on its side in a puddle of human fluids. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling should have made the entire scene appear cliché, but death hung in the air undiluted. The door was closed but unlocked.
Down the hall men play cards, surely telling crude jokes that would lack humor to sober ears. The caricatures of lost souls gambling away blood money. Each bill they lose, a measured portion of the appraisal of a person’s value. How much is it worth to you to have someone hurt, scared, killed, gone. Standard rates apply.
They didn’t even notice me pass by.
Further on there is a flight of stairs and a steel door. Like the kind on a submarine, a boat? The wheel turns silently, but then again maybe not. Ears are warm and wet with blood, filled with soft white noise. I must be deaf. I should be dead.
It is night on the deck. If the sun had been out it I might have died from the shock. I might have? I probably still will. I miss the water when I fall over the side of the boat. The dock's punch was softer than others I had felt in the night and struggling to my knees I sigh that it could learn a thing or two from the men back on the boat.
My body gives out sixteen miles down the road, at most a city block. It all fades to black. Temporarily. Cross my fingers.
Hopefully I will get arrested.

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