(A Killer, above ---20 to life in maximum security)
In a far away, blurry, illusionary world, our story begins as two streets intersect, next to the local watering hole, with our hero knee-deep in whiskey: Total flood damage of the liver. He couldn't leave, nor did he want to leave this beautiful amber-colored world. In this world your decisions are made for you, but unfortunately, to a place where future plans are unnecessary. In this golden land he’s been attached to a bar stool, with a heavy duty chain, and a lock, seemingly without a key.
On this night without a moon, he searched in his pockets and found a large key. He couldn’t believe it had sitting there all these years. With tremendous amounts of fear he inserted the key into the lock and set himself free. “Could it be this easy,” he asked, and walked out of the bar into the night air, with a new moon.
He saw a dead man’s name atop a street sign, and sadly, he could see that in every direction, everything eventually faded to black, a black so consuming he saw himself old, dying, atop his death bed.
“I don’t want to die. I don’t want streets named after me, I prefer anonymity, but I’ve never tried harder to accomplish anything but that eventuality. I’ve held the whiskey so close, for so long, oh how I love it so! ‘To smash the mirrors’, like they say, maybe that’s what I need. I want all the images of me; mirrors and reflections in windows, reflections in another’s eyes, and all the pictures of me put in a pile soaked in gasoline. I need to be startled. I need a new beginning, it seems to be everywhere.”
“I have to start over.” He felt his eyes pool. “I know now that this life is plenty long enough. Yet, I’ve let it slip through my mind: A life unlived. I need to get back to some rudimentary ideas, blood runs, something extreme. Maybe nature …to the ‘ultimate rudimentary of being’ should be my goal: to run naked, to kill without fear or guilt! Up in the desert; his friend said, is a place that'll startle you, and make you hesitate.
So he ran, rather stumbled home and drank a liter of coffee. He threw some rags in a bag, and pounded a hammer on his starter motor. He began to drive to the desert. His legs were trembling as his foot released the clutch. He hadn’t left the city where he lived ---in over twenty years.
He drove through the San Joaquin Valley. It was hot. His foot pressed the accelerator harder to relieve him from it. It kept following him, the heat mixed with smog. But through the smog he dreamed he saw his salvation, ‘The Great Barrier’, or the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
A green and lush world would appear first, and just past that, a different world, the desert, where in both worlds, nothing but honesty. It all seemed to rhythm, and he wasn’t even there yet.
He was still in the muck, the smog, the filth, as it followed him up to the summit. The entire ride up the mountains he felt as if a hand was trying to stop him. At every juncture, at every turn, he felt scared, he was sure some tragedy at some point in time had occurred, “These Mountains are untamable!” But he continued on, trembling. Finally he was squirted out of ‘The Great Barrier’, into, ‘The Great Basin’. With a huge sigh he made a right off of Highway 80 to see his friend who lived in the desert.
After the pleasantries were exchanged with his friend, something soft and smooth curled around his ankles, purring in a way that soothed him. It was his friend’s cat. He exclaimed, “What innocence this cat has in its face. I’m in love!”
But he was tired, it was late. His friend told him she had a bed waiting and warm for him. As he pulled the covers over his body, at first, the desert made him feel horrible loneliness. But the pendulum swung as he got warm. It was all turned on its head, and the only way to describe his feelings then was…‘a final resting place, home’. He awoke refreshed the next morning:
I awoke before my friend did. I had coffee and plenty of cigarettes, but a distraction, somewhere, seemed constant. I burned my finger with my cigarette thinking about it. A strange light came through my friend’s house. It even seemed to be creeping underneath her doors. But …it was so enchanting. I opened the drapes on my friend’s window. The sky was a blue I had never seen before. In the city the filth rises up quickly. It’s probably always there, at night when we’re asleep, even then I’m sure. It doesn’t have enough time to escape. The manufacturing process must be constant.
I opened up my friend’s sliding glass door. I took a seat on a large wooden chair and found myself on my friend’s porch, a hundred square foot structure for reflection. It was cool and oxygenated from her desert plants. The desert was my friends backyard, and as I turned my head west, something entirely different. It was a green mountain. I saw obvious stages to this, incongruity, like an infant, growing, evolving; infant, toddler, adolescent, adult, middle-aged, and the final stage. I had all day, or at least until my friend awoke to ruminate about this.
I said I opened my friend's sliding glass door, but also ---left it open. I didn’t think the porch and its view could hold me, at attention almost. My friend’s cat must have followed me out, because I saw something though heard nothing, hence, I ignored everything, but the all-so-blue-sky.
When I eventually turned my head to my right ---my friend’s cat was sitting on her porches four foot wall. The cat had flattened its body. All of its muscles were taut. It was ready. The only muscles that moved showed the cat where his objective was at. What was it? What was the objective? It was stuck. I was stuck, but stuck on what?
“It couldn’t have been more than three seconds. It was real; life or death. I was finally startled, and soon, once again, I was interested in this life.”
The cat jumped down on the porch floor. I didn’t hear a sound, but miraculously saw it materialize on the other corner of the porch, closer to its objective. He flattened his body further, almost completely flat now. Life and death was about to happen before my eyes. Life death, a battle to decide it all would soon take place. But:
The cat was now directly below me. He then sprinted fifteen feet North West, closer to his objective, under a desert Juniper shrub. Then I couldn’t see him, but I could see his objective as I looked ten feet further. Inside another Juniper bush I saw movements from what appeared to be a tramped bird, trying frantically to escape. Then I, and to this day, still believe I saw a trail from the cats movements lingering there, in mid-air, lunging, long after I heard my friend’s cat scream: Attack! The cat was successful as I heard the death rattle from the bird. And later still, just a moment, which was a life: Nothing could be heard from the cat and or the bird. A murder had occurred!
Link to story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38862604/from/?beginSlide=1>1=43001
The End
