I did not belong in the bare essential apartment surrounded by all the up and comings. I didn’t belong in a bar when the nights in the hot and humid town pulsed with loneliness. I didn’t belong on the street in the middle of the night walking with a man that nearly drove me mad with sexual desire.
I got up and followed as best I could but even in my discomfort I confessed a strange gratitude that she had not let go of my throbbing arm. We walked for forever but in reality we walked just around the block. She steered me past parked cars and a darkened street and down some stairs.
I understand his mother wants to watch me die. That will be the last insult if she tries to send me a message she’s praying for me. She should have reared a better son.
Do you believe in evil?
Do you?
I deal in death, that’s how I earn my bread and butter. Wallowing in the financial implications of suffering and demise, I shuffle the sheaves of paper, both tactile and electronic, that rustle the real-life certainty of not existing anymore. Working under a thick armour of mental self-preservation which expands with the continual observation of someone else’s misery, I muddle through and keep an even tone in my voice. I work in an emotional freezer for survival’s sake.
“What’s your name,” he asked.
“Laurel,” she whispered, ashamed–this was no proper introduction.
“Well, Laurel, would you like to see the two-headed chickens or the trapeze act in the big top?”
She looked down and whispered no thank you and hoped he would believe her.
Her soul, her psyche, her intuition screamed out against her very strong mind against the very thinness of ‘good.’ Her soul, her psyche, her intuition were parts of her that knew something was missing: being bad.
I regret none of my interactions with those of whom I have shared the gloom of tombs, dark empty spaces, sounds of voices from beyond the grave and the sudden awareness of being two in the room.
I’m left here to contemplate the deathlessness of this place because centuries from now, I’ll read about it.
We were told to die rather than get captured and they said it with all the sincerity of a man with a gun to his head.
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