An Ear for Crime

Hickory, dickory dock,

I selected the Hickory family. I had to choose the right one. There were several families with the surname Hickory in this city, in its suburbs. I drove and drove. So many days, so many nights. I scouted. Studied houses and yards patiently. Until I saw the ones with the clock. Right there in their backyard. I knew then. They were the ones.

The mouse ran up the clock.

It was the sundial in the backyard. The clock. I placed it against the wall which I knew had the best window for a stealth entrance. By then, I knew the Hickory family’s schedule. I knew when the kids went to bed. When the parents did. The rooms were all dark that night when I stood on the sundial and leaned against the wall, next to the pretty trellis. I used the glass cutter. I unlocked the window. I was in to do my business. I must say it all went beautifully. Not a whimper, not a pleading out of place.

The clock struck one,

They actually had a grandfather clock in there. Imagine that. I heard it strike one a.m. And people say there’s no such thing as fate. There was one Hickory left alive by then. Her eyes pleaded with me. Her mouth couldn’t. Not with that gag. I had recited the rhyme enough by then, that she must have known what was coming, what that sound from the downstairs clock meant. She must have known that it was time for me to leave. Finishing time. And so I did.

The mouse ran down!

I went out the way I came in. Down to the clock and off through the backyard, racing into the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then through dark neighboring yards. My car was parked several streets away, where it would not arouse suspicion. I must say I was pleased with the way it all went down. It was the night of the new moon. The cool dark of that night on my skin felt so nice. Thank You, Moon. It took everything I had not to steal peeks at the videos I had recorded of the Hickorys. Such fun we all had. But I waited until I got home.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The obituaries for the Hickory family were sanitized. The news stories splashed across the front pages, and all over the airwaves and internet, were more sensationalized. Television’s talking heads were fascinated by the murders. They loved that I had left the nursery rhyme behind. They loved that I had left a sprung mouse-trap on each of their bodies. That sort of thing plays well in the tabloids.

But not all the details were released. The police like to hold some gruesome facts back. I get it. They have to play the hand they’re dealt. They have to hold those cards close. To see who knows what. So the darling public didn’t get to learn that the dearly departed indeed showed signs that a mouse had visited. None of the news stories mentioned the gnawing.

For those following my work in the press, they’ll have other rhyme crimes to read about in the near future. Unfortunately, some will be discovered out of sequence. There’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that old battle-axe who writes those letters to the editor constantly. I finished that one months ago. But Mary has yet to return to her gardening . Come spring, when she finally gets back to tending her silver bells and cockle shells, she should find them. I mean those pretty maids all in a row.

I hope she writes a letter to the editor about that one.

A Piece of Paper

The piece of paper with a child's crayon drawing on it goes blowing down a winter street. It cannot decide whether its drawing, the child's world, is on it or in it. The landscape with periwinkle wraps and rouge people. American Indians doing their laundry in the sky. Some such. Oh, and chimney smoke. Always that. Blue grey squiggles of autumn rising over the simple house. This landscape with lightweight people wraps around your ankle a moment, not long enough to bend down and take it, not long enough to have it, and then it continues skipping the air down the street. Strange that the trees you see lining this long street at such correct intervals are all anonymous but not random. The branches of these trees are the secret home of this drawing.

The Returns

A man walked into a sterilized room and noticed it was filled with a bunch of returned suicides. They had been arranged in a rough circle (which primitive superstition asserts is the opposite, talismanic shape to suicide's unbounded anti-circle). They were all sitting on fold-out metal chairs. All the chairs were one-size-fits-all. That is how suicide is, thought the man. The chairs looked as provisional as life felt to the returned suicides. The returns were all ages, all sizes, all colors and creeds. They had all tried to buy the farm, but their eternal mortgage had fallen through. They were here to explain but not apologize, a tightrope act. Now it was going to be something like credit counseling. There would be condescension masquerading as love or at least civility. Some would later decide to save themselves or others. They would become bankers of life. Others would bide their time, visualizing isolated tree branches the way some have porn films playing in their heads all day. No sooner had the man entered the room than he announced himself as conductor. He showed the returned suicides a small baton. He smiled at the string section and they all jumped out the nearest window, en masse. 

The Plant

     My mother's closest relationship when she died was with a plant.

     What can I say? She was a weird woman. And she was old. Old enough to have crotchets, eccentric ideas. I urged her to explore the possibility of a pet, the warmth and personality such a spirit might bring to her apartment and her life. But she insisted the plant was better than any cat or dog. And it was much less work. I say "plant," because when I first saw the green tropical thing in her digs, it wasn't even as tall as I am. It barely came up to my waist.

       Over the years, it grew much larger. Maybe I shouldn't say "plant." Perhaps I should call it what it is: a tree. Some sort of exotic palm tree. It did cut a somewhat different silhouette. If I speak candidly, there was always something about it that I found a little unsavory. I almost used the word "uncanny." What was I thinking? How can a tree be uncanny?  But if you had seen some of the things I had seen! The way she would throw her arms around that tree and whisper in the place where you might expect there to be ears. The way I would see her tip her drinks (Mother loved alcohol) into the plant's pot, as if she were sharing sips with a lover.

        "Won't that kill your beloved?" I would ask.

           "Hardly! She drinks more than I do, the lush," she giggled.

            Crazy old women. You just don't argue with them.

        My mother and I had our difficulties. She thought I didn't see her enough. She called fairly constantly, sometimes several times a day and even at night. I always reminded myself that a widow's lot can be hard. This wasn't easy on Natasha. Natasha is much younger than I am. Perhaps that is what is responsible for the imbalance of power in our relationship. Or maybe it is just N.'s somewhat overpowering spirit.

      Initially, N. played polite during these barrages of calls and exchanged a few perfunctory sentences with Mother before handing me the phone. But it wasn't long until she was answering the phone without saying a word, marching it directly to me, letting Mother guess correctly on the other end at what was happening: a freeze-out. But this was fine with Mother, since there was no love lost on her end for N., whom she considered a gold-digging (silver-digging? aluminum-digging?) wastrel.

         When Mother died suddenly, I was saddened, of course, but I would be lying if I said I didn't anticipate a warming between N. and me, a renaissance of increased goodwill and more charitable feelings, if you will.

            But there was a hitch.

            Mother's estate was rather hefty and she had been quite generous with me, her favorite son (if I am allowed to speak candidly). There was a proviso in her will, a ridiculous proviso, that I must "adopt" her beloved plant. Not legally adopt it. Nothing that crazy. But I must take it. Her tree, which had occupied the very center of her living room, like a performer in a nightclub, was now to be, perforce, relocated to our apartment.

           I looked at the attorney and said, "You're joking, of course."

       He explained that it was no joke. He was required to visit my dwelling to make sure the plant had indeed been relocated before the arrangements could be finalized for the disbursement of assets.

             N. sighed heavily at the news but we did what was required of us. We hired a moving company and soon Mother's beloved palm tree was ensconced in our living room. Its top fronds found themselves crowding up into our much lower ceiling. N. suggested we pick up some shears and "hack the shit out of it."

              So this is what we planned to do.

              Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a strange turn.

               While we were cruising with our shopping cart down the ridiculously wide aisles of the hardware warehouse where we hoped to find shears, a ridiculously handsome, ridiculously young man accosted us. He looked like the sort of chap you'd see on an afternoon soap, dark featured and oh-so-poised.

                He asserted that he was N.'s lover (he had actually followed us to the store in his hybrid, imagine!) and that they were to begin a life together anew. She had promised him. I laughed in his face. Then I saw N's sheepish face.

                She left HOMEWORLD with the twenty-five year old that night, climbed into his hybrid like a tall, displaced princess in a very poorly-written fairy tale, and I rarely saw her again after that.

                 I might have thought briefly about killing myself, but I no longer was in the mood to kill mother's beloved friend.

                                                    *

              I was alone for a few weeks, drinking again. But only for a few weeks, I promised myself. I remembered to share my screwdrivers and other cocktails with Mother's alcoholic tree. It did seem to perk up her leaves even more.

              Why did I say her leaves just now?

                Well, it's hard to tell you this part. It's hard to tell you that I began to see shadows around the tree when the room was dark, when I sat there all alone, sinking into the ugly black couch whose upholstery was always too much like melting butter for my taste. No support at all for a man. That was N.'s choice.

                 True, I was drunk. But I began to see feminine forms, voluptuous shapes, shadow breasts and legs turning. Dark legs, dark arms. Never did I see a face. Just this....woman shape.

                   Whenever I would jump up and switch on the light suddenly, trying to catch her, I would just laugh.

                It was nothing more than a palm tree. And I was a pitiful drunk.

                    I drank on. Once I went over and hugged her in the darkness. I pressed my body against her. I was hard. I heard a moaning. A satisfaction coming from her. My lips slobbered on her trunk. My hand found a wetness. A sort of wet bole. You've surely seen a bole on a tree before that looked like a woman's secret source. You've had to have wondered. When you were a young man. I didn't understand it. Not one bit.

                      And then Natasha came back.

                                                         *


            Natasha came home one night and just flipped on the light switch in my bedroom, found me passed-out drunk. She threw the bottle off our balcony. I heard the crash. She was shameless. She wanted to be taken back with absolute impunity. She took on the role of my savior. With a straight-face. I agreed immediately.

                 She looked at the tree with even more disdain now. She gave me to understand right away that the tree had to go. The lawyer was not going to come back and "check up" on us. He had as much as winked at us and said, "What you do later with that tree is your own business." Natasha had flashed him a grateful smile then. She really hated Mother.

                     So I came home from work one day soon after that and the palm had been lugged out onto the balcony. It was snowing out there. I came in carrying the groceries and set them down where I stood, just inside the front door. Somehow it bothered me so much. And how had she gotten that heavy pot out there? No way on earth she had done it by herself. Could it have been a strapping twenty-five-year-old who had given her the necessary assistance?

                    And there was the matter of my new inheritance. Was it really the fact that her young lover was "impossible" (her word) or was it that he was "practical" (my word)?

                     As the snow continued to become denser and denser throughout that evening, as Natasha and I sat there watching television together like two pilots on a long distance flight, I couldn't help stealing glances at her. By her, I mean the palm. She was barely visible in the white-out now as a squall whipped through our city.

                      Natasha grew furious at me for stealing glances at the plant, for making comments about the brutal weather.

                     "Don't you realize that tree is your Mother? She's in there, somehow. It's the last stranglehold she has on you. And you're...tree-whipped! It's me or her!"

                       People who look like models can generally get away with murder. But I had had a bad feeling, a hunch about Natasha for months now, and our breakup-makeup thing had not done the work of breaking a bad union and then resoldering it. I tersely explained that we were through.

                            N. packed what little of her things she had brought back to our apartment and left within the hour. She showed her usual degree of emotion. Think negative numbers.

                              My first act was to go out on the balcony and drag the palm back into the center of the living room. My living room now. Or should I say our living room still. The tree had been good company in N's absence.

                                                               *

                        I did go on one more brief bender. I did take a few days of vacation from work. But I told myself I was grieving the real loss of Natasha this time. The final goodbye.


                                                             *

                         One morning, after a night of heavy indulgence, I did wake up with that tree in bed with me. I was naked. Was the tree naked too? Aren't trees always naked? I didn't even open my eyes. I was listening to the whisper coming from her leaves. I remained pleasantly blind as a newborn kitten. I told her I wish I could take her to a tropical island, that we could have a getaway vacation together. But I just couldn't see her getting on a plane. We had a special kind of love, one that would work best on a desert isle, perhaps. I stuck my naked feet in her pot of soil and dug my toes in. It made me giggle like a schoolboy who has finally bedded his first crush in her parents' house. The humus was wet and gave nicely. I had nowhere to be for days and it was so comfortable, so real. So real. The earth is one sexy mother, isn't it? 

Plus

      For honesty's sake, it is better to tell your life story when you are tired.

      For the ultimate in honesty, it is best to tell your life story when you are dead.

                                                 *

      Leon was finishing up in hospice. He was not afraid to die, for he was tired beyond fear. He was obscenely old. He was alone in the world. He had, in fact, detached himself from the existence of his large, globous body entirely, except for when this corpus-soon-to-be-corpse managed to sneak a pointlessly punitive message of pain, a sort of ridiculous holler, an idiotic yahoo, through his pharmacological defense shields, which were tended not quite assiduously enough  by the not quite beneficent but nevertheless smiling and amiable nurses. The chief weapon in that arsenal, the one which deployed the shield, which protected  floating being from actually being here, was morphine. Morphine, that king of drugs, the king of no fucks given today, Ma'am.

      Leon stared at a little bouquet of flowers that had appeared while he was sleeping, which had suddenly materialized on what he liked to think of as the "floating table," that little service station on casters. The table floated like a ballerina. It was Ginger Rogers to any nurse's Fred Astaire. This bouquet came from nobody he knew. It wasn't for Leon. Rather it had been purloined, Leon intuited, from a nearby room in the hospice where someone had just checked out in that final way. Someone had checked out to go check into that dark hotel below our feet. The hotel of infinite capacity.  Some nurse, probably Jim, had rehomed these flowers. Probably the nurse thought he had repurposed kindness. But the flowers had merely moved from a room of the dead to a room of the dying. To say what, really? What is it that we imagine a gift of flowers says to the moribund or the dead? Leon remembered archeologists giving accounts of finding flowers (ancient pollen) in Paleolithic graves. So when we brought flowers into hospice rooms, when we decorated our funerals with them, we were being Neanderthals? We had come so far? Not at all in these moments. We had put no distance at all between us and that aporia the Neanderthals felt in the face of death. You might as well shoot Silly String as place a bouquet on a grave. It made Leon smile, despite his muzzy hopelessness.

      The man tried to hump himself up a little on his pillows and told himself he knew who it was that went this time. That silver-haired little smiling gamine across the hall. It must have been. He seemed to remember hearing a quiet commotion across the way in her room that morning. Asleep, he had known what it was and had known it was not worth rousing himself up into full consciousness. But now the memory returned. The sounds which had tweaked his consciousness. It had been nothing as loud as a resuscitation. What was her name? Oh yes, Barbara. How he hated when she hummed her way down the hall with her walker. And hummed her way back. But she was a nice little woman. No use denying that. He was sure he could remember the exact moment when she received the flowers, that cooing and excitement. A grandson had brought those, Leon knew, because the oversize adolescent had turned into his room by mistake at first, with the little bouquet in its vase palmed in one if his huge hands. He had redirected the peach-fuzz giant across the hall.

      Leon knew he was missing a clue here about the fragile woman. But it was irretrievable. It was meant to be irretrievable. Something about empathy, something about grieving even strangers. The morphine put the kibosh to that. Good.  It was good it was that way. Sleep in being awake and the sort of jigsaw sort of holds together.

      Leon stared at the flowers. Merciless beings. They were merciless because they were a puzzle. They were merciless because they were ferociously alive and determined to give meaning to color and form. In this late hour. Their own color and form. Or so they thought. Bother, bother, bother.. But they had already been snipped. They were in a plastic vase drinking water. They were in a hospice themselves. There were orange cups and cusps, pink labials and little dry white antennae. What a load of shit, to feel the vibrance and the engagement these things wanted with the man lying in the bed, waiting his turn. The vibrations they gave off.  But they wanted that engagement with anyone. They needed attention. They wanted a painter to see them. Obnoxious things. As bad as people, Leon thought. Or as good as them. Same difference. Bloom, attention.

       They were careful about  mirrors in the hospice. The staff discreetly hid them. There had to be full length ones, but they hung and hid on the dark sides of doors turned to walls. Leon knew the patients, clients, inmates--whatever the polite term was these days, he had forgotten--usually wanted to control the reckoning of their own reflection and all that it implied. One hobbled, one fell, one was often stooped if one was ambulatory at all. But then there were the funny cases. The ones who could have danced a jitterbug right up to the moment they went dark. Some were even young. Better not touch that with the mind. Isn't it funny how a thing like than can happen, Leon wondered. That sudden precipice. How you can think you're fine but be moments away? Then Leon giggled and suddenly died.

     A cerebral event. The nurse actually did nothing. She watched quietly from the doorway, calling no one. Though the machines were sounding a surprisingly polite alarm. There was no family to summon. No real alarm. She bit her thumb. At the nail.

      Leon didn't know she was there. She saw the man rolling over into it. She did the human thing then, approached and took his hand. His big hand covered in seborrheic keratoses, glued-down disgusting chocolate chips. Did he know she took his hand?

       No.

     

                                                                    *

     Suddenly, all the time in the world was there. It emerged from a beatific doorway that was somehow insanely wet.

      Leon lay on a large bed in a high-ceiling bedroom. A shadowy room protecting itself from a sunny afternoon. Dark blankets over long curtains over the tall windows. A vague insinuation of a city out there. So vague.

     Leon lay back and admired his voluptuous breasts.

     I am this way forever, Leon knew. He was right.

      His lover entered the room then. It was the male corollary of the tigress Leon had become. Everything was to be given. There was fruit in the bed.

       He entered the lovemaking from the other side. He realized instantly he had missed out his entire life. That he could not be entered in this way. It was criminal but he had not known.  But now it was here. Searing pleasure.

         The man making love to him did not look like him. But he knew it was him inside there. They must be the same.

          Here, here, here, his body said. Her body said. There, there, yes there, his body said.

          They were enfolded in a swath of light, for that is what this sort of living is.

            The tongue of flame is what he would remember and remembering, Leon knew, was now forever.

                                    *

         He was a dog in the night. Leon was on all fours, a black dog, trotting through the darkness, drinking from puddles. He drank the moon from puddles. It tasted so good.

        What is there in a dog's mind that is wrong?

        Well, there were shadows that teased, and the smells were infinite! There were threats and promises and worries. He noticed he still had his breasts. His voluptuous human breasts somehow seemed natural on the underside of his dog body.

           He would deliver them somewhere.

          His lover was far behind him now, Leon knew, down at the end of the longest street ever. It was the man in the apartment who had just taught him everything there is within his body, the power of surrender.

           Leon ran forward. The man would remain forever at the end of the long street, running towards the black dog. The distance between them would elongate infinitely. It was a beautiful thing. It was like a violin string that could go around the circumference of the world while being played. No worries.

           Leon arrived at an opening in the earth. It was like a cave but it went down.

            He wagged his thick black tail.

             He went down.

     
                                   *

        Going down the slope of the cave, Leon realized how much smaller he had become. He had six legs, not four. He was small but he was immense within himself. He was still the exact size of the universe, whether he was a voluptuous woman, a black dog or the thing he was now.  He was inside the mind of an ant. It was all armor, that head. He had mandibles and a skull of some strange shell. But it was comfortable. Designed for comfort. Ergonomic. Home.  It was like waking up as the moon and knowing you were the moon.

             Leon was slowing down. His body had antifreeze in it. Some ants behind him were closing the entrance to the cave (or anthill) now. Closing the cold out. They were doing such a great job. He felt the tender ministrations as if they were hands touching his body, setting it aright. As if it were a mother tucking him in.

              He approached a group of brethren ants. They were all touching their antennae to each other, slowly. They were closing in a circle. The antifreeze was doing its work. The bodies were sealing up from the inside. Winter was moving over the anthill. He knew he was safe though he heard the wind. He felt so lucky.

             What if some of us were left outside, Leon worried. He asked the other ants in ant language (he was quite fluent) whether they should form a rescue party, unseal the cave, the anthill, and search for any stragglers.

           Stragglers will be fine, the other ants said in ant unison.

           This could be translated, Leon knew, as ant death is not real; only ant language is real. Do not betray this moment.

             Leon had to agree with this sentiment. He realized his empathy for the earth outside and the stragglers left for the winter blades of ice to shear away was a primitive holdover from the time before ant-consciousness had made everything all right again. Evolution had been running backwards all this time. It was the higher-ups, the ones who stepped on us, who had it all wrong. To pity them, Leon thought, is useless.

      So he slept instead in the bosom of his siblings, who had been waiting for him.

The Sound of a Cat Getting Shot

The sound of a cat getting shot before morning. Let me give you a paragraph on that. I will need thousands of baths and it won't be enough. See, it cried out. As if the death was not instantaneous, no, not as if, the death was not instantaneous. Somehow (the bullet must have entered the hindquarters) the body could be a vortex of consciousness, so the pain was allowed to enter the universe. The pain beat the annihilation, the void, not only to the nerves but the neurons. And I hear all these things as living textures, as if this were my own skin grown in a Petri dish, somehow still a phantom limbness in a little glass vessel. The space tumbles over and over itself. The horror. Though I know he had a gun, I ran out into the night of the morning. I stood there in my pajama bottoms and accused in my blindness. I wanted the fucker to know there had been a witness. The witness was an ear. I wished him dead so bad. The cat lived out there and was harmless. But the cat also belonged to some kids. He hid, the fucker. Somewhere in the green that sheltered in darkness, he pulled back. I couldn't find the animal. The horror if it lived. This is all paper, see, everything alive becomes paper. I went back in and murdered him. Over and over I murder him. Then I heard the car start up. The awful sounds of that engine that's nearly dead. It sounds like a car engine made out of tin foil. He drove off way too fast. He shot the cat because of the sound his car engine makes. Also, he's white and they're black, the kids, the cat is black. I will do drawing after drawing, the sound of the cat getting shot.  As I draw, I will relish the murder, his scrawny neck crushed between my two hands like melting tangerines.

That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz

A Man Woke Up

A man woke up holding his wife's hand. He hadn't opened his eyes yet, but he was contemplating asking her for his favorite breakfast. Or was it his turn to make breakfast? He felt waking up was harder than usual that morning. Instead of using his eyes, he kept them closed and let his fingers explore his love's dainty hand. His fingers "read" the unusual setting of the wedding ring they had spent such a great deal of time picking out, designing together. The baby must still be asleep, he thought. He smiled at the quietness of the moment with his eyes still shut. It was nice. His fingers lingered on that strange asymmetry of diamonds.  But she was not in bed with him. Why was she standing next to his bed? As he continued to trace a curve in the ring's setting, a harp of diamonds, he opened his eyes

When he did see her, confusion came flooding in.  His wife was many years younger. She was smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. How could she be younger? His mind briefly entertained the ridiculous notion that he had traveled back in time. He searched his mind for what had happened the previous night, before he had gone to sleep, but there was nothing. It was a blank. This nothing disturbed him greatly. He felt a chasm of dread opening up. He spoke his wife's name and watched as one of the tears which had gathered into her eyes made its escape and traveled down her lovely, impossibly young face.

He tried to rise to comfort her, but something was holding him in the bed. He saw the machines then, he heard one of them, he realized where he was. It was a hospital room and a cheerless one.

"Dad, I'm Rebecca," the woman he had at first seen as a younger version of his wife sobbed as she bent over to kiss him on the forehead. "Mom's gone. You've been in a coma for nineteen years. She died in the auto accident. You survived, but they weren't sure if you would ever wake up. I told them you would. Eventually. I promised myself." A smile broke through her lovely face. Her mother's face.

He saw the ring on her hand as it came up to caress his face. It was indeed his wife's ring.

The Thing

The thing about Rick is that he didn't save the girl in the Popeyes. Sometimes he would say "woman." Was she a girl or a woman? Who knows, does it matter? She was seventeen. Or nineteen. I forget. It was an odd number. I remember that. Strange the way facts have jagged edges like that. You can almost just seize them sometimes.

He was standing in line trying to decide whether to order the three piece chicken meal or the five piece when the guy came through the front door with the gun already out. He was screaming at her, right at her,the girl behind the counter, as he flew across the room of multifarious screams, the people running towards and out the side doors, even the front door the young man had just come through, anywhere they could escape. Dumber or more desperate, unthinking people ran into the bathrooms.

The way Rick told the story he didn't run. He just froze there at his place in line which was no longer a place in line since everyone had gone in an instant. It was as if the man with the pistol, the furious man, couldn't see Rick. He only had murderous eyes for the girl or woman behind the counter. She just froze too. Standing there in the horrible uniform that was supposed to just be a temporary indignity. Now it was how she would disappear.  Rick said there was a resigned look in her eyes. He saw that even in those few moments. Why didn't she run? Scream? Do something? He often asked us this. He knew there was no answer. Maybe she was preparing to reason with him. Maybe she just knew.

It was the usual story of love (or something someone considered love) gone wrong. The moment for Rick to have acted was a very brief moment indeed. The bullet in the face followed immediately after the few short sentences, the reading of the charges against her monstrous heart. And she was destroyed, shattered, gone from view down behind the stainless counter. Though Rick saw the parts of her on the Popeyes menu board he had just been studying. Brain tissue slid down over the bright images of fried chicken, obeying the dictates of gravity, which always has a simple and well-defined job to do.

The man turned and ran after making one more declarative statement. "I TOLD you," he said. To no one. To the air. He said it as if she was still a sentient thing, a cloud of senses inside a body standing behind a counter. She wasn't. She wasn't any longer. And then he ran out the door into the snow coming down. He was apprehended three days later. He might be free by now. Who knows. It's been a decent amount of time.

Rick was drunk. Rick was high. We reminded him of these things. We said he couldn't have processed it quickly enough and he couldn't have known what would happen in those few short seconds after the man entered the Popeyes. Many lunatics wave guns around and it all ends relatively well. No bloodshed. It was a metaphysics problem, irresoluble as these things are, and we tried to get Rick to understand that. We were his friends. It could get exhausting. The scenario was revisited so many times between us all. We tried to listen.

It turned out okay because Rick later shot himself. He shot himself in the head. So, he explained, there would be a karmic canceling out. The girl in the Popeyes would somehow be given this absolute love offering, this admission that her life ended way too young for the universe to ever make sense again, for Rick ever to be at peace again. And Rick was all about peace; he was easygoing. His life had been a mellow, slow, drawn-out party. He had served a hitch in the army, but it had been uneventful. He had two divorces under his belt, but he remained friends with both exes. He could have probably gone the distance and been one of the lucky ones, if only he had not been hungry for fried chicken on that February afternoon, at just that hour. Seeing that young girl taken out somehow took him out. He was guiltless. But something in his brain would not let him see that.

Rick had explained to everyone that he had inoperable brain cancer, so everyone decided to go on this death trip with Rick to varying degrees. I mean he had announced his suicide. He was going to go off into the woods he loved and end it there. Those are the woods where he always went on "hunting trips" that were thinly-disguised drug parties with some obligatory shooting of guns at phantom deer and phantom bears and whatever phantom else Rick and his mostly lowlife but reliable friends hallucinated. They would tell you they were "ghetto rednecks." They did fine in the city but they had a country side that came from somewhere. Rick had indeed grown up in the country but had adjusted very well to living in a shit part of town. He was non-judgmental. Sweet with the vulnerable ones. Tough with the ones who would slit your throat if you ever showed a moment of weakness. Where he lived you had to fight sometimes. Rick had fought. He might not have been the brightest guy, but he could find decent work most of the time. In between, he did riskier, sometimes stupid things. But even then he played fair with people and harmed no one. Everyone except the assholes liked Rick.

Rick went alone on his final trip. He had to make it clear where he would be so his body could be recovered and there was no problem. A friend even lent him his cabin for this. He didn't want it to be a rental, some stranger's place. That wouldn't be fair. The friend would call 911 at the appropriate time and act clueless, explain his worries about his "severely depressed friend." And then things would be taken care of by strangers who had no tender feelings for Rick. It all made sense.

Rick repeatedly talked about how his brain cancer was somehow the karmic result of the incident in the Popeyes all those years ago. It wasn't some dead girl seeking vengeance. He wasn't superstitious like that. The constant nightmares weren't like that. It was just the universal balance. It was just something he could not process away. We told him he was wrong. But he wanted to keep this belief. If it somehow gave him a sense of peace, who were we to argue with the insanity of the idea?

Except Rick's cancer wasn't a karmic balancing out. It wasn't even cancer.

We learned from Rick's brother six months after his death by self-inflicted gunshot in the woods that Rick never had inoperable brain cancer. He didn't have brain cancer or any form of cancer at all. It was true he had been spending excessive amounts of time in the hospital, but it was for the treatment of a variety of chronic ailments, none of them fatal, and severe psychiatric problems, including PTSD. None of us were following the cancer narrative that closely since Rick wouldn't allow us to "dwell on it." He had never been a liar, so everyone just believed it all.

And Rick had exhibited the sort of symptoms you expected of someone with a brain tumor. He had serious memory lapses. He was often greatly confused. He needed shepherding. Later, we learned this was probably his severe mental illness and declining state of mind, coupled with the serious battery of psychotherapeutic meds Rick was taking (and probably abusing).

His friends felt horribly hoodwinked for having taking this death trip with Rick. There had been farewell parties, sexy "going away" parties. Girls had offered their favors, some from tender hearts and some (we suspected) for more lurid reasons. Does it turn some girls on to do a guy they know will soon be six feet under? Do they feel the way those hands linger on them and how those hands seem to know those breasts are among the last breasts on earth they will ever caress?  Did Rick's tongue lap the honey with special, mortal ardor? He gave us all strange thoughts. He never made it out of his forties and that makes you think. You expect to make it out of the forties, at least. Everyone does.

You look back at a guy like that. You look back at a guy with bad luck like that.

The Popeyes is still there in the worst part of town. I'm guessing no one who works in that shithole knows a girl was dropped behind that counter. This is a whole other generation. Sometimes they'll vacate a place like that. They always do if it's a massacre. Or the curse of the memory of the deed will do the place in. But this one's still going. It's been remodeled a few times. It serves the needs of one of the poorer neighborhoods. The projects is right across the street. I'm guessing there was some discussion, but hunger and need won out. There's no grocery stores for miles. You can walk there if you don't have a car.

Actually, a man was driven right over and dragged by a car piloted by a junior congressman. less than a block from the front door of that Popeyes. This was in the middle of the night, a few years after that girl or woman was murdered. I could say her name but I won't. I don't know why I don't want to say.

There were no witnesses to that bloody dragging but the victim and the drunk congressman behind the wheel. A video camera in a downtown parking garage in the Capitol complex caught him examining and cleaning up his rental car. When he was arrested, he said he thought he had "hit a sign." The young man had been dragged twenty or thirty feet. He knew it was no sign.

I've never even been inside the Popeyes. I lost a taste for meat years ago and even when I did eat that nasty shit (I'm thinking now of hairs like pubic hairs on the skin of fried chicken) that greasy shit gave me the trots. I know people who swear by it. I"m sure people fall in love in there. They do that sort of thing everywhere. If I ever went in that place, I think I'd just leave my body. But you know they don't put a tombstone in the middle of a fried chicken shack. No, wait. Two tombstones.

Short Story

There was an oddly shaped piece of pink paper in the middle of the street. A man on his way to work walked over to examine it. He looked down from a "respectable distance," couldn't decide, and then proceeded on to the office. A young girl interrupted her skipping on her way to school to stand on the curb and scrutinize it from a safe distance. Two different cats going opposite directions sniffed at it when the sun was in two different places in the sky, but only its aura, really. Nobody could be quite sure. A squirrel hopping across the street like a cursor also stopped briefly and had a metaphysical encounter with the crumpled form. Then night came and it was left to be itself, blissful or cursed. It was pink. It was a pink slip.