A Body Between Them

A Body Between Them

Eric: “We draw a line in the sand. From here on in no one mentions this to anyone else. You all got that? From now on, this never happened. We get rid of it and it never happened.”

After scraping a line in the wet sand with his white trainers crusted with dirt, he stood on his own, the wind blowing through his scraggly hair, the grey clouds formed over a Midlands shore. A group of five people stood awkwardly on the other side of the line, the sound of the rhythmic waves puncturing any hope for true silence, where thoughts manifest themselves unhindered by the outside world. In front of them was the body.

Eric: “Well?” His weather-beaten face was screwed up, pulling a desperate expression. The grey evening gave these people no real light, their faces pale and gaunt and lifeless expressions plastered all over them. The face of the body before them still had his final emotion clinging to it – Rigour-mortis had kept his mouth forced open, statued in fear.

One of the five, a woman with her head down and tears dripping down her face in reverential silence, muttered, “We should phone the police Eric…”

Eric: “No! No one call the pigs! That is the last thing we want to do! This was not our fault! This was not my fault! But do you think they’ll believe that? Well?” He stood at his side of the line. Alone.

The grey filter in which we see theses people does not fade. There is no defining epiphany to make things clear, no divine answer. Instead six people stand uneasy with a body between them, until one of them, balding, his eyes stricken with fear said, “I’ve got a shovel in the back of my car.”

Then debate from the five.

“We can’t bury a body in the sand. It’s not deep enough…”

“There’s a forest a couple miles from here…”

“We can’t do this… this is insane…”

“We have to. Eric’s right… they’ll never believ…”

“We have to decide soon okay. We’re out in the open here…”

“We can’t know what the police’ll think…”

“What if somebody finds us out. Then we’re fucked…”

“No one needs to know. Not if we bury it deep enough..”

“The police…”

“How are they going to even know it was us. There’s no way they’ll…”

“I’ve seen CSI and shit like that. They’ll find prints and DNA and…”

“Not if it’s buried for long enough. Fingerprints fade. So does DNA…”

Eric: “This. Is the only way.”

They stood in silence once again. Eric moved towards the body, over his line, and raised it by the armpits. Eric: “Is somebody going to help me here. I can’t do this on my own.”

The two men of the group stepped forward and grabbed a leg each, raising the body off the ground completely. Eric: “Right Patrick, we’re using your car since you’ve got the shovel. You’ll have to get rid of it later.” He nodded towards the three girls. “One of you get Marie’s phone off ‘er. We’re not getting the pigs into this mess. Alright?”

One of the women moved towards Marie and began searching the pockets of her anorak until her mobile phone was found. Marie looked into the eyes of the complicit woman that stood in front of her and said, “Becky…. we can’t do this.”

Becky looked right back and weakly replied, “We have to.”

The men struggled up the beach, a body between them, the women following close behind. They reached the sand banks that led to the car park and the three men dropped the body, panting vociferously. Through struggled breaths, adjusting his glasses, the balding man said, “I didn’t think this would happen on a day-trip to Grimsby.”

Eric: “No one did.”

“I mean, it’s meant to be Britain’s second best beach. Who could have thought that he would just come at us and then… well then Marie would flip…”

Marie paced up to the balding man, her hands balled into fists, “How the bloody hell would you know what happened? That man attacked us! He attacked us for Christ’s sake…”

“So you claim…”

“So I claim? You don’t know what you’re talking about! Fuck you!” Marie pushed the man before her, knocking him off balance – knocking him onto the body. As his shirt connected with the blood-strewn green t-shirt of a dead man, he screamed. He ambled off the body, his glasses falling off his face and into the sand, his body shivering, his eyes watering, hands shaking, body shaking, heart pulsing, alive. He ran at Marie, “you fucking sick bitch!”, and grabbed her by the lapels of her shirt. Eric ran at him, pulling him forcefully off her and pushing him away. The sand sat silently underneath them, feeling the stances of six people and the dead weight of a body.

Eric: “Patrick, shut the fuck up and calm down. We’ve got work to do and we need to it as soon as possible. After this, you two don’t even have to talk. For now, let’s be civil. Go to your car and start the engine. Marie, you’ll take the weight Patrick was carrying. Now let’s hurry up.”

Patrick picked up his glasses then walked unsteadily away from the group with his face crimson. Then the body was again picked up for the journey to the car. They struggled, two women walking reluctantly beside them. Dead eyes were staring up at Eric. He was looking forward. Always looking forward. They reached the car and piled it into the boot with no help from Patrick – he was sitting in the drivers seat with his face still deep red, staring out of the front window at nothing in particular.

Eric shut the boot, an action that snapped Patrick out of his hypnotised glare, causing him to wind his window down and say, “I don’t think we’ll fit everyone in my car. It only seats five.”

Eric: “Someone can sit on someone else’s lap.”

Patrick spluttered and said, “But what if the police pull us over? I could get a fine for something like that you know!”

Eric: “Patrick, you have a dead body in your boot. If the pigs pull us over then a fine’s really not what you should be worrying about.”

Eric then turned to the other man, his mousy face silent and scared. Eric: “Are you alright Jez? You haven’t said anything since…”

“I’m fine,” He snapped, “Let’s get in the car.”

Eric: Yea. Sure. Let’s go.”

The group piled into Patrick’s car. Eric sat at the front. Eric: “How long ’til we get to the woods?”

Patrick muttered, “Fifteen minutes.”

The group in the car were silent. The car hummed, the occasional splutter of an unhealthy engine interrupting their brief respite. At regular intervals, Patrick looked into the rear-view mirror at Marie, his anger refusing to wane.

No solutions are set in stone. As a car with a body in its boot speeds towards a thick forest on a grey Grimsby evening, a group of police officers sit in their station watching television and drinking endless cups of tea. A group of MPs are sitting around a restaurant table discussing foreign policy. A gang of youths hang around on a street corner doing nothing in particular. People around the world are asleep, out drinking, working, living their lives. As a car with a body in its boot speeds towards a thick forest on a grey Grimsby evening, nothing is different. What people don’t know can’t hurt them. Still, the stress of the situation slowly turned these people’s collective cognitive functions into ones of paranoia, and when paranoia becomes an overwhelming facet of a human being no solutions are set in stone. No solutions make sense. A respite let this group of people think.

The car reached the edge of the forest and then stopped dead. Eric: “Why’ve you stopped the car? We can’t bury a body here Patrick.”

Patrick looked at Eric with sand stuck to his thick-rimmed glasses and said, “This isn’t right.”

Eric: “This isn’t right? What do you mean this isn’t right? You were the one boasting about your shovel ownership not forty minutes ago!”

Patrick took his hands off the steering wheel, “Well… I’ve had time to think now and I’ve changed my mind.”

Eric: “I don’t care any more. We’ve gone too far to not bury this. How are you going to explain the fact that we piled a body into your boot before contacting the pigs? Were you planning on telling them we were handily trying to deliver the body to save them a bit of effort? We’re gone if we don’t do this, especially now. We have to do this. This is already done. Now drive.”

No one else spoke. Patrick placed his hands back on the steering wheel. The car began to drive into the forest, trees that have lived for hundreds of years looming over it and rendering it a minuscule speck in the spectrum of time. Eventually, it drove off-road, over mud and grass with only its headlights aiding it in the murky darkness of nature. Then it stopped, its headlights still glaring. The group got out in silence, Eric making his way to the boot. He dragged the body out and dropped it onto the ground. Then he grabbed the shovel. Eric: “Let’s start digging.”

Patrick spoke up again, “I-I still don’t think this is right. This isn’t even our mess. We all saw what Marie did! We all saw her…”

Marie looked spitefully at Patrick and said, “It wasn’t just me Patrick and you know it. Still… we have to phone the police.”

Eric: “We don’t call them. We’re not going to.”

Jez suddenly sparked, “Who put you in charge exactly? What makes you such an expert at what’s right for us? We’re gonna get found out, whether we bury the body or not. Nothing stays buried forever Eric. This is Tell-tale Heart shit right here!”

Eric: “Jez, don’t you start as well. I don’t need this from you…”

“Oh piss off Eric.”, fumed Jez, “Just ’cause I don’t say much in the office, doesn’t mean I’m gonna put up with your bossy shit when the body of a man’s at stake. This has gone too far…”

Eric: “We can’t call ‘em. Just can’t. This wasn’t our fault…”

“This was all of our faults Eric,” Jez replied, “You can convince yourself otherwise but deep down you know the truth. We did this, all of us. We’re calling the police.”

Patrick looked at Becky and the other woman and said, “Are you two with us or Eric?”

Becky muttered, “You.” The other woman nodded in agreement, shivering in shock.

“Five against one. That’s it then. Your way’s gone Eric,” said Patrick, with a sneering finality in his tone.

Eric screamed, “No! No! This is not how this is going! Fuck you Patrick!”

“Oh what are you gonna do leader-man?”, exclaimed Patrick, “Shut us up? Kill more people?”

Eric’s eyes were going insane, “I’ll kill all of you if it means I don’t go to prison! I’m not going there again!”

Everyone’s expressions were suddenly glazed with confusion. Marie said, “What do you mean again?”

Jez: “Prison? I’ve known you for years. What haven’t you told me?”

Eric turned towards Jez in a darting frenzy, “That’s not important! You people don’t know ANYTHING! Nothing about me. NoTHING about each other. You’re not even sure who killed THIS FILTH! None of it, none of IT’S important! What’s important is are you still phoning the fucking pigs? WELL?”

Jez: “We’re still phoning them Eric. Put down the shovel. You’re crossing a line here man. Put down the shovel. Now.”

Eric stopped holding the shovel lazily and gripped it tight, a weapon at the ready, “FUCK you Jez! Fuck ALL of you! YOU’RE all dead!

Eric ran towards Patrick with his shovel raised above his head, screaming insanely. Jez sprinted towards Eric, tackling him to the ground. The shovel flew far away from Eric, onto the mud and the grass and the darkness that was faraway from the headlights of the car that was warm and safe and clean apart from the boot which reeked of the stench of death and guilt-ridden consciences that do the right thing eventually. Jez stayed sitting on Eric, no chance of escape, and said to Marie, “Call them now. Let’s get the truth over and done with.”

Marie got her phone from Becky and dialled 999.

Then it began to rain.

We know nothing.

The Anatomy Of A Gun – Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

‘HELL’

In a dank warehouse in downtown L.A. two men in dark grey suits sit on the bonnet of a black BMW, its windows tinted. A thin man in a torn pin-striped suit sits opposite the car with his hands bound to the back of a wooden chair. His face is covered in cuts and bruises and blood, some of it dried up and some of it sliding slowly down his pallid complexion before dripping onto his suit jacket or splashing onto the concrete floor; all of the blood will dry up in time. His once innocent blue eyes are now grey and lifeless. His head limply lolls downwards making his chin connect harshly with his breastplate. He is not breathing. He is dead. In a faraway corner of the warehouse a small incinerator sits patiently, orange flames crackling and spitting ferociously from within its metal grate like bulldogs being held at bay by their collars and chains.

The man on the left side of the bonnets face is pale. Dark bags tightly hug the bottom of his blue bloodshot eyes. He sits with a lit joint hanging from his lips. He stares solemnly at the body in the chair. He watches the blood drip-drip-drip down from the corpses face, the trails like new veins. He looks at the body and doesn’t see a person; the person in that body went somewhere else entirely.

The man on the right side of the bonnets face is tanned and distracted as he examines his fingernails and the blood that is trapped underneath them. He looks up at the body and says, “Well the incinerator looks hot enough. Might as well get to it, eh?”

“Yea… if you think so…” The pale faced man is not in the warehouse; He is somewhere else; He is with the person who used to be in that bloodied body opposite him.

The tanned man grabs the joint out of the pale man’s mouth and throws it to the ground. “For fuck’s sake Marcus, why d’you have to get stoned all the time? You’re spaced out man! We torture a guy for two days until he goes and dies on us, and the first thing you do is go and roll up and get high? Fuckin’ idiot man! The fire’s still burnin’ and we still got a body to put in it. Now snap the fuck out of it!”

“It’s… a coping mech-chanism,” whispers Marcus, his face barely registering the words that have just been spoken to him, “And don’t touch my joints when I’m smoking…Don’t fucking touch ‘em. It’s a coping mechanism man… It’s how I fucking cope…” Marcus whimpers and his whole body quivers, an intangible cold overcoming him.

“I’m… I’m sorry man.” The tanned man puts his arms around Marcus, embracing his shivering frame tightly. “I’m sorry man. I shouldn’t shout at you like that, I know. You cope man. You cope well.”

“I just… I keep seeing everyone else… everything else we’ve… they’re in my head Dean. All the time. Ghosts… they’re whispering to me Dean…”

“Shhh shhh shhh, I know man, I know. I hear them too.” Dean lightly kisses Marcus on the forehead, quelling his fears with a single action more comforting than words. “But we still got to do this man. He’s still got to go in the fire one piece at a time.”

Marcus pulls away from Dean’s hold, “Can’t we just put the whole body in this time? I don’t like seeing the cutting anymore…”

“You know we can’t man: smell’s too strong. Someone’ll come and rat us out. Anyway, incinerator’s too small here. Wouldn’t fit all of him in that thing. This is just how it’s got to be.”

Dean stands up from the bonnet and, adjusting his suit jacket on the journey, walks to the trunk of the car. Marcus pulls another joint out of his pocket and lights it up. He inhales and then lets the smoke drift out of his mouth with a long audible sigh. For a moment the smoke in front of his face obscures his full view of the body bound to the chair – Instead, a haze. Then the smoke disappears – fading into the light – and the body is still there, still not a hazy hallucination.

Dean comes back to the front of the car, walking with a steady stride towards the body, a hacksaw in his left hand, a bottle of peroxide and a cloth in his right. He reaches the body and places the peroxide and the cloth on the ground, the hacksaw still grasped firmly in his left.. He stares aimlessly for a moment, then turns to Marcus saying, “Y’know this suits pretty nice. We clean it up a bit and it’ll look brand fuckin’ new. You want it?”

“I’m not wearing a dead man’s suit. There are lines that I draw.”

“Fair enough… what about ebay then? We get a bit of extra cash and somebody else gets a new suit. Win win.”

“No! No fucking ebay! Just get rid of the body!”

“Ok, ok. I was kidding anyway. Just tryin’ to cheer y’up.”

“Don’t.”

“Alright. I’ll get started then, eh?”

Dean pulls up the dead body’s head by its greasy hair. The hacksaw is raised in the air. It comes down swiftly. Blood spurts out of the body’s neck, sprinkler systems making water arch and fall. “Fuckin’ veins man!”, exclaims Dean as blood splashes against his suit jacket, a final attack.

“That means his heart’s still beating. I guess he’s more alive than we thought.”

“Well he ain’t fuckin’ alive now!”

The blood flow dies down, then ceases. Marcus takes another drag from his joint. As more smoke slips from him he says, “One day… one day we’ll go to Hell for all that we’ve done.”

Dean hacks at the neck more, through bone, veins, vocal chords, muscle tissue, cartilage, his hands becoming more tainted with every movement.

Marcus leans back on the tinted car window, facing the tin roof of the warehouse, “Maybe we’re in Hell already. Af-ter we got back from guan… that place. We touch down on the landing pad and boom, we’re in Hell. Kicked out then Hell…”

Through the thyroid cartilage…

“That’s how we have to do what we have to do… The ghosts. Talking all the time. Their screams. It’s our punishment…”

Cricoid cartilage…

“Kicked out then Hell…Paradise lost for all our sins…”

Jugular veins…

“Torturers then tortured…with Earth…”

A severed head falls heavily to the floor like a stone. Dean sighs and says, “Done. One body part down. The fuck are you mutterin’ t’yourself?”

“…Nothing… just thinking.”

“Yea? Well you don’t gotta keep doing that just now. Come over here and throw that head in the incinerator. The fire’s still burnin’ brother and it’s gonna keep burnin’ ’til we’re done.”

“Yea… I know…”

Marcus walks up to the body and picks up the severed head by the hair. “We got everything we needed from him right?”

Dean nods, “Yep. Definitely. Jackson’ll get his moneys worth for info.”

Marcus looks the dead head in the eyes, “What did he say about some Simmon’s gang when we met him?”

“Fucked if I know. We probably should’ve asked him.”

“Yea… yea we probably should’ve.”

Marcus walk to the incinerator and carefully opens the grate. He looks deep into the flames but all he can see is burning. He throws the head into the fire and shuts the grate.

The smoke turns black.

Desperate…

We’re all so desperate, each and every one of us. Desperate for money; desperate for fame and the status and privilege that it gives us; desperate to be artists; to be the people we look up to; to become who we long to be. We intolerably reject our nine to five office jobs or senior sales assistant positions at Tescos. We work but we know – hope – that our aspirations, our dreams will be fulfilled. Some gleaming armoured patron will ride along and commission us. Some publisher will contact us. A talent scout will sign our band and we’ll be living a permanent life of debauched luxury. Ahhhh bliss.

But we all know that we’re kidding ourselves. Just as the truly great die young, the mediocre majority of the living population will remain ignored. The truth about most writers? They’ll probably end up contributing a few titbits to local publications or posting pieces on the internet, before giving up on the dream and working in administration. The truth about most bands? They’ll probably get a few gigs before drifting apart, leaving only bitter memories and forgotten friendships in their wake. This applies to all artistic walks of life; most of us fizzle out before we’ve even sparked.

And I’m not exempt from this – a lot of the time, people who write such musings are doing so to pass judgement on others. I am doing so simply because I am admitting my own failures – I just happen to believe that most people share the same failures as me. And yet it seems that no matter how bleak and almost self-defeatingly melodramatic my outlook on the creative faculties seems to be, I am still desperate to pursue my various aspirations just as much as everyone else.  Somewhere down the line I hope to be where I want to be. But like so many others, I allow pointless distractions to get in the way of my creative desires being fulfilled. I only write when I’m alone for fear of my scribblings being judged; I usually choose to listen to other peoples musical creations rather than learn the multitude of instruments that I have for myself; I’ll loop and loop around the same few websites for hours on end just to see if they’ve been updated. Life is so full of little distractions and I cannot tear myself away from them. I am a self-aware participant in my own folly.

But does that mean that the way to succeed in any type of artistry is seclusion? A life away from anything and everything else apart from ones art? Living in a world without all of the little distractions in life? It worked for James Joyce – a man who went into self-imposed exile and wrote some of the greatest literary works ever produced (’Ulysses’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ etc.). Phil Selway, drummer for ‘Radiohead’, once claimed that the band never listen to any music but their own during the creation of an album, and they are obviously extremely popular and, by most accounts, quite good. Too much attention and fame can easily ruin an artist’s creative flow – just look at J.D. Salinger or Quentin Tarantino. So surely seclusion is the only sure-fire way to allow truly uninhibited creative freedom?

On the other hand, the need for approval drives others to create. After all, most rock bands are created due to a want for fame and attention, but you wouldn’t call ‘The Beatles’, ‘Bowie’, or ‘The Smiths’ creatively vacuous. However, this desire for the affection of others can lead to underwhelming and impersonal pieces of work – the definition of product in the worst way possible. This is why the aforementioned rock band will usually pedal out the same type of album in a bid to keep fans happy. It’s why writers will insistently write in the same tired genre and why contemporary artists will whip out the same shock tactics. It’s why ‘Oasis’ can play the same tired tracks from their only two truly great albums and still get applause from diehard fans at gigs. It’s a product – neatly wrapped and eye pleasing, but ultimately hollow. The need for attention, it seems, can push people into the spotlight but it can’t be a sole sustainer of creative flourish.

However, seclusion and a need for attention aren’t the only situations in which something can be created. A lot of artists need society itself to allow their creative juices to flow. Authors like Bret Easton Ellis and George Orwell would be nowhere without views on society to put across. Even James Joyce’s work, a man in exile, focuses on his own life experiences in Dublin.

So it seems that what has allowed most of these artists to reach some sort of creative zenith, what binds them all together is the fact that they have lived full lives and drawn upon them. If this is how most ordinary people become celebrated artists then no wonder most people never become the creative geniuses that they think they should be: they burn out. They spend so much time wrapped up in themselves that they forget to live their own lives. They forget that great art can take years, not instants. Jack Kerouac spent several years of his life ‘On The Road’ before writing the novel of the same name. That novel took three weeks to write with the aid of a monumental coffee binge.  Years of living, such a short time to get it all down on paper. That is the creation of art; intense procrastination until you have something to say – until you have something beautiful to write, draw, sing about etcetera. That is art.

Getting back to my opening paragraph, we’re all so desperate, each and every one of us. Nowadays creative genius and fame are so finely intertwined, and fame has so many connotations of grandeur and opulent luxury that we want to get to those positions of admiration as quickly as possible. A lot of the time, people will become famous for seemingly no reason and that will only frustrate anyone who is in a creative field and is desperate for the fame they feel they deserve. This frustration might lead them to give up. But the road to creative respect and admiration is a long one and hard one for the mediocre majority. We must stay in our cocoons for a long time before we emerge as butterflies, as somebody cleverer than me probably once said. And yet we see other people achieving more and we find it difficult to accept that they probably worked hard to make their way up the ladder. They are on television and they are in films, living the life that you’re desperate to. We are desperate to get where we want to be as quickly as possible and it has led to some of the population doing some very cheap things in a bid for fame. The ‘X-Factors’ and the ‘Britain’s Got Talents’ of this world are proof enough of that. In the world today, we have replaced the need for genuine respect and admiration with the need to join the ranks of the fickle world of celebrity

To conclude, if you’re desperate to reach that peak of both genius and appreciation, then don’t be. Keep aspiring, keep working at it, keep living your life just like every other artist before you had to. Nothing will come of frustration except more frustration. True inspiration stems from living your life the way you see fit, not watching some flavour of the month on television being applauded because he thinks he’s in some way better than the rest of us commoners. This need for fame will stultify truly great creativity, and without creative genius the world would be a horribly banal place.

The Anatomy Of A Gun – Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

‘BACKGROUND CHECKS’

You wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch T.V. Go to sleep.

A copy and paste existence lived by a billion different, yet exactly the same, people.

All of that changes after you’ve had a gun pointed at your head.

The day started at 6am when I awoke in my bed with sweat dripping off me, my heart pounding through my chest. The nightmare that I had jerked myself awake from made the waking world seem like a forgiving place to be. It was one of those nightmares where you imagine yourself falling; Everyone’s had one but this was different.

It began with me plummeting from the blue sky towards this desert wasteland. The world was a blur as I fell through the air. The clouds above me rapidly felt like their distance was growing mercilessly. With every millisecond that passed I could feel the inevitability of death drawing nearer and nearer, but I wasn’t scared. Instead of reacting with perfectly human panic, I began to question why this was happening now. Why, when my life is essentially static, am I falling from grace so quickly? Why now, at this point in time, this juncture? If you do nothing in your life, is it your punishment to fall even faster than everyone else? Then the panic did kick in. I impotently tried to flap my arms up and down in an admittedly uninformed attempt at flight. The ground was now so close that I could clearly see the footprints of everyone else that had dared to tread on it before I had known that it even existed.

Then I hit the ground.

This would be the point in time when most peoples minds wouldn’t be able to take any more. The brain forces the body to wake itself up because the perception of death can induce so much panic that it’ll bring on a heart attack. Mind over matter and all that kind of thing. But like I said, this was different. When I hit the millions of tiny grains of sand that constituted a desert I didn’t die. Somehow I survived the impact of this thousand mile descent into the earth itself. But after I stood up – my clothes covered in specks of sand – the land was completely different. The light brown desert was gone, replaced by this grey dried-up carcass of a world. My green eyes watered up with tears of sadness at the sight of it. I decided that I couldn’t look at this dead world for much longer, so I decided to fall further. I fell through the grey ground into deeper, much deeper shades of black that enveloped everything I could ever know and every hope that I ever had of my own life and I fell more and more until nothing made sense any more and there was no light in my life and no other soul had fallen deeper than me and the dead world was non-existent because it wasn’t there any more, it was just gone, and then I woke up with sweat dripping off me, my heart pounding through my chest.

I lay in my bed considering what the dream might mean but didn’t manage to come up with any kind of tangible answer. I eventually decided to get up ten minutes earlier than I usually do. I jumped in the shower and allowed the warm water to ease me into another long slog of a day. After my shower, I dried myself off and picked the same grey suit that I wear every Monday out of the closet. Once I had put on the suit, I looked out of my open bedroom window for a few moments to see the New York City skyline that sat before my eyes, the usual symphony of cars and people flowing into my eardrums and waking up my drowsy head. I loved the view from my window. I’ve gotten through so many bouts of sadness just by peering out of it. To see the sun glisten off the glass fronts of skyscrapers and office blocks, seeing people hastily make there way to wherever they’re going; all of it just makes me realise how alive the world is. I stood by my window for a few more moments, then departed for my regular coffee shop down the road. It was this franchised place a couple of streets away called ‘Café Delicious!’.

I hated it there.

I hated everything about it. I hated the way that the sign out front desperately tried to give itself an air of grandeur by having these bold white fonts that were so businesslike, so unwelcoming. I loathed the way that every item on the menu had some foreign word in it to make it seem that little bit more continental and that this somehow justified the extortionate prices within. I despised how it was the epitome of the franchised outlet. I was disgusted by the way that the warm welcoming aroma of freshly ground coffee was mingled with the stale stench of coffee breath that radiated from the customers jabbering mouths. Oh, and the customers. Every one of them has pretensions spewing out of every orifice. If they’re not discussing the novel that they are definitely working on as loudly as possible, then they’re talking about the latest art house film they saw or the quasi-intellectual book that they definitely read in a single night. They probably think ‘McDonalds’ is a third world country.

But there was a reason that I came in here.

I walked up to the counter, which a woman in an unflattering dark green polo shirt and grey trousers stood behind. The name badge on her polo shirt read ‘Deborah’. She looked at me with a polite smile and greeted me with her usual phrase, “Welcome to Café Delicious! sir. What can I get you today?”

I smiled back at her – politely of course – and replied, “Just the usual again Deborah.”

She sighed and wearily said, “I know that, but if the management overhear me welcome anyone in a different way they might discipline me.”

I laughed mildly and, leaning over the mahogany counter, whispered, “I get it. Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul if you greet me differently next time.”

She smiled again, this time a friendly smile, and said, “Thanks. Venti black coffee and a croque monsieur panini coming up.”

A croque monsieur panini is two slices of glorified bread with melted ham and cheese as a filling. I hate the name but it does taste nice…

I walked away from the counter and went to sit in my regular seat to wait for my order.

That was when my reason came in to the café.

The reason with her shiny brunette hair down to her shoulders and her perfectly brown eyes. The reason with her black coat that was almost long enough to meet with her knee high leather boots, the gap between the two items of clothing making the tiniest section of her black opaque tights visible. The reason with her thin red lips and her perfectly defined cheekbones. The perfect reason to sit in a coffee shop you despise. The reasons name was Samantha Dresden.

She walked up to my table and took a seat, saying “Hey” with a warm smile as she did so.

I said hi back, subconsciously fixing my hair and straightening my suit jacket.

“So how’ve you been?” She asked, with slight concern noticeable in her voice.

I looked deeply into Samantha’s eyes and said,“Look Samantha, I’ve been wanting to apologise for a few days ago…”

“Oh don’t be silly. There’s no need to apologise. You’re having a rough time, what with you’re job at the bank being a bit shaky just now. I don’t want to hear you apologise. I just want to hear that you’re feeling better than the last time I saw you.”

The last time I spoke to Samantha was a little awkward. We sat at the same table of ‘Café Delicious!’ whilst I discussed all of my problems with her, before confessing my love to her sympathetic face through near tear-filled eyes. I assumed that she would pretend to forget that I had mentioned love of any sort for this conversation so I just replied, “Well…I’m feeling a little less… emotional than last time. The problems are still there, my jobs still kind of on the line, but I figured that that’s just the way things are at banks just now and there’s nothing much I can do about. Everyone’s in the same boat. Things are just the way they are. So yea, I guess I’m a bit better.”

I could see Samantha wasn’t really satisfied with my response, “Things are the way they are? That doesn’t sound better at all. It sounds more like you’ve given up. Like you’ve just got no control over your situation.”

“Well… I suppose that’s sort of true in a way.”

“Not at all! You can’t just free-fall and hope that someone’ll catch you. You’ve got to take control!”

Deborah quietly came over with my order, causing a relieving lull in Samantha’s little speech. I had heard variations of what she was saying from so many other people throughout my life – parents, teachers, lecturers, bosses – but it never really helped. I didn’t really have enough of an actual aspiration for it to matter. “I think I’ll just stick with where I am just now until things get better, if that’s okay with you.” I said, once Deborah had left the table.

Whilst I tucked into my croque monsieur panini and supped daintily on my boiling hot coffee, Samantha carried on talking about how I had to “take control” and “move on with my life”. I liked to think that if I did start to take control of my life and make a few changes here and there then I might be talking to Samantha as more than just a friend, but probably not.

The croque monsieur panini eventually disappeared down my gullet and the coffee eventually became cool enough to drink with vigour, and as Samantha talked the street outside became more alive with people and I realised that I had to get to work. So we politely went our separate ways and I felt a little pang of hurt that we didn’t even mention the fact that I had told her I loved her just a few days before. When you don’t do much with your life, thinking of a love that’s getting away is the worst thing in the world.

I reluctantly traipsed through the crowded and angular streets to get to work. Walking through New York isn’t like looking at it through a bedroom window. That symphony of cars and people ceases and turns into a cacophony. That hustle and bustle that looks so charming from above becomes an interminable rush that you can’t control. People pushing their way past you, their mobile phones permanently fixed to their ears, never noticing anyone else, bees buzzing around the hive, bees who think they’re in control: I should have been one of them. But instead I traipsed and I traipsed until I reached the ‘JKW Finance Group’ building on Wall Street where I worked.

My official job title is ‘Executive Financial Consultant’. In theory, this meant that I advised customers on how they should invest their hard-earned cash. In practice it meant that I got bawled at by numerous angry fat cat customers of the ‘JKW Finance Group’ everyday. You see, the ‘executive’ in my job title doesn’t describe me; it describes the level of clientèle that I have to deal with. As such, they think that they are better than me and treat me like shit. But… that’s just work.

When I reached my office, I was met by my secretary waiting obsequiously outside my door. “Morning sir.”, she said, handing me a post-it note, “Your appointments for today.”

I mournfully glanced at it and said, “Only one appointment again?”

“Surprisingly, nobody’s crying out for a financial consultant when they don’t have any money. If this economic downturn doesn’t get fixed soon, we’ll all be out of a job… Oh, and by the way, he’s blind so you’ll have to guide him in from the elevator.”

“Me? Why can’t you guide him in?”

She shrugged her shoulders, her obsequious pretence fading, and sighed, “I took the afternoon off. No clients, no work. You’ll just have to cope without me.”

Saying goodbye to her, I opened my office doors and took a seat at my desk, absent-mindedly pawing at a newtons cradle that sat upon it, occasionally glancing at a blank computer screen as if something interesting might happen on it, my mind defeated and my job pointless. I looked at the post-it note again. All I had to do for the day was talk to a new client called Mr. Reynolds and that wasn’t until 2:30pm. So I sat and I waited, doing nothing very much except thinking about how maybe I could ask my secretary to dinner but it would be best not to.

2:20pm came and I stood patiently outside of the elevator– not particularly politely, he wasn’t going to notice anyway – for Mr. Reynolds to arrive. I checked my watch, the hands ticking informatively away. Five minutes more till half past. For some reason I began to feel nervous about the customers arrival. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t get many clients.

2:30pm arrived and the doors of the elevator slowly slid open, revealing Mr. Reynolds to me. He was a lot tattier than I expected. He had on this long light brown trench coat – It looked like it might be the only thing he ever wore – and a brown trilby that shaded the dark sunglasses he wore. His face looked like it had taken a few beatings in its time; he had this messy looking cut on the left side of his face that looked as if it might need flicked his white cane onto the hard wooden corridor and stepped out of the elevator, it shutting swiftly behind him. “Ahhh right on time Mr. Reynolds.” I said, in the usual friendly tone I use for clients.

His head turned to where I was standing as he gruffly replied, “I’m never late. We will go into your office to discuss business.”

“Um, of course sir. If you’ll just come with me.” I linked arms with him and together we strode down the corridor to my office. Something unsettled me about the way that Mr. Reynolds walked. It wasn’t really like he needed my assistance at all. It was more like he was simply looking where he was going.

We arrived at my office and I ushered him into the chair opposite my desk, him staying solemnly silent the whole time. As I sat in my own chair, I said, “So Mr. Reynolds, what can I do for you today?”

“I understand you deal with one Mr. Derek Simmons.”, he growled, “Is that correct?”

“Uh… well yes that’s correct, but unfortunately I’m not really at liberty to discuss his account with you…”

“I want every piece of his financial background that you have on that little computer you’ve got there on your desk. Every investment, every business acquisition, every time he’s paid for a fucking sandwich at some shitty newspaper stand, everything, and I want it all put on a data stick and handed to me without any fuss or pain.”

Unable to speak for a moment, dumbstruck, I spluttered, “I’m sorry Mr. Reynolds but I don’t really appreciate your tone. As I’ve already stated to you, I’m not at liberty to hand out the information of any of my clients to you…”

“You see this cane I’m holding under your desk? It’s pointing directly at your left kneecap I think. This isn’t a cane, well not one for the blind anyway. It’s a gun. A little invention of mine. You see, the long pipe that looks like a cane actually has the exact same design as a a traditional aluminium suppressor, meaning not a soul would hear me blow your kneecap clean off. Not that they would anyway – I slipped rohypnol into the security personnel’s coffee machine over an hour ago. And you may not have noticed the little black box that sits directly underneath where my hand is holding the trigger. Well that’s where I keep my cartridges and where the firing mechanisms are. Clever stuff huh? I’d get into the more technical details but, yawn, I don’t want to bore you. I just want you to know that right now, as we’re talking, there’s a gun aimed point-blank at you. Now you’re going to give me what I want or I’m going to shoot you and it’s probably going to be very painful.”

I suddenly felt like I couldn’t control my own lungs, my breathing panicked and erratic. Plucking up the courage to speak, I said, “You’re not blind are you?”

Mr. Reynolds took off his glasses with his right hand and slipped them into his trench coat pocket, showing one bloodshot green eye and one eye simply not there at all, just missing.“Well, you’re half right.”, he muttered, with a bitter smile.

I gasped, adding shock and confusion to panic. Unable to talk; unable to move; unable to do anything at all.

“You’ve never had a gun pointed at you, have you?”, smirked Mr. Reynolds.

You are falling from the sky. Hitting the ground is an inevitability.

“N-n-no.” It was all I could say.

“I have. I’ve had more guns pointed at me than I can remember. The feel of cold steel pushed up against your cheek, digging into your cheekbone. That thought that you might die.”, he pushed the cane into my knee, making me jump, “That thought that the last thing you’ll feel is a bullet passing through your body, maybe cutting its journey short and just staying somewhere, anywhere inside of you. That feelin’ that you get when you think you’re going to die makes you more alive than at any other point in your sorry life. Best feelin’ in the world. What’s the password for your computer?”

“W-w-why are you doing this t-to me?”

At this question Mr. Reynolds stood up, a petulant rage filling his one eye, and pulling the cane gun up from under the table, aimed it squarely at the bridge of my nose, edging it closer and closer and closer in tiny increments. “You feelin’ it yet? You feelin’ alive and dead yet? If you don’t tell me the password to your fuckin’ shitty computer, you’ll only be feelin’ dead. That’s a promise from me to you. This isn’t worth your life. Just give me the password to the computer.”

The panic kicks in. You start to flap your arms up and down in an admittedly uninformed attempt at flight.

“Uh-Uh-Uh…”

“You stutter once more and I’m gonna shoot you anyway.”

I got my breath back and managed to say, “Okay. Okay, okay, I’ll put in the password…”

“Good boy.” Mr. Reynolds lowered the gun to my chest and came around to my side of the desk to look over my shoulder at the computer. With trembling hands I turned on the monitor and put in the password on the start-up screen. Whilst the screen loaded, we waited in silence. The only sound that could be heard was that of a clock on the wall, ticking and ticking and ticking away, my occasional heavy breath punctuating each movement of the second hand. A gun was pointed at my chest; A handmade gun. I was terrified but Mr. Reynolds was right; I had never felt so alive.

The desktop screen loaded, mercifully destroying the silence with the sound of Mr. Reynold’s voice, “Right. Now let’s get this business over with. Find Mr. Simmons files. Do it now.”

Clumsily I fumbled through directory after directory, desperately seeking out Mr. Simmons files before Mr. Reynolds became impatient and decided that I was disposable; he was now prodding the thin white barrel into my ribs. I typed quicker and quicker, clicked faster and faster, trying to stay alive in the most mundane way possible. The file opened and I said, “There. There it is.”

“Good.”, murmured Reynolds. He took over the keyboard with one hand, still pointing the gun at me, and began quickly peering through the transactions folder. Reynolds face suddenly became impetuous once again. He quickly skimmed through each and every file in Mr. Simmons folder, his face growing more confused and angry with each new piece of data he saw.“He’s clean… He’s actually fucking clean…Fuck!”, he turned his haggard face towards me, “Looks like I won’t be needing that data stick after all. Background checks are done. It’s time I left. Haven’t you had fun?”

I looked at him. Just looked, unable to reply. Mr. Reynolds carefully backed away from the desk, getting closer to the doors I had guided him through just ten minutes before. “Don’t forget I made you feel alive.”, He said, “And if you tell anyone about your little near-death experience, I’ll fucking kill you. Alright? Ah fuck it.”

Then you hit the ground.

I heard a low swish noise, but it was the searing pain in my left arm that confirmed he had shot me. I felt dizzy. The room spun as Mr. Reynolds shut the office door behind him. I think I saw him smile at me before replacing his sunglasses and leaving. I fell to the floor.

Then everything went black.

*******

The black coffee sat there on my usual table, steam rising, making its way into the air; becoming nothing but another invisible particle in a wash of methane and carbon dioxide and every other invisible poison on this planet. We don’t see it but it’s there. I sat slovenly with my left arm wrapped in a sling. I could feel the usual customers of ‘Café Delicious!’ eyeing me with suspicion. A sling meant something had happened to this man in the same business suit he had been wearing the day before. Maybe something terrible, they’ll think. Something unwelcome to people drinking their morning coffee. Something unwelcome to people who are used to the usual; used to the same, day-in day-out.

There was no croque monsieur panini on the table; I didn’t feel like eating.

Samantha came in to the coffee shop, and a look of utter shock struck her face when she saw me. She rushed over to our regular table and said, “My god! What happened to you?”

“Nothing…”

“What do you mean nothing! Your arms in a sling!”

I looked through her, past her, and said, “I got shot yesterday afternoon…”

She raised her hands to her mouth, “Oh my god…”

“Some guy came into my office looking for information on a client. I gave him what he wanted then he shot me.” I was surprised at how monotonous my voice sounded, like a drone repeating the lines he was told to verbatim.

Samantha’s hands drew away from her mouth and anxiously grasped at the table instead. “Are you okay? Are the police involved?”

“I woke up in the hospital and the police asked me questions. I didn’t tell them anything.”

“But, but why not? Don’t you want the man who shot you to be caught?”

“I don’t really care.”

Samantha let out a sharp shot of breath to illustrate how flabbergasted she was by my indifference. “How can you say that? This man shot you! You know that right?”

I kept looking past her, out of the window. I saw the streets become more alive with people. People rushing to wherever they were going. I didn’t know why they hurried, wanting so so much to be on time; it didn’t mean anything. They still didn’t feel alive. “You know when I was here this time this morning? I hated this place. Everything about it. I’ve been coming in here for god knows how long because you do. Simply because of that. This time yesterday morning I could fall away into your eyes. I could let them take me anywhere. I could listen to anything you had to say to me. It’s because I loved you…”

“Let’s not…”

“Oh don’t worry, I’m not going to labour the point. I know you don’t feel the same way. I just… yesterday I felt that. All of those emotions bubbling up inside of me, making it seem worth living. Now I… I feel nothing Samantha. I look at you and I feel nothing.” A few days ago, saying something like that would have made me cry. Instead I just sat there, waiting for a reply.

She looked confused.“Nothing? What do you mean? What happened to you yesterday?”

“I feel nothing. Nothing at all.” With that, I got up and walked somnambulant out of ‘Café Delicious!”. I could hear Samantha shouting after me but I didn’t care; I already knew where I was going next.

I arrived at the nearest gun store I could find close to my apartment. I didn’t need to look around. I requested the first gun I saw in the glass cabinet. Some grey handgun I didn’t look at the name of. It didn’t matter what it was called. Not for what I would be using it for.

I left the gun store and walked straight back to my apartment. As I made my way there I was shoved to and fro by pedestrians with their mobile phones permanently attached to their ears. Bees in the hive; I’ll never be one of them.

I reached my apartment and made a beeline for the bedroom. I looked out of the window that showed me the New York City skyline. It had no effect on me. It looked dead, gone. I sat down on the edge of the bed and loaded a single bullet into its chamber, fumbling with the cartridge for a while due to my sling. I calmly lifted my hand up and pointed the gun at the side of my head. And there it was, some sort of feeling again. That gun pressed up against my temple, its cold clean metal jutting into me. Every person and place and their hustle and bustle was gone, and it made me feel alive. I could hear Mr. Reynolds whispering those sweet nothings into my ear, “You feelin’ it yet? You feelin’ alive and dead yet?” My pulse raced. Beads of sweat began to exude from my forehead as I sat there, pressing the gun harder and harder into my temple. I felt terrified, alive, panicked, wonderful. I felt something. Something is always better than nothing. My hand shook. My finger was quivering on the trigger. I knew I couldn’t just hold a gun to my head forever. The side of my head was beginning to feel numb I was pushing the gun into it so hard. I couldn’t feel numb any more. I couldn’t ever feel numb ever again. I had to feel alive. I had to take control.

Then I pulled the trigger.

The Anatomy Of A Gun – Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

‘A JOB OFFER’

The bang of the ‘Smith and Wesson 1006′ firing loudly reverberates against the disused theatres walls as Reynold’s body falls to the floor in a crumpled heap. Whilst the blood slowly pools around Reynold’s lifeless corpse, the man in the trench coat stares at his gun in awe. He watches the smoke swirling from its barrel slowly make its way up to the spotlight before becoming invisible in its luminescence. He lightly strokes the gun, feeling the heat radiating from the beautiful silver chamber. For a single moment, the theatre and the corpse of Reynolds and the car outside that will have to be disposed of as quickly as possible, every tiny triviality of life and death and killing and hiding your secrets from the rest of the world, every little idiosyncrasy of every little problem fades into the darkness and all that is left is the man in the trench coat and his gun that is so small and has caused so much destruction. The denouement of the kill is always, relentlessly, just a facsimile of the last; another body on the ground whilst the man in the trench coat stares at his gun with his one bloodshot eye, fully fascinated by the life-ending power that he holds in his hand.

The darkness disappears as the contrast of life is turned back up and the theatre is filled with the funeral march slow sound of one set of hands clapping. The man in the trench coat rapidly swivels his entire body around one-hundred and eighty degrees and points his gun at the fire exit ten rows away where a pitch-black-suited man stands, applauding the show before him. The black-suited man, visibly old with a full head of bright white hair, stops clapping and, smiling a wicked smile, says, “Oh I do love the theatre. There’s just something about it that makes a man feel alive. Sorry, If that’s a slight cliché on my part. I never was very good with introductions. Then again, you don’t appear to have much of a predilection for people yourself so you probably understand my problem…”

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand.” replies the man in the trench coat, his weather beaten face visibly perturbed.

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you three. For one, I’m not here to kill you. If I wanted to, I could have had a hundred different men kill you in a hundred different places in a hundred different ways, but I don’t want that. I want you very much alive and well. For two, I’m worth far more to you alive than dead. That man – Reynolds, I believe you knew him as – how much money did you receive for killing him?”

The man in the trench coat warily replies, “Two-fifty.”

“Wow. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money to spend. It’s not very much to kill a man though. What had poor Mr. Reynolds done?”

“He made the mistake of thinking no one was watching.”

The old man sighs, then shakes his head and says, “Never a good mistake to make. One would have to be a fool to believe that no one is watching. It would be like believing that there are no repercussions to ones actions.”, At these words the old man in the black suits wicked smile turns to a grimace, then quickly back to a smile again, “Nevertheless, that’s still a poultry amount for a hired killer. As it happens, I have a few jobs that I’m willing to give you if you would be willing to take them. Well-paid jobs too. Think of that two-hundred and fifty thousand and triple it. All laundered cash with no links to anyone. What do you say?”

“Who are you?,” Asks the man in the trench coat, still firmly grasping his handgun.

“I’m a very successful man. I’m a man who wouldn’t usually come down here to ask you to do these jobs for me. Usually I would delegate the task to someone else but you were so hard to track down that I just had to meet you in person. You truly are an illusive figure. No files. No birth certificate. No police record. Not even a real name. You must be the only man in America whose managed to not leave any kind of discernible paper trail behind you. Just rumours and conjecture told in hushed tones in the most unholy dives imaginable. Just little pieces of information here and there to lead me to another place, then another and another and now here. I’m the man who was told a thousand and one times that I wouldn’t be able to find you unless you wanted to be found and yet here I am and here you are. That’s who I am.”

The man in the trench coat half-smiles, a little flattered, at the old man as he says, “That’s real nice and by all means well done, but I’m gonna need a name.”

The man in the fire exits smile once again falters, showing more wrinkles in his face, “Why do you need my name?”

“Background checks. Standard policy.”

They both stare at each other in silence for a few moments, a few pockets in time, the old man with a gun pointed at him, the man in the trench coat waiting for an answer, until a smile reappears on the black-suited man’s face and he says, “fair enough. I’ll play by your rules. Derek. Derek Simmons. If you’re interested in the contracts then you’ll be at my club, ‘Popescu’, in New York in exactly three weeks time. If you don’t show then I will assume you’re not interested and find someone else. But I know you won’t disappoint me like that.”, He nods his head and says, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I shall leave you to clear up this mess. I have other business to attend to.”

Derek Simmons turns to leave before the man in the trench coat barks, “Hey wait! You didn’t give me a third reason to not kill you.”

Derek laughs mildly and says, “You’re so arrogant that you only ever put one bullet in that gun and I believe that that is now firmly lodged in Mr. Reynold’s skull. Oh, and by the way, would it be possible for me to have a name? Something to call you by?”

The man in the trench coat instantly, coldly, replies, “No.”

*******

Sixteen miles away on the fourth story of a faceless grey multi-story parking lot, a thin man in his mid-twenties in a pin-striped suit is pacing up and down smoking a cigarette beside a blue SUV. With every journey he takes past the parked car and past it again, his face becomes more and more racked with concern. When he has smoked his cigarette down to its filter, he stops pacing and pulls a pack out of his trouser pocket. His hands shake so much that the pack falls onto the dirty ground and he is forced to drop onto his knees to retrieve it. He picks the red and white packet up and stands back up, his hands still quivering uncontrollably. The low rumbling sound of a car engine begins to softly echo around the parking lot, causing the nerves in the meagre man’s stomach to grow almost unbearably. The sound of the engine becomes louder with every passing moment, every tick of the clock, before the source becomes identifiable on the fourth floor as a black BMW, its windows tinted. The car drives up to the thin man and stops beside him with its engine still running. The back window slowly winds down revealing darkness inside. A man within the vehicle, merely a shadowy spectre to the eyes of the man in the pin-striped suit, says, “Get in the car.”

The thin man, his innocent blue eyes brimming with fear, stutters, “A-a-are you from the Simmons gang?”

The shadow within the car points a black handgun with a silencer attached to its end at the man and says, more forcefully this time, “Get in the car.”

The man reluctantly opens the car door and gets inside. Instantly, the black BMW begins moving again and leaves the fourth story of the multi-story parking lot. The sound of the engine slowly dissipates before disappearing completely, as if it had never been there at all.

The Anatomy Of A Gun: Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

‘A STEP BACK’

I get so bored sometimes. I mean, I know that’s no excuse for what I do. But then again, it’s not really meant to be an excuse. What I do is completely inexcusable within mainstream society. I see what I do plastered all over the news. Another victim. Another body fished from the river. Another corpse lying in an alleyway. Once a walking, talking, living, breathing, human being. A thousand thoughts running through their head at any given moment. Then, a shell. A bag of meat lying limp on the kerb. The news reporter on television always looks solemn when telling the story, as if people don’t die everyday. As if this human life was somehow important in the grand scheme of things. I seriously doubt that the hooker I killed and then dumped in the skip outside of some supermarket on the high street was really contributing to society in a big way. Or that the drunken homeless man I shot in the kneecaps and decapitated with a samurai sword was secretly developing a way to end famine. I don’t go around killing instigators of world peace or anything. Admittedly, those killings don’t make much of a stir on the televisions or newspapers. It’s the people higher up on the food chain that make my stories infamous.

The last piece of work I did got the most coverage. It was with this politician guy. This guy called Errol Merchant. Seriously, who wouldn’t vote for a guy with a name like that? It reeks of class. He looked the part too. He had this sneering face that made the working man feel just inadequate enough to vote for him. The class system hard at work there. A fancy name and classy look can get you anywhere. Why be a man of the people when you can be a man above the people? No matter how much of his checkered past was dragged out by the newspapers, he still got elected. And trust me, this fancy suit and arrogant face was just a mask hiding debauchery. Hookers, drugs, orgies, S&M. This guy did them all. So I figured he sort of deserved it, not that it mattered anyway. I was just looking for a challenge. A higher mountain to climb. It took three months of preparation before I reached the summit of his death. Three months of stalking and sneaking and figuring out everything he did and at what time and where and with whom. Three months of tireless work. I’m happy to tell you that it was three months well spent. On the third of July at 11pm I followed him to the red light district where he liked to indulge in the abuse of rent boys. I waited until he had picked his boy for the evening and followed them to this woodland clearing that Mr. Merchant always took his boys to. No lights were on apart from the one inside his car. No witnesses for what this scum bag politician was doing or for what I was about to. I lurked in the bushes and watched the politician and the rent boy. My car was parked a half a mile away. Not far enough for a slow escape, far away enough to not be linked to this.

I watched him as he forced himself onto the poor boy. The boy now definitely damaged goods. The boy now the perfect scapegoat for me. I heard the usual muffled scream from the car as Errol Merchant knocked out the now completely naked boy so that he could do what he wanted to him. One less witness for me to worry about. I slipped on a pair of black leather gloves and creeped up to the expensive black car. I crouched by the car door, waiting for the right time. Waiting for this poor kid to have more bruises. More of a motive. I heard the politician grumble and call the rent boy a piece of shit. I pulled out a ‘Colt Python’ handgun from my pocket. I chose the ‘Colt Python’ because it makes so much noise and I wanted to take advantage of the secluded area. I swiftly opened the car door and pointed the gun at Merchant, his cock hanging out of his zipper, brushing the unconscious boys bruised skin.

I didn’t want to say anything to this man. I felt genuinely repulsed by him. I hadn’t really felt such revulsion for a kill before. It was just a hobby to me. Some take up jogging, I kill people. The victim never really mattered. It was the build-up. The speech just before. The fear in their eyes as they realise what’s about to happen to them. That was all part of the fun. But I just wanted this over and done with. I gave him just enough time to see my face before I pulled the trigger. Blood exploded out of the back of his head, hitting the windscreen with a dry thud. The sound of the gun echoed so satisfyingly around the clearing. The fact that anyone could hear the bullet but no one did felt liberating and beautiful. Moments like that really make you feel free. A moment when no one is watching is the best thing in the world. The politicians breathless body dropped onto the unconscious boy as if in slow motion. The back of the politicians head was a mess. All brains and blood and hair mixed together. It fascinated me. I didn’t know if the rent boy was suffocating with the heavy body on top of him, but I also didn’t care very much. If my scapegoat was dead, then he was less likely to seem innocent. I handcuffed the politician and the boy together then turned on the headlights of the car so that someone knew that it was there. I placed the ‘Colt Python’ in the boys limp hand and then left.

The next day was majestic. My favourite headline in the paper was ‘Twisted Politicians Sex Game Gone Wrong – Fourteen Year Old Boy In Custody’. On television, every news programme was discussing the state of the nation and asking why we allow these sick perverts to run our country. Every news reporter looking solemn faced at their autocue, every panelist looking like they had a bad smell under their nose. Nobody claimed that it could be anyone else. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it might have been a set-up. It didn’t occur to anyone that it might just be a man bored with his normal life and his normal family who liked to kill things. Majestic.

A day after that I got a phone call. A phone call from a group of contract killers interested in my work. The man on the other end of the phone said, “Mr. Reynolds, we have a proposition for you. If you’re interested, go to the parking lot at the end of the street where we’ll have a man waiting for you.”

It was every persons dream: their hobby becoming their actual job. I hurriedly walked to the parking lot to find a man in a long brown trench coat with a brown hat on, like the detectives in those film noires from the fifties. He stood beside this scruffy looking white piece-of-shit car that had more rust than paint on it, his face shaded completely by the hat. He walked up to me and asked, “You Reynolds?”

“Yea.”

“Good.”

He pulled a metal rod from his brown sleeve and smacked me in the stomach with it. I fell to the ground winded, coughing my guts up, and heard him say, “I hope you like the theatre.”

Then everything went black.

Quotes

Very short blog today due to working on something else that is taking a long time. Just a little quote that I liked about writing from ‘On The Road’ :

“Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict”

And here is another quote from ‘Less Than Zero’ that I have written on a post-it note and stuck to my bedside cabinet. I find it oddly life-affirming every time I look at it:

“”Where are we going?” I asked.
“I don’t know, he said. “Just driving.”
“But this road doesn’t go anywhere” I told him.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we’re on it, dude.” he said.”

The Anatomy Of A Gun – Chapter 1

THE ANATOMY OF A GUN

CHAPTER ONE

‘A SPOTLIGHT’

He stands on stage, the spotlight focused solely on him. The ancient planks of wood underneath his feet creak of their own accord. The red show curtain that was once so clean and pristine is now covered in patches of pitch black mould, the rest of the curtain faded and torn. He stands on stage, the spotlight focused solely on him, and does nothing. In front of the dilapidated stage are rows and rows of dusty red seats. One man sits in one of the seats in the second row. The man wears a long brown trench coat that covers his entire body. A brown hat sits on his head, shading the top half of his face as if he doesn’t have one. He sits on the dusty chair with a lit cigarette in one hand, a silver handgun in the other. The gun is pointed at the stage. At the man with the spotlight focused solely on him.

He stands on stage, the spotlight focused solely on him, and does nothing. He does nothing except allow a single tear to run down his wrinkled face and fall onto the creaky wooden floor. The man with the gun takes a puff of his cigarette. He tilts his head back, gun still pointed at the man in the spotlight, and blows two smoke rings into the air. He watches the smoke rings go up and up until they hit the beam of the spotlight and fade away, meeting with the dust particles that to and fro in the light. The light showing us the tiny things we can’t usually see. The light showing the miniscule dust particles that to and fro and to and fro, bouncing off each other like flies fighting over shit. The man with the gun points his head back towards the spotlight, back towards the wrinkled man doing nothing, and says, “Do you know what kind of gun this is?”

The man in the spotlight begins to shiver, as if having to speak has triggered something horrible inside the synapses of his brain, and replies, “N-n-no.”

The man with gun and the trench coat smiles and says, “Wow, stuttering already? And here I was thinking that I was being such a nice guy. When I usually do this they don’t start stuttering until I’ve started shouting or at least started slicing them up a bit. All I’ve done to you is grab you, put you in the boot of my car, drive you here, place you there and pointed a gun at you. You must be a real scaredy cat Reynolds. I suppose you’ve actually got something to lose though. Beautiful family, smokin’ hot wife…”

The man in the spotlight, the man called Reynolds, both eyes now incessantly filling with tears says, “If you go anywhere near my family I’ll rip your fucking throat out…”

The man with the guns smile fades. He stands up from his dusty red chair, still pointing the gun at Reynolds. He takes one puff of his cigarette, now almost smoked down to its filter, and throws it at Reynolds. The cigarette hits Reynolds squarely in the face, causing him to take a step back and trip up on the stage. Reynolds falls on his back with a thud. The dust on the stage flies away from Reynolds in a circle, like Reynolds is a bomb and the dustless part of the stage is the blast radius. Like the dust wants to get away from him. The man with the gun says with a grimace, “Don’t try to grow the big balls now Reynolds. You’re way past that. You’re way past anything really. Any kind of honour, nobility. Any chance of redemption. Gone. You sold your spineless soul to the devil and now you’re paying the price. So don’t try and feed me some bullshit story about how you care about your family when we both know you don’t care about anyone but yourself. Now stand the fuck up. STAND THE FUCK UP!”

Reynolds stands up. Still in the spotlight, a massive wet patch begins to form in the crotch of his grey trousers. Piss starts to leak from his legs onto the brown wood of the stage. Tears run down his cheek, into the piss stain. He makes a heavy wheezing noise like he knows that every breath could be his last and he’s trying to savour it. The crotch of his grey trousers are now almost black from the piss stain. The man with the gun says, “Anyway. What kind of gun is this? Well, ladies and gents of the theatre, this handgun is known as the ‘Smith and Wesson Model 1006′. It’s a recoil operated double-action semi-automatic handgun chambered in a powerful ten millimetre auto cartridge. It’s made entirely of stainless steel and has a five inch barrel and a nine round single column magazine. It is generally considered to be very accurate and reliable, meaning I won’t miss. I just wanted you to know that I’ll be thinking about how this gun works when I’m shooting you. I won’t be thinking about how I’ll be shooting an unarmed human being. I won’t be thinking about your brains getting blown out of the back of your head as you fall to the ground, creating a pool of blood to join that pool of piss you’ve made for yourself. Well done on the piss by the way. Sterling work. It makes you look even more pathetic, if that’s even possible. I might be thinking about how much you deserve this. How much you deserve this bullet trapped in your skull. I’ll definitely be thinking about how majestic the technology of this gun is. How something so small, so insignificant looking, can destroy so much. Kind of poetic, don’t you think?”

Reynolds, standing in a spotlight in a puddle of his own urine and tears, says, “P-please. I’ll pay you as much as you want. Y-you don’t have to do this”

The man in the trench coat takes off his hat and throws it to the darkened ground to reveal his face, rugged and weather beaten. One of his green eyes missing. No eye patch, no glass eye: just a pink fleshy hole where an eye should be. The left side of his face has a cut with dried up blood around it, no stitches. He stares at Reynolds, letting him scrutinise the face of his killer and says, “No. I don’t.”

He pulls the trigger.

Always A Path

There is always a path. From the trampled down grass to the newly lain tarmac, there is always a new place to go; A new path to follow. The beaten down soil keeps its thorough way definite, never growing plants again so that we can journey on. And although the snow of winter and the dead leaves of autumn may obscure the path from view and make it seem like it cannot be trodden upon, it is always there. It is always waiting for one more person to trudge over its battered plain and carry on until one path cuts off and all that can be seen is a dead end. And when that dead end is eventually reached, a person must look to find a new path to follow. A fork in the road for an option, a straight road for fate. If there is no path to be seen then a new path must be made. More grass trampled, More battering down, more tar poured, more waiting. Because there must always be a different place to travel to, a new place to discover. There must always be a path.

Vampire: Prologue

Author’s notes: I don’t usually input Author’s notes into any of my work. I feel that they make the piece look messy and are, for the most part, unnecessary. However, I feel the need to put this story into context before you read it. Everything here is in a very rough draft form. The ‘mission statement’ for this piece is to get a story put together in as quick a time as possible. There will be no forward planning and no notes to help me. It is a case of just jumping and seeing where I land. Therefore, if you notice any plot holes, grammatical errors etc. please notify me. Also, if you would like to suggest where the plot could go then please do. It may help me push the idea in a different direction than I am expecting and some reader participation could be fun, I suppose. Anyway, hopefully you will enjoy what you read.

VAMPIRE

PROLOGUE

“You turn your back for one second and everything changes. Isn’t that right?”

“Always.”

“So long, so long, so long… I’ve been waiting for this for too long. I’m not even sure why I want to do this any more…”

“You do not have to do anything. You can let me leave. You can have everything, anything that is here. We can keep this hunt going forever or we can end it here. You can let me leave.”

“You’re pathetic, you know that? I mean look at you! Just fucking look at yourself! Withering away in some dump that used to be so grand. You used to be a legend. You were the reason we were so powerful. You were the start; The reason we thirst for blood; The reason we are the way we are. You spread this power, this virus. Now just look at you! This hunt ended a long time ago, I realise that now. Any creature who tries to reason with their hunter instead of dying with dignity is not worth the hunt. Where’s your honour? Where has it gone?”

“When you have been around for as long as I have, you realise that honour is not always the best option.”

“So that’s it is it? You just keep going? Keep living at any cost?”

“Always.”

“You’re nothing any more. Nothing.”

“We must keep living. Just like we must take the lives of others to prolong our own. We must keep living. If we do not, then we truly are nothing. I have something. I have my life. I have my name. My name will live on forever whether you kill me or not. What exactly have you got?”

“Well… right now I’ve got a stake in my hand and you trapped. I need nothing more for the time being…”

“You cannot fill the void by killing me Edgar. You cannot go back to the way things were.”

“No… no I can’t. But I can end this chapter in my journey. I can finish this for good…”

“I’ll still be there. In your head. In your blackened heart. Everywhere in your being. I made you the way you are. I made all of you the way you are. You can never truly end me.”

“I can try. And now is my time to. It’s time to go Dracula. Time to die.”