I am a party, strangely enough, and I'm drinking, but not too heavily. It seems like everyone I know or used to know, even for a little scrap of time, they're all here. All drinking heavily. All of the people my eyes ever graced.
I start to feel it coming on, the vomit and I head to bathroom. It's not the alcohol, it's the pills I had hours before. Waiting outside and then, a guy in a red shirt walks out, passes me. He turns and looks me dead in the eyes. I know him, perhaps better than anyone else here, even my flesh-and-blood sister. He looks at me and we both know. He's coming for me, later. He's coming to get me.
I dash in the toilet, quickly vomit and leap up. Splash water on my face and look in the mirror. I can do this, my eyelids flinch. I have to escape. Out the back. Now.
I duck into the back bedroom, kick out the screen and this apartment is on the second story. I have to leap hard, land hard and roll. My twisted ankle, I don't think it's broken. So I run. I run down alleys cloaked in nightfall, past wooden fences with chainlinked pitbulls on the other side.
A howling, screeching terror follows me. Like the howling of wolves, I flee with pumping legs and throbbing lungs.
I dart across traffic, right in front of a police cruiser. The beast floods me with his violet lights and slowly crawls from the cradle of his car. He towers over me, checks that my ID is of age and breathalyzes me. I don't even blow a .07. So weak.
The cop decides to let me go, but I realize it would be better to be imprisoned in the cage of leviathan than the foul hunter on my scent. For I know, he comes for me.
So I sock the officer in the face. Hard. To give him a reason to handcuff me, to sacrifice my freedom for my breath.
But the officer goes down. He's unconscious in one slug.
The only viable option is to steal the cop cruiser. What else is alternative? By barely slipping into gear, I'm screeching off at speeds unknown to physics. The lights are still beaming in all directions as I tear down the wrecked neighborhoods of junkies, immigrants and thugs. A fool's paradise.
A mere second later the hood crumples up into the windshield and the airbag explodes onto my face. Glass and dust bond with my skin, until I am streaked with the blood of the stigmata.
I crawl from the wreckage and inspect my victim. A red sports car, the driver completely flattened by my tires. The angle his neck and limbs hang suggest he was killed instantly. On the other side, I twist the deceased face. It is truly, by the coincidence of saints, my enemy. His life essence leaks and mingles onto my own red covered hand. How could I?
I was guilty all along. He never meant to bat a cardinal eyelash at me. I killed my nemesis with little more than hallucination.
And sirens rise on the peaks and the heavy air, hunting me, like the howling of wolves.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
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