Got It Bad

I hope that I will grow old. I hope that someone will love me. In that car park, there was none of that. The pistol on the seat of the car parked up down the road. The other characters like crows pestering a child. A nuisance. A pest. Something to be exterminated.

I was vaguely aware that I was choking down on gabardine. Like when spitting orange pips I selected my target. I knew that it would end here on some level. The only level that I could now comprehend. But as I squeezed the trigger and took another life I was aware of the orange unravelling in my hands and of juice that would eventually turn sticky. But for now, I was shooting lemons.

I was clear to get away as far as my imagination would let me go. Which to be fair was not very far. The funeral directors up the road opposite the fire station were going to be my alamo. I could see it. I felt the knife in my hand and the unreal feeling of life taking on its own direction and watched transfixed like it was happening on tv on an old fashioned set and I was suddenly older than my mother who was serving dinner. It was somehow not as good as bland watery cabbage and lamb chops served up to me as a child. Not as reassuring anyway. I pushed my plate away and got on with the business at hand.

The police band was using my name and I heard it like through a lens. It seemed inevitable that it would end here and that my body would be transported by ambulance to some wailing planet of post-gangster celebrity where chicken drumsticks were served with salt and pepper mash and the delegates all drank the same brand of whiskey. Where I would be immortalised in the slim pages of a magazine in black and white, forever.

More pins to knock down and a rifle in my hands. Did it matter? I was sailing on grit anyway. A beige suit, a hat that fell too. A car interior that might hold a clue. Another meat hooks in my heart carrying the weight cold. Wood splinters near my head. A bright light. A blaze of glory.

I see laminate and so it wasn’t the end, just the beginning of yet another chapter.

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