His breath reeks of ale. Clothes stench of sweat and homegrown tobacco. A voice that grinds like the railroad. Six foot six with an added inch of broken leather. Dual silver six shooters accentuate his hips. Fully bearded. Fully loaded. The coldest thousand yard stare you’ve ever witnessed.
His birth name is Sven Halldis. The town knows him as The Viking…
I stand facing the wall with a fraction of a millimeter between its cold reinforced concrete and the tip of my gnarled nose. I have been staring at a splotch of blood the size of my face for at least eighteen hours, over the course of which I have watched it coagulate and darken to a miraculous deep maroon. The back of my head is an equally uncomfortable distance from a large, unknown object. I am unable to tell if it is another concrete wall, but using my best judgment I presume that it is. To my left and right are infinitely open green valleys taunting me with their wondrous sense of freedom. You may be asking yourself why I don’t just slide my way out of this nasty little predicament, but a) my feet are buried in stone and b) I know deep down the sense of freedom is nothing more than an illusion fabricated by my own imagination. By freeing myself I would actually receive absolutely nothing. Nothing tangible that I could hold in my hand, cherish and say to myself, “This object that I hold in my hand is my freedom.”
Her pale, pebbled flesh hangs like thick plastic drapery from her severely stressed bones. She sits idly in the corner, slumped over the electronic glow of her screen, still as stone, save for her hands which move slightly here and there between operating her sweat stained mouse and keyboard and taking a swig from her seventy two ounce Super-Slurpee®. Every few hours she carefully pricks a fresh, soft scab from her salty flesh and slowly slips it between her lips. Her belligerent body odor and freakishly high rate of respiration makes it painfully hard for the rest of us to breathe. We all blast our individual music in our noise canceling headphones to drown out the perpetual sound of wheezing and random release of gas. Her wardrobe consists of three spaghetti-strap shirts, one pink, one purple and one blue, three pairs of faded teal short-shorts, and a countless supply of trashy translucent slippers. Every time my eyes are assaulted with her presence I have random daydreams about how many rolls of fat she has to pull back before she can defecate, or if she has ever had sex, and if she has had sex was it with an equally disgusting male, or an equally disgusting female, or if she has ever looked in the mirror and said to herself “I’m a fucking burden on society.” With any other person I would feel bad thinking such things, but with her, this behemoth of self-neglect, I don’t feel a single bit of remorse. The only thing on this planet more repulsive than her physicality is her personality…
I pull the trigger and a billion drops of my imagination shower the open field behind me. The grass grows greener than it has in decades. Maggots rejoice in an orgiastic song and dance while the remainder of my material existence reduces to soil. Mother earth stares solemnly at the stars in a daze of chemically enhanced self discovery. The stars glance back in passing, fading into falsehood as the entire fucking universe hits rock bottom.
She looks deep into my eyes, tapping the tip of her blade-like fingernail on the table in patterns that can only be morse code. I don’t understand morse code and that gets me even more excited than her devious smile and chin-length black hair. I’m fascinated by mystery. The tapping stops and she tilts her head quizzically, as if she expects me to give her an answer. My eyes flutter around the room as I begin to suffer an internal panic. A finger pokes me repeatedly in the spine and I feel myself inching closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, a few pebbles crumbling and falling completely out of sight. What did she ask? What am I supposed to say? I hear myself swallow a brick and hope to the God I’m not even sure exists that she isn’t picking up on my severe discomfort. To my advantage, our waitress stops and tops off my coffee…
As I stumble my way to the bathroom my already deteriorating vision pulses in and out of focus. My body slumps uncontrollably into the wall, causing my one and only framed photograph of my one and only son to shift into an annoying slant. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a crooked photograph. ESPECIALLY when it’s THIS one. Despite the fact that I’m sweating like a pig and about to faint at any moment, I pause to adjust the photo into a neat and orderly position. His wonderful smile grabs me like always. Oh, how deeply I miss him. If there is a God he’s gonna fucking pay…
