A stranger approaches you one night. Perhaps you are alone under the only lighted lamp in a shadowy streetcorner, or it is an empty bus you ride, sullen in your seat and feeling the late hour. The stranger approaches you with bead black eyes and a voice like yellowed parchment paper rasping against dead skin, and submits a choice in the flickering light of street or bus, of knowing the exact circumstances and instant of your death, or an eternity approaching others with the exact same proposal.
You chuckle at the strange turn of events and choose eternity. His bone white face crinkles into a rictus that is, you realize with growing horror, a smile. It is a slash that expels a hot carcass wind and sprouts a jagged range of yellowred fangs filling your vision like some poison portrait of Transylvania. Suddenly that corpse breath is digging at your neck, and you can’t but marvel at the utter corniness of the beast’s next words: You shall live forever in the hearts and minds of your loved ones! You manage to squeeze off a b-b-but I have nothing, nobody! just before your cartoid spurts arterially. A spark of irritation, in your dying mind, conflagrates into a full-out bloom of fury as you behold your very last impression of life, a grinning white red chiaroscuro.
In the white hot incandescence of anger, your thing we call soul like moth to streetlight, away from death hanging on to that lashing frail thread of vengeance’s lust, back, back, back, your life unspooling to a connate snap where a white cold glare brutally greets you with a hand slap to the backside, heckuva set of lungs this one’s got! You progress through the various stages of human development in a tense anger, the cloud of premonition hanging over your head. You wonder where all this repressed rage comes from, and your high school psychologist keeps on saying you keep it bottled up until you’re forced to find something to bottle him up. One day you slide into a vacant bus, or stride into the littered halo of a lone streetlight. You choose to know the exact instant and circumstances of your death, and he tears out your throat on the spot.
Round round round the merry-go-round you go, the wet warm splashing to a halt with a connate slap in cold fluorescent glare and laughter at baby you boiling with pure pissed off and you grow up kicking at dogs and breaking windows, become took with carrying a pair of pliers about without really knowing why and one night you step into a bus, or you find yourself loitering an empty streetcorner. You fly at the pale thing with the rat eyes and bad teeth, you know this how, without even looking at these poison lips, on pure instinct and sheer reflex, and there is screaming. This time around, it is not you that screams.
Well, mostly not you.
vignettes 