The dim light of a single faux-Edison bulb hanging above the bar washes the pub in a warm orange perfectly separated from the cold blues and blacks he came in seeking refuge from, interspersed by harsh neons that burned his eyes. It's eerily silent, no patron willing to interrupt their own drinking to make a sound outside of the soft thumps of glasses coming to rest on tables.
In a strange sense, it's nothing more than a stopping point for the destitute, the ones that float through it all with little to anchor them. No one talks because no one has anything to say. Anything they could say is meaningless, both to themselves and others.
The peace and quiet of the pub is interrupted as the door is roughly opened, a screech rising as hinges, years dry of oil, protest. Standing in the doorway, a silhouette in the dark interior ringed by rain-soaked streetlight, was a young man in a fancy coat who held himself in a manner the man had seen only in carnies, politicians, and wax statues. The newcomer sauntered into the pub, slowly gazing around at the sullen drunks, sure to show everyone there his immaculately clean complexion and ivory grin.
A youthful spool of yarn, the twine the silent observer craves. He exudes charisma, it sputters from his mouth in a red foam. So young, so arrogant.
To incite is to cheat, to reel in is cunning. So he begins reeling. He taunts, cajoles, questions the suave young man on his life, decrying every hint of personality and disregarding supposed accomplishments.
Life is but a series of choices that lead to one's death, the man is simply moving the young man along the path. And so the foolhardy is drug along until he has slaked his thirst and stoked the fire within him. The weary soul seeps into the cracks of the prideful's skin, until he himself begins to feel the arrogance drip down his form. It's a dangerous game, but one he must play if he is to beckon the youthful soul out into eternity.
The young man tosses back the last of his tumbler of whiskey before pointing at the hunched bundle of wrinkles that had been taunting him. He makes a grand declaration, spit flying from his lips as he reigns in his frustration with the promise of putting the old fool in his place.
They find themselves walking out through the entryway, the streetlamp's haze catching the fanciful buttons that litter the youth's clothes, creating a magnet for the eyes that had been hidden away in the gloomy atmosphere of the pub. The freshly groomed declarant rests a hand in his pocket as the other gestures theatrically, his feet kicking out in front of him to catch his forward-leaned strut, kicking rainwater up off the pocketed asphalt with each solid clack! of his heel connecting with the street. Walking slowly behind him, his hands resting casually in his pockets, the aged killer glares at the back of his enemy's skull, his slack eyelids betraying a growing animosity for the showmanship of the peacock in front of him.
Both parties drop off of the main street, turning a corner to saunter down a dim alleyway.
No crowds, no witnesses. A private matter.
Enamel in the gutter, blood on the pavement.
They walk their distance down the alleyway, giving each other a small breath between them, encouraging a charging beginning.
Taking a deep breath in, the sullen man begins to center himself, mentally preparing for the oncoming eternity. He sucks air in through his nose until his lungs have shoved his chest to his chin before letting it leak out of his mouth.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Again, again.
He narrows his thoughts, pulling from only one source, to keep himself grounded.
Another deep breath as he shifts to taking in only…
Nerve Endings, Sensory Filling His Mind
His skin is tough as jerky, a deep tan that's splotched with burning crimson red, like his mother hung him out with the laundry when he was a baby, pinching the flesh on his neck with a clothespin onto the line, wriggling and squirming, crying out to the wastes of his Arizona hometown. His tears being drunk up by the thirsty, cracked ground below him. It was wrinkled to hell and back, brought on by the unholy torrent of sun and the torrid winds of the wastes as it chafed and peeled skin off bone, mixing with his waning age as it tries to slough off his body and escape into the sweet, cool rest lying six feet below his worn boots.
He stands still as he can, his feet trying to dig into the wet black. Rain runs down his forehead, hanging on his brow, slipping gently down his nose, trailing his lips, before dropping to the ground. His alcohol-logged tongue runs over his teeth, almost feeling the grit of the sand that was once stuck to them, as he runs his thumb over the plastic in his pocket, his hand hidden away in his jeans, feeling the textured grip. The other hand taps restlessly on his leg, a steady flow of index to pinkie, trying to quell the adrenaline that demands he rush forwards, shoulder primed for impact.
He eyes the man across from him, a spry yuppie from higher up the land, in both location and status. He's a showman, wearing an elegant black coat with a velvet satin inner lining that he readily shows off as he holds it back on his right side, his hand reaching into a pocket to retrieve leather gloves. The circus carnie watches the weathered man from beneath slouching brown hair, the once perfect shape falling away as mousse washes away in the rain. With a genteel smile, teeth as white as sclera, shimmering in the little light bouncing off the rain that made it into the cramped backway. The man stares at the showman, his eyes never even twitching while the fancy broker blinks, and blinks, and blinks as the rain flows over his eyes. It'll be his undoing.
The showman raises a leather hand, shoving an errant clump of hair behind his ear, keeping his appearance as best he can. He continues to grin at the man, a different kind of grin than the one he flashed at his audience in the pub, one that reeked of sheer confidence and charisma. No, this grin was almost pity for him, as if he were saying, I'm sorry I'm gonna have to beat your shit in you mangy mutt, but I've got something to prove. The perfect edges of his stark-white teeth gave speeches without his tongue moving an inch.
In that moment, as the peacock flashed its feathers, the veteran realized that he hated the pompous prick. He wasn't a real fighter, he'd never felt the burn of a knife wound on his shoulder signaling that he'd barely avoided death, never shot another human being's lungs and watched their breaths turn to blood, never faced any of the hardships of the city as it siphoned the future from his crippled form. He wasn't a man. He was an art piece, a walking, talking installation that spouted stock numbers and told exaggerated stories of his wealth. Stick a few quarters in his mouth and he'd come to life.
The weathered man shifts his feet on the slick pavement, triple checking that he was sturdy. He was. The faux-pugilist sees him adjust and follows suit, continuing his preening as his black leather dress shoes twist on the asphalt, their thin, silver heel plates clacking. Always ensuring he announced his presence.
Some windows in the apartments around them were open now, bored city dwellers desperate for something different, anything. The people watched from the perfect distance from the men; far away enough to have plausible deniability in witnessing the event, but close enough to be able to clearly see the loser or losers and watch in ecstasy as they breathed their last. The two men has spent too long feeling each other out, getting a lay of the land, and some were growing impatient, but said nothing, erecting a social barrier between them and the oncoming brutality. In a world of monotony, they were desperate for one or both of them to die in the street.
For a moment, and for no real discernible reason, all is still. The cacophony of the rainfall fades away. Neither man dares to breathe. Something in the air in that moment tells them that they are about to bring the act to its climax, give the audience the conclusion they've been patiently waiting for.
The sullen man realizes that just like the silent crowd, he's thirsty too. Not for change, no, but for life. He knows he's in his waning years, that all the booze, tobacco, and fighting is catching up to him quickly. His aging frame protests even the very act of getting out of bed. So he's been drinking the elixir of life as of late, and drinking deep. It isn't about the money anymore, hunting Iraqi and Afghan combatants for the military, or open desert plains gunfights. Now he drags fools into the street and makes them brush knuckles. That's the fountain from which he draws the elixir, filling a ceremonial ewer with the precious stuff. Now, in that moment before he will either live or die, he's craving it; a thirst that can't be slaked by mere water alone, nor the moment at hand. It's only after he's put steel through another living, conscious human with a life as full and complex has his that he can bathe in the rush. Let it overtake him as the hand gripping the knife slowly lowers, shaking with pleasure. He can practically see his victims' ties to the mortal coil sever one by one with each gasping breath, each poke and prod at their wound, confusion plastering their face. A wife, a husband, a kid, a parent, a friend, all dissolving into the ether along with their soul. And he loves it. So when he sees the broker's eye twitch as fingers begin to curl, he digs into the street and charges shoulder first, barely thinking about if he also has a knife, whether he'll live or die.
His shoulder crashes into the yuppie's chest, inspired by the moment where his passions were reignited like phosphorus, knocking the wind from his lungs and throwing him to the ground, his back loudly cracking as it strikes the asphalt at an unnatural angle. The broker wheezes, trying to regain his breath, before the worn drunk straddles him, slamming his fists down on his chest and face. With each impact, something gives way, hard angles in his bones stabbing into the assailant's clenched fist. Blood spurts from his crumpled nose, teeth knocked loose from their immaculate pink shelves. Something in his eye bursts, the sclera running red to once again match his teeth, as swollen lips begin to plea.
Satisfied, breathing heavily, the victor pulls the knife out from his jean pocket, taking in the black plastic handle's bumpy texture. Swimming in adrenaline, he flicks his wrist out, the steel catching the faint light as it swings out into place with a faint click. It takes but a moment for the man to find a space between the pathetic rich-boy's ribs, his index and middle finger trailing down fabric, feeling the soft thumps just below the skin as the panic within the young man spikes even more than before, his eyes, ringed by swiftly discoloring skin, taking in the glint of the blade that heralded his demise.
The veteran smiles, filling in the wrinkles left behind as evidence of his history, perfectly aligning to match the moments before this that had left him just as happy. With a single fluid movement, the blade is bedded deep inside the broker's chest, a hair to the left of the heart, only clipping it, the pretty-boy letting loose a faint puff of breath, expending what little he had left. Pulling it out again, the veteran stands up and backs away, wishing to get a full view of the fool's final moments.
The yuppie's perfectly starched, white button-up reveals a red tide flowing in from his chest as he limply brings his arms up from the ground and gently taps, taps, taps where he's been stabbed, eyes wide with dilated pupils, one stained a faint crimson. He kicks his legs gently, as if he were trying to push himself away from the weathered man, or perhaps he imagined himself standing up. Words try to escape his throat, but have no wind to carry them, leaving only faint wheezes that desperately try to figure out what went so wrong. The audience lean out of their windows, trying to get a good view of the dying man's final moments, his processes reduced to that of a child as he mouths, "Why? Why? Why?" sputtering up blood and saliva onto his chin, his face tightening and turning red as he strains against the inevitable. He wants to reclaim his charisma, but it's been ripped from him.
The weathered man closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nostrils, feeling how the warm, damp air flows through him into his lungs. The cool water of relief shudders through his body, contrasting the warmth on his skin from the summer's heat. His arms faintly quake as adrenaline courses through his body, slowly waning until it all seeps out of his feet and drains into the sewer. He gently wipes the blade of his pocket knife on his pants, clearing the drapery of blood, and brings his other hand up to his forehead, wiping sweat and rainwater off onto his fingers. Lowering the hand, he gazes at the slick fingers, glistening in the faint lamplight, before bringing them to his tongue. He savors the faint salty taste, the life that seeps out of his pores. Proof that he wasn't just upright, but alive.
Opening his eyes, the victor finds that many of the observers have lost interest, closing their windows, walking off to their next hedonistic distraction before the man on the ground has even stopped squirming. So desperate, tolerance calcifying in their veins.
Every execution, it took less and less time for the people to move on, leaving to the suffocation of monotony more and more.
the Atmosphere Between, a Current of Ionic Winds
He is a worn creature. One who walks with no forward momentum, rising with the sun and setting with liquor.
Hedonism and hatred define his existence. Every act is one driven by that worn, calcified instinct.
The more time flies past him, the less he beds and works. The more he drinks and kills.
He is a blade. One brought to a keen point by the passage of time, the sands slowly etching away at the end as it passes by.
His soul is waning, beginning to dislodge itself from his form. A notion his eyes cannot perceive and yet he is keenly aware of. So he stitches himself into a patchwork creature. Harvests the silver cord of others.
He is a stuffed animal. His seams are loose, stuffing pouring out.
A force of spite and defiance, he treads life underfoot.
He is a scythe. The gleaming edge separating wheat from the precious earth, severing mortal ties.
Existence is something to be earned. A trophy of those who could stand to grab hold of it. Those who cannot claim it never deserved it.
He is a dam. His diverts, halts, and welcomes new flows of a river, ones that go contrary to the river's wishes. And so he stands, at the precipice of eternity. Packing mud and wood into place.
Across from him, standing so far away, is a minnow being carried by the stream. A facsimile of life, hinting at potential, if only he would be allowed to pass by, to continue on down the river.
What does the wrathful force of hatred know about the potential of youth? Had he ever truly been given a chance to flourish or was he another casualty of neglect, scattered over rocky ground? The pavement around him answers with a resounding yes, the blood he tried to bury rising up slowly, thick and warm, creeping up the world-worn boots.
He had had potential, he could have been the silvered blade upon which injustice would have been impaled, but that life had been forfeited. The wiles of life took hold of him, latching onto his wild fantasies of violence. Cruel mentors taught him that life was a grand lake, individual existences mere stones. When thrown, some will skip and others will plunge into the depths, but all inevitably succumb to the cold waters of eternity. Better to find yourself bounding across life's surface, awash in personal pleasure, than to be the one who sinks, striking down the stones around you to gain momentum, their fate be damned.
Money became his lifeblood, blood his pleasure. He took up arms with the oppressors of the time, slaughtering innocents with the simple flex of a finger, the rifle preparing for the next snuff with spring-loaded enthusiasm, cycling leaden hatred into the steel chamber.
As the days of his perpetual horror wound on and on and on, a sickening numbness spread over his senses, dulling the exhilaration.
The moral soul would find such a creeping illness to be disturbing, betraying a settling complacency in atrocity or, more terrifying, the re-categorization of it all into the realm of normalcy.
All he could feel was disappointment. Not for his actions, but for the sole reason of sheer boredom. The loss of a passion that ran deep in his veins. He rode the wastes on diesel-fueled steelback, a part of a cadre of soulless monsters, seeking out that elixir.
They tread the torrid sands, hunting down Iraqis and Afghans, cracking open skulls and pulling teeth to keep as trophies. Scarves, bullets, firearms, insignia branded bandanas, and swatches of cloth.
Yet still that pervasive cold chilled his blood, depriving him of what was once a fiery passion, burning up all those that fell into the shadow of his wrath.
Bouts of apathy and listlessness led him to depraved places in his mind, newer and more ferocious lusts that would push him over the brink of humanity. Fantasies of flayed flesh and twitching muscles, playing out like a snuff film in his mind's eye. They're notions that he'd never get to indulge, yet he found himself willfully daydreaming possibilities, but they weren't enough to extinguish the smoldering boredom that festered in him.
Patrolling a small, dusty village, lost in the thoughts that kept him up at night, he heard someone cry out. He sprinted, already salivating over the prospect of putting a bullet in someone's chest.
Turning a corner, following the delectable screaming, he suddenly found a shoulder in his chest, throwing him to the ground, his rifle clattering away from him. Quickly recovering, he scrambled to his feet, taking in the scene. Standing across from him was an Afghan civilian, rubbing his shoulder. On the ground lie a member of his squad, his neck slashed, a kukri embedded in his chest and a torn swatch of cloth gripped tightly in his hand. Sitting against the wall was an Afghan woman in a ripped dress, her knees tucked up to her chest, trembling and crying.
The Afghan man looked to the soldier, slowly walking back to the dead soldier and pulling the kukri out of his chest, never taking his eyes off of the living soldier. Holding it in his hands, he spun it twice, blood flying off, his eyes aglow with the righteous wrath of the scorned. The soldier obliged, drawing his Ka-Bar, revealing a grin that had been hidden behind a thin façade of moral justice, not even attempting to retrieve his rifle.
They stand, staring at each other for a moment, the dry air between them standing eerily still. The woman crying, saying something in Dari, but even if he could hear her he wouldn't have understood it. He'd refused to learn their sand-tongue, believing that the diplomatic endeavors that entailed communications he planned to engage with could be translated efficiently with shouting and gunpowder.
But he didn't hear her, he only heard the blood rushing through his skull, the sinkholes of his soul emerging in his eyes as adrenaline once more coursed through his system.
Silence. Steady, calm breaths, awaiting a twitch that would signal the beginning of the end. A shiver down his spine sent him into a frenzy. Mindless action.
The soldier stood over the bleeding figure of the Afghan man, the woman crawling over to his body, screaming.
Taking a deep breath, looking to the bleeding man, listening to the anguished cries, the numb soul found the addicting drought it'd been so longing for, the rush of life causing him to twitch and groan.
He chased that sweet nectar, reeling choleric jesters to stage, putting steel through skin.
Now he stands before yet another injection of heroin, another chance to imbibe, that faint notion of potential soon to be spilled upon the ground.
That moment of suspense arises, his carrion brethren circling overhead, an omen of inevitability.
Tense up, blink, breathe out, jump.
Writhing on the ground, afraid of the world around him for the first time since he opened his eyes, the minnow bared his belly, submitting.
The harvest is plentiful, slick, silvery thread looped around muscle and sinew, spooled on his young, slowing heart. The weathered man works a cosmic needle, sewing shut malaise abundant, cinching into place loose organs and drooping veins. Once more he is a stout and proud creature, standing so tall as to drink from the clouds.
The sweet taste of existence, like dollops of honey on his tongue, runs warm down his throat. Sensations' songs he's grown addicted to warble through his mortal form, plying away rust and detritus. A bolstering of the soul by proxy, rejuvenated by hallowed fluids roiling in his belly.
Then, it's gone.
A husk, chaff floating through the wastes, subject to the wiles of errant breezes. In place of the ecstasy, teeth sprout once more. Molars and incisors that slowly chew and gnaw at him, wearing him down from the inside, crying out for the substance, his sacred drug.
Two corpses come to rest, one far colder than the other yet still standing. Held aloft by rigor mortis.
Every execution, it took less and less time for the rush to fade away, leaving him more and more dissatisfied.