Up. Down. Up again. A chilled hand, frozen white, grips the stern as two men, stern yet sitting in the rear, glance across my forehead at the young lady, dead, but not nearly as smug as before. The coffee, sent overboard my cup by the next wave, burns and blisters my frostbitten finger, as I thoughtfully give a jolly laugh to the captain and take another bite of my Thomas' English muffin. The water was cold, deep, yet pleasant to look at. On a sunny day, warm rays heating the air, causing a stench to emerge from a young woman's body, a swim could almost be enjoyable. Today, however, the death in the water was up-staged only by the death in the boat. On the top of a rather large crest, I could easily see the land we were nearing, jaunted rocks climbing the hillside slowly, goats spotting the countryside as sores on an old man's face. "If you'd only given me the time, I wouldn't have been so goddamn late. You need to give me the entire message. It's not easy committing murder when you're secretary can't even tell you what time your appointment is. Adultry, maybe, but definitely not a fucking murder." A bird (probably a hawk, I figure) dives two-hundred feet into the water, after four seconds appearing with a limp, yet placid, rock bass. Four o'clock, "tea time," was the call. "Twenty dollars." "What?" "Twenty dollars. It'll be another twenty dollars to do it again." "But my time's not up. There's still time left on the meter." "Tough. Twenty dollars, I said." "Get the fuck out of my bed." Two clicks and I was back to my movie. Seven-fifty for the movie. Fifty spent on live entertainment. God, these movies are expensive. It took two sips to finish the glass. Two steps to another glass. Two shots till another death. Those two steps were tougher to take than the two shots were to perform. Worse for my health, too. Drinking is certainly not the most valuable of my habits. Sixteen paces. The young man was ordered to take sixteen paces, kneel down, and like a child on his ninth birthday, wait for his surprise. Four men stood quietly on each side, smiling thoughtfully (as they had been taught), each secretly thanking that he himself had not been caught sneaking a drink. (And to think, the youngest of them, the soldier on the far left, who couldn't be more than sixteen, had smoked dope twice in the last week alone.) Creativity is the oppressor of law. Originality, that of order. "In the name of freedom," cries out the President (though probably of no higher rank than captain), and eight bullets enter the child's skull. "Without law, without punishment, anarchy would engulf us," he cries out again. The young lady's body seemed to disappear in the cold water without so much as a wimper of disagreement. The bullets entered the young boy's head without knocking - no rap on the door first heard. Ten...Twenty...One thousand...One million... Where does the count end? "This war can't end till the body count reaches one trillion." "But why?" "It'll be easier to put in the L.A. Times that way. You know how they always fuck up big numbers." A young man, tired, sick, hungry, yet saturated in brilliance, two more hits and his mind lay content. His fingers looked like those shriveled fingers of the young lady in the lake. The young lady in the ocean. Another on the shore. Two more in your dining room. One dangling from the mantel, and three more framed, hanging in the den. Which is your favorite?
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Updated Thursday, 04-Mar-2004 14:58:32 PST