By Yashas Acharya
As I’m sat at the deli, a man colts in with a boy,
coy, the populous innocuous to plate tectonics that
the mind ushers. The heart flutters, a thought stutters
as if unspeakable.
I raise the coffee mug till the warmth embraces my lip,
yet it stung the tongue - then devoid
like the flood did the crop destroy.
I shiver.
His gaze does not meet mine, though
the boy’s does,
and I cannot blink, eyes dry, focused on the malign,
I think.
Again, I shiver
and it hits.
Like the blitzkrieg cauldron,
war after Vienna, it hits. I
am blinded. I am fucking blinded and bells
ring and ears take a toll.
The rush of blood to the head, once steady, now visceral.
Fingers tremble, cigarette downed but the smoke lingers.
I rise as they do and trail the two, boy marauder-
how familiar.
We enter the pick-up truck,
Slovenly silence as the diesel engine roars down the causeway.
No cars, no commotion,
just asphalt and ocean surrounding us three now, and
maybe it was the Tryptamine but
I wasn’t a day older than seventeen now.
Halt.
A house, a sky,
tar, water,
no men, no God to sentence the sinners to a slaughterhouse
here. I exit the backseat of beer cans, crocodile leather veneer,
And revel in the suburbian scent of
my home.
The weight of some thirty eight years now
in the dagger I wield, sharper than the knife
that Cane was abel to clutch in that field.
They pause before the front door,
his arm around the boy’s nape, then navel
but I lunge forth and pin him to the floor in a craze with the first stab to the chest a jab to the left lung and a thrust to the bottom left for good measure I heard that a left hook’s more pain than pleasure and not only drags him down to depths below but hurts like a bitch too and when I’m finished with my prey, the boy’s gaze - affixed
as I’m sipping my coffee back at the deli.
This time around the television sounds today’s
game (noun)
while the cigarette burns out and
the boy continues down the causeway.