Death Row Records

Flash Fiction #8

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ZIP UP THE DUFFEL where there’s viridescence inside (onomatopoeia goes crk-crk-crk), tack a pouch between my molars and soft tissue. I let the hit marinate me, plumb me for all I’m worth. Lock the driver seat, foot on the dash, reverse, PRNDL, back up, back up. Demons dressed in American colours put their lights on and start grumbling twenty blocks south of me, ravenous for a piece of me and my pie. Fat little piggies ought to finish their donuts first, ‘fore I huff and puff and leave them wrangling in my dust.

Twenty-five to fifty’s the max, written so in the lawman’s book, but I’m far from that now, tonguing the earth with yaw marks, rubber rolling on rampaged asphalt, leaving cadaverous rats in my wake (I’ll go to their wake soon, I hope). My hands used to be skin, but they’re leather now, wheeling tight, anaconda vise, and up there down that pretty little stretch of road is my own shadow, a dark heaping hive of black buzzard bees, and I must take my leave of it, I must. So I shift the stick, check my rearview, dodge the demons, E2 up to EDSA, count the lights, lights, lights as they flash on by then dip out my shaded purview forever, kerosine and gasoline and adrenaline up to and behind my eyes, makes colours heightened, reds molecular, blues cosmic, golds into slipstream quicksilver.

Call a last meal a death row meal. Does that make the last supper a death row supper? What about this rotation right here? These death row records?

First song: hyperpop, ‘Von Dutch,’ brat summer, short shorts and crop tops and frizzy hair and pedigree on account of my mouth being louder than a big-bellied beluga’s booming. It’s okay to admit you’re a little jealous of me—I would be too, if I were you. Still on EDSA, urban gun-muzzles with iron-girded windows never breaking past two-storeys, going down and down, fast enough to trick my shadow, fast enough to beat my dark heaping hive. I look for it in my rearview mirror. There he is. Brechtian abyssal, pinhole white eyes amidst a boogeyman blackness, shaped like me, but you aren’t me. You won’t be me. You can’t. You can’t.

Second song: like getting electronically stomped on with glitter and basslines, ‘I Feel You’, tattoos and shades and denim vests and Christendom. I feel you within my mind, there, where kingdom comes past Babylon. I feel you, baby. You ‘member me? ‘Member those spokes of pre-dawn light jabbing through? The way they’d hit the silk sheen of our bed, strike your face like a German Expressionist’s crosshatch? The light’d make your face a Janus. One half would be mine, wreathed with light, revealing your eye and nostril (just the one). But the other half, that’s claimed by the boogeyman blackness. I should’ve listened to it. Should’ve known I’d only ever get to keep one half, and not the other, because to understand you is to understand that we are only ever pieces of other people brought into flickering summations, that I am a hole lesser than the sum of his parts.

Third song: 6/8 time, E minor, progressing through rock and power and ballad, ‘Run.’ EDSA’s coming to a grisly end now, I can see. It taunts me. It wants me, even. But unfortunately for them, I’m a taken man, taken by you when you needed me, taken so bad that not even Liam Neeson could bring me back. The pouch wadded between my gums pulses through me like a C4’s signal, plastique semtex waiting to be Napoleon blown-apart. Leathery hands keep ‘er steady, keep ‘er hoarse and heaving through this empty liminality.

Fourth song: gothic and jazzy, writing on my own headstone, bandaged and blinded, so high it makes my brain whirl. Look up here man, I’m in danger. Do I even need to tell you the title? You should know it by now. It was one of our favorites, if I recall. Can you believe us? Foreshadowing our own shadows overtaking us. Force majeure, that’s what it was. Force majeure (separated by a million nautical miles you’re there all by your lonesome can’t even touch mandated lockdown six-feet apart and so you’re there and i’m here and i needed to scrounge enough to see you but it just wasn’t enough and now my voice is an android’s voice, toneless, cheerless, a gasped series of vernacular noises from another planet i should’ve seen you but i didn’t i didn’t i didn’t i didn’t and then you went the way of force majeure and now i dont even need all this money i saved)

EDSA’s dying soon. I don’t think the demons will get me.

I check for my shadow.

You’re there with him in the backseat. You’re smiling and your hands are twiddling. It’s a sickle smile. A hostage’s smile.

Don’t worry, baby. You won’t have to fake it anymore. I’m gonna get you back.

Just you wait.

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