And I stand there in the darkness, train blaring out its
horn into the otherwise still night.
I wish this fucking
neighborhood would shut the hell up!
They come over like zombies with direction. Their purpose
already evaporated from so many before.
They don’t know that though.
He throws a bike into the abandoned yard. I freeze in
place like some tweaker-fighting scarecrow. I stand there paralyzed with anger.
There is no weed left for them to take. Just me in this dark yard; shovel in
hand. Wearing the same uniform they use, like the Nazgûl they come over
the fence, bearing bypass pruners, loppers, and oversized pocket knives in
their respective pitches to rob me of my plants.
Each night for the last several months it’s been this way. We wait them
out.
We wait for them like
fucking idiots.
It has come to this. In the depths of me something has become infected. Where
I once imagined the first of my mangled girls as an accident, I am overcome
with relief that my shovel was within arms-reach. Feeling light in my hands, there
isn’t another object in our whole operation that feels more trained in my
hands.
I imagine I’ll go for their eyes first; then their neck. Maybe I’ll lop
their heads clean off after I take them to the ground. Nice and clean.
We’ve never issued the
text before: “Alpha protocol.”
It wouldn’t even matter, if I could get them in the ground in under an
hour. They’re gone. Just like that, gone.
At this stage in the game I don’t even care. I want violence and vengeance.
Realistically though, we are but ships out to sea. My best friend faces
deportation. My mother is fat. My roommates are all addicted to the drug. And we
fight on, surrounded on all fronts in an unstoppable rising tide of
desperation.
And I wait in the dark gripping my shovel as if it is some umbilical cord
that will connect me back to the earth through violence.
Realizing we cannot have what has been lost. As we can only speculate to
what could have been. And it is the curse of our reality.
