15

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.