Short Story Two: Jennifer

Jennifer

Jennifer woke up at her desk with her face laying on her keyboard. She had an imprint of a key on her left cheek that she could see in a mirror that she kept near her screen. Her tiny cubicle was full of various bobble heads, papers, folders, and everything else that she could keep tabletop. She looked around at what she owned. Pictures of her family scattered the wall, put up without care. A poem she wrote in second grade. A calendar with cats on it. She was a sad person. 40 pounds overweight. Nobody waiting for her when she got home. Nobody caring about her at work. Nobody caring about her outside.

She was just a forty-two year old girl with a sad job, a sad house, a horrible body, and a horrible mind.

She thought back to before she was like this. The last time she was thin was back before her divorce. Her and her husband were happy. But she was a bitch. She would nag him. She would act stupid, and get mad at him for it. He turned into a pushover. She decided she could do what she wanted, and started to eat anything and everything. Ice cream, chocolate, anything. She gained weight. Her husband started drinking in order to cope with the relationship. She felt like a queen, and he was just her servant, ready to revoke herself from the kingdom whenever she wanted. She would ask, and she would receive.

In her youth, she had affairs with her boss, rather than having sex with her husband. She was hot. Was. he liked her, and she got plenty of raises. Her husband wasn’t a provider. Wasn’t important to her. She didn’t care about him, and he just had to deal with it. What was he supposed to do about it? Leave? No. he had everything he needed. He knew that she was cheating on him, but he was getting food, money, and most luxuries that people don’t normally get.

He started cheating on her, returning the favor. She didn’t care. It was bound to happen. Their relationship was shallow, up until it started thinning out. They started to talk less. Whenever they did talk, it was mean, sarcastic and rude.

Once she started to gain more and more weight, she lost her boss’ attention. She wasn’t the hot person she was when he started to have an affair with her. She didn’t care. She had the promotions. She only started to care when he started to take them away from her. Making demotions. She was unable to stop him as her pay wage dropped all the way from 35 dollars back to 8.50 an hour. She was depressed.

Her husband decided it wasn’t worth it. He divorced her, and she was on her own. She got a small, sad apartment, as she started gaining more weight.

Once she got to a certain weight, she went to a doctor about it, and she was diagnosed with type two diabetes. This was horrible. The only thing that she had to keep her happy in life was food, alcohol, and drugs. Since the food was taken out of the equation, the drugs and alcohol increased.

She stopped caring for her life. She got up at 7 am, got out of bed, put on clothes, and she went to work. No makeup. Nothing that would make her look good. She stopped. She stopped acting like she cared.

And then she stopped anything else. Today at work, she planned to get her job done, then go home and kill herself. There was nothing in her life that was worth living. She had a bad job that hardly ever paid. She had nothing to live for. Her husband divorced her. She was fat. She had nothing. Nothing. Not even a nice home to come to after a day of crunching numbers.

When she was sitting there at her desk, she thought about the schedule all over again. She finishes work, asks all men in the office if they are interested in sleeping with her. If yes, she goes back to her place with them. If no, then she ties the noose.

She finished her work at about 5:30. It was just starting to get dark outside, and she was getting ready to ask every man. Starting with the ones she absolutely knew would say no. Her boss was number one on her list. Ending with the intern boy that was eyeing her down the last week when he first joined.

She walked into her boss’ office. He was sitting on his desk. “Hey. What’s up.”

“Oh, I was just ending my shift.” she said, getting ready to ask him. “What are you doing?”

“The normal. Crunching numbers. Reviewing the health plan. Something tells me you didn’t come to hear me talk about that though.”

“Well, I was just thinking about old times.” she walked closer to him and rested her fat, disgusting sweaty palms on his desk and let most of her weight on it.

“Yeah, and what?” he said, looking at her hands and then the rest of her with a worried face on.

“Maybe we could, you know, try again.” she told him, as her fingers of her right hand climbed up his arm.

“Okay.” he stood up, “I know that you’re a little bit sad after your divorce and everything, but I don’t think that that would be the best idea.”

“Oh, it’s just a bit of harmless fun between us.”

“Not harmless. Once you started gaining weight, you broke my leg. And that was still twenty pounds ago.”

“Fine.”

“Really. Just fine and you think that will be it. I know you don’t give up that easily.”

“Well, I don’t need you.”

“Nobody else is gonna want a middle aged fat woman who just yells at them all day.”

“Yeah, well you don’t know that.”

“If you ask anybody else, you’re fired.”

“Fine.”

She had to skip all the way down the list. She went to the person at the bottom. The person that would most likely want to have sex with her. The new intern. He was only eighteen.

He stood next to the coffee pot. He had recently poured himself a cup, and he was taking a break in order to try and mentally prepare himself for the all nighter he was going to pull with most of the other people in the office. When she walked into the room looking for him, he said “oh, hey Jennifer,” before she pressed her fat disgusting lips against his.he immediately resisted.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I thought you loved me.”

“No. you’re fucking disgusting. Who the fuck loves you?”

Her heart dropped. Even the person at the top of the list of people who could possibly want to fuck her wanted her. She was hopeless. If she didn’t want to kill herself before, she did now. She looked down at her body, at her various fat folds. She thought about everything that has happened in her life. Her divorce. Her marriage. Her affair. She was putting an end to it.

She rode the public transport home. She sat next to nobody. She was a miserable person that nobody would want to sit next to. It would just depress them. She never had any company. At work, people made fun of her. Made her feel bad. Either that, or they avoided her. Tried to not feel as bad for knowing this girl.

When she walked out of the office, she had one thought running through her mind. Death. Death. She needed the release of it. She needed to feel fulfilled. She had three options at home. Either overdose, bullet or suffocation. The three most likely cases of suicide. She walked out to her car, a straight face on. She didn’t care anymore. She cared less than when she got a divorce. She cared less than when her boss ended their affair. She cared less than before she walked outside of these doors alone. She was done with her life. She wasn’t fulfilled. She had regrets. Bu she didn’t care to fix anything. She made no goodbyes, no long, exasperated suicide note. She would die, and nobody would care. Not even her.

She drove, with no expression, driving straight home. No stops. No dinner. No liquor. Nothing. She was going into this with no stimulate rushing dopamine through her brain. She was going to die, and nothing was going to be the blame but her.

She walked into her house and turned on music, played it as loud as she could. She only played it so that someone would at least come over and see her body to dispose of it before it got more disgusting than it was when she was alive. Before she started to decompose.

She set up a chair with a small wooden backing on it. She tied a noose, and she nailed it into the highest point on the wall. She slipped her neck in and let herself say something out loud before she kicked the chair over. Even though it was for nobody. “Goodbye.”

She could hear her neighbor outside of her door yelling for her to turn down her music, getting more and more angry before walking away to get the landlord to come up and unlock her door.

She kicked over the chair into instant regret. She could feel the rope tightening around her neck, and she gripped it trying to stop it.

She was in luck. The rope snapped, and she fell down to the ground, just before crying. She bawled her eyes out as the front door opened and the landlord alongside her neighbor walked in to see her holding the rope in her hands.

The end.

I won't be posting the next few weeks because I'm working on a new book that should be out early February. I want to get a good start before school comes back into the equation.

Short Story One: Chemo

Chemo

Jimmy paced in the hot room as his mother received surgery in the next one over.  She’s had cancer for the past four years. It shouldn't surprise him as much as it does, but something’s getting to him today. There’s this feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. It’s something that he has had for the past month. A feeling that something will go wrong. He finally sat down in the waiting room outside the operating room. He was determined to think well about the situation.

It’s all fine he thought she’ll be fine.

After sitting down in the room, he took out his phone to try and kill time. The nurse had said that the operation might take four hours. It seemed like forever. His mother on the other side of these walls, struggling to live. Finally having the cancer in her liver be taken out after four years of chemo, radiation, and other forms of medicine that seemed to never work. The cancer was under control. It was staying in the same place. She kept working. He picked up extra shifts waiting tables at Chili's, which just barely helped them scrape by the skin of their necks.

He kept changing seats. There were no other people in the room. No one to comfort him. To tell him it will be alright. Not even anybody who is going through the same pain of having somebody under the knife. He decides to call his friend. His mom went under surgery a few months ago, just a minor blood clot by her ankle. But they wanted it out. So they got it removed.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jimmy said as soon as his friend Philip answered the phone.

“Not much, just out shopping for food.”

“Can you just tell me that everything is going to be okay?”

“Why, what’s going on?”

“My mom is having her liver cancer removed.”

“Dude, that’s great.”

“Yeah, well we don’t know if the operation is successful yet, she’s still under the knife.”

“Oh, well I hope it goes well.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He hung up the phone. His friend might have been enthusiastic about the situation, but it isn’t what he needed.

His father had already been dead for about three years. Shot himself after he found out about everything with his mom. He had come back home from a work retreat that everybody was taking. He had no cell service for six months, and didn’t even call or text home for the whole six months he was there. When he got back, he felt like shit. He was out having fun in Fiji while his mom was undergoing cancer treatments that costed more than they could afford. He was really shaken up, especially the first time he saw Jimmy’s mom’s bald head.

He shot himself in their car, using the shotgun that they kept around for protection. After all that, they had to fend for themselves.

His mom was becoming more and more weak as the chemo treatments continued. The cancer was eating away at her. They tried everything that they could to stop her from working, but they couldn’t. His job didn’t pay enough that he could pay the hospital bills and their basic bills every month, with medication costing $10,000 or more every month. He could only pay one. That meant that his mom had to keep her job.

For a good portion of his life, she worked at Walmart. She would count and stack cans of beans. His dad had a nice office job. When he got home from school, he would be home alone for 15 minutes, and his mom would show up, and take care of him. Starting middle school, he had more freedom. The middle school was closer, so he would spend more time there alone. This meant that his mom could take more shifts at Walmart. So she did. From 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock every afternoon, he would be home alone.

The announcement of his dad going on a work retreat was big. Everybody was excited for him. It was only a few weeks after he had left when Jimmy’s mom got cancer. It was tragic. She started coughing up blood, so they took her to the doctor. They said it had already progressed to stage three. That meant that it was just starting to spread in her body. Using certain veins, the cancer was starting to take over their lives. They had to start paying lots of bills as they tried to get it treated. When his mom asked for a bonus, they greeted her at Walmart with a “demotion” to the management department. She was getting paid three dollars less than she was before, which was a problem because they needed her to make three dollars more an hour.

When it got even worse, after his dad killed himself, they had to take more action. Jimmy was already working at full capacity, so he started to ask around to his friends. Begging, really. Philip started to give them money that he didn’t need from his job. He worked and got paid plenty, so he gave plenty to them. After two more years, here he was. Standing outside the operating room getting ready to either have really good or really bad news thrown at him. Either the cancer has spread even more than it already has, or they were able to remove it.

He was pacing again. He started to think of anything to do. He didn’t want to leave the room, because the operation might finish while he’s gone. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital because hospitals show death and overall suffering. He was completely torn. All he could do was sit.

He started thinking again. What if this hadn’t happened? What if she didn’t get cancer? Would they all just be a big happy family? How was he supposed to know? He was a little speck in the grand scheme of things. There are seven billion people on this earth. Are him and his mother really worth it at all? If they’re so insignificant, then why would they be there in the first place? But there was one question. One that has been eating away at him for the entire time his mother has had cancer.

Why does God hate us?

If god is real, then why would he let his mother get cancer, his father to kill himself, and his family to be put through the pain it has been put through for the past four years?

If god is real then why is his mother in the other room with her stomach open so that she can have god’s mistake fixed inside her?

If god is real, then why shouldn’t I hate him?

His head was spinning. He felt like he was going to throw up. He rushed to the bathroom across the hall from where he was. Opening the door, he threw himself at the toilet, and started right away, no hesitation. No holding it back. He was in fear for his mother’s life. She was only forty years old, and she could die today, leaving a 17 year old to keep her house and pay her hospital bills.

Then what? He spends the rest of his life in mourning of his mother who died of cancer too early in her life. He leaves his friends alone, lives in a small apartment, gets a little bit hurt, only gets disability checks for the rest of his life, drinking his life away. That isn’t the Jimmy she raised. That isn’t the Jimmy he wanted to be. He wanted to be a doctor when he got to the age. He wanted to help people. He wanted to make the world a better place. He wanted to be able to go to any office and know more than any person their. When he walked into the room, he wanted people to think, that’s the guy who saved my daughter. Or he’s had three successful brain surgeries last month.

He was just scared that his mom’s death would interfere with this. He didn’t want to have to subconsciously think about his mother every time he was putting someone else under the knife.

He sat back down in this room, wiping more throw up off of his chin. He wasn’t drinking anything, so he had a disgusting taste in his mouth. The burning in the back of his throat went away after a little while, and he was just looking around again.

Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into sleep.

When he woke up, there was a nurse in front of him, tapping his shoulder. She had the results.

“Well then, what are they.” Jimmy said, scared but excited at the same time.

“Well, I have good news and bad news.”

“Give the good news first.”

“Well, we have taken the cancer out. All tumors have been removed from her liver.”

“Well, that’s great news, but what could be bad about that?”

“The cancer has actually spread to her kidney, and has reached stage four.”

Jimmy’s heart dropped. He thought that this was it. Either she lived for a long time, or she dies a young death. But it feels like she is in purgatory. A stage between the two. Between life and death. She’s been there for four years, and she isn’t leaving now. They had two options. Number one: they gave up and let his mother die just around the age of forty; Number two: they continue to fight and keep their fingers crossed that eventually something will work.

Number one means accepting death. Letting his mother die. Letting her, hypothetically, go to a better place. No more pain. No more suffering. She would just die.

Number two means that they would have to work harder. Spend more money than they did before on chemo and other drugs that they need to save her life. Have more and more surgeries. Be in debt for a long time.

They decided number one.

Six months later, his mother died, in her normal bed, in her normal house, when she layed down to take a nap. Jimmy cried at her bedside for ten minutes before he called anybody to come over. First, he called nine-one-one. Then his friend Philip. They both showed up about the same time. They both asked the same questions about his mother. When they were done, they went inside and looked at the body. She was peaceful. Serene. Despite the pain that she had been in in the last four years, she finally seemed to not have any.

In the last six months, Jimmy and his mother had bonded more than they had the rest of his life. She had told him her life stories. They were like open books with each other.

He was depressed for months after she died. He lived in the same home, went to school on his own, and paid taxes every month. He had already turned 18 before she died. He stayed in the home to take care of her. Now that she’s dead it’s the only thing that reminds him of her.

The end.

The point of this story was to see if I could write a short story that told a message, made sense, and had character development all in just five pages. It took me about 45 minutes to write this story, which happened around 11 o'clock. Here it si for your viewing pleasure.

Blood: Epilougue

Epilogue

Then I woke up.

I lifted myself off of the pavement outside of the airport. I was weak, and my chest hurt. I knew where I was. I didn’t know who took me.

Whoever they were, they wanted me to leave.

I could feel the tickets I had bought a couple days ago for salt lake city in my pocket. No luggage. No problem.

I went through security, got on my flight at 9:00 pm on new year's night. When we were off, it was January second, 2017.

And I guess that’s it.

Blood: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Carletta was in front of me, and she had a man wearing a mask standing behind her, holding a shotgun. When I looked up, the man said “where’s my money.”

“What money? Who are you?”

“You owe me, because you were supposed to sell the coke. Give me the goddamn money.”

Okay, he had a gun, the room was small, and he wanted money. I knew his name. Gabriel Gonzales. He was my boss in albuquerque. I sold Coke for him. When I didn’t sell coke, he would kill someone. So, I sold the coke. But I didn’t this time. I was going to leave. I was going to tell him. He was distant, and high constantly. I didn’t. Big mistake.

“Fine.” he said, disappointed as he pressed the gun to the side of Carletta’s skull, and pulled the trigger, killing her.

“Dude, what the shit!”

“Give me that money, man.”

“Okay, shit.”

He kicked me out, and I ran back over to my house, where James and the white kid were waiting for me. “It’s going down.” I exclaimed as I walked in. they knew just what it meant, and they both stood up and grabbed all the guns we owned.

Which was four.

One 44 revolver, one Uzi, one Hunting rifle, one Glock. That’s all we needed. James was the gang banger. He got the Uzi. I was slow and careful. I got the revolver. The white kid was a sharp shooter. He got the Hunting rifle and the Glock if things got hairy too close by.

Together we were the three assholes who were going to kill other assholes because we owed them money.

The Hunting rifle was silenced. It wouldn’t make a sound. The other guns weren’t. So we needed to kill as many as we could and get out of there within 18 minutes. We timed it. That’s how long it takes the cops to get there.

We all got ready. Loaded clips. Punched each other in the stomach. The usual stuff. When we got there, the people inside were all getting ready to come over to our house for the money.

James took point, I was behind. The white kid was 500 yards away. It was fixing to be a great day.

James kicked open the door, allowing it to swing halfway open before he swept the room. One full clip and three people were hit hard enough they were down. Next was me. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. everybody else was dead. Next room was more of the same. Bang bang, you’re dead. The white kid shot the boss as he shot me in the arm. When we got home, we picked at my wound and tried to fix it. We really didn’t.

“Well shit. Do you think we’ll get away with it?” asked James. He was scared, which makes sense. We had just killed a lot of people.

My wound starting hurting more and more as the adrenaline calmed down. “Yeah. according to this city, we have never done anything wrong. We’re model citizens.”

That night, I slept sweeter than usual. On the chair next to the door. Drunk off of whiskey, high off weed, I went to bed like a baby.

There is one more post, which is the epilogue. Don't stop paying attention. There are short stories coming up as well

Blood: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I could see a cut on my arm, long, deep. The windshield was almost broken, so I kicked it out. I got out of the car, and helped Carletta get out herself. She was less hurt than me, but less strong all the same. I had hit the gym quite a bit in the last month. We were on our way to get to Cheddar’s scratch kitchen, closer to the west-side. I was driving, and the freeway was mostly empty. We were riding around 85 miles per hour. A drunk driver skidded onto the road from the merging lane, and hit me from behind. We swerved and span out. What a way to get to know somebody.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, scared the cut only looked minor.

“I’m fine, just a little hurt.”

“Okay. Well, i’m gonna call the cops.”

“Alright, go for it.” she was shaken up. So was I. we could have died. We weren’t exactly going slowly. I took a look at the car. It was definitely totaled. The other car wasn’t. I ran over to the man in his car. The operator answered, and I said “hello, I was just in a car accident on I-40, and I don’t think the other guy is gonna be okay.”

“Okay sir, i’ll put you through to the police, do you know the nearest mile marker.

“Yes, it would be 49.”

“There should be some police there in a moment.”

“Thank you.”

I hung up, and looked at the man in his car. He had his head on the dashboard, and I could see blood seeping out of the sides.

Carletta ran up next to me to look at him. “Jeez, he really got fucked up.”

“That could have been us.”

She didn’t want to think about that. I was confused. Why is it that this guy could be dead, but our car took more damage, and flipped over, and we survived. I even passed out. Why would he die?

Carletta ran up to the window, and knocked on the glass. “Hello, are you okay.”

There was no response to her question. He was most definitely dead. A few minutes, a squad car and an ambulance pulled up next to the wreck. They set up cones, and pried the man’s car door open, to reveal that the man was more hurt than me and Carletta had thought. They pulled him off the dashboard and he woke up. I could see four deep cuts, and a broken nose that were obvious. When he woke up, he let out a painful scream, and yelled “fuck” nice and loud so everyone could hear it.

When he got up and started trying to walk. He fell right over. He was a mixture of drunk, and injured. The paramedics helped him up, and then to the ambulance. He had a compound fracture in his right leg, and a broken bone that was split cleanly, so skin and muscle dangled the rest of his forearm. He mumbled something mean and painful. Once they got him in the ambulance, they shoved some morphine in his arm. When he started screaming, they restrained him, to make sure they would be able to give him proper medical treatment. I could see him scream after every single bump in the road. The expression on his face told me he was in pain, even before the accident.

One of the paramedics saw the cut on my arm and sat me down to check it out. He dabbed on rubbing alcohol and it burned my skin. When he was done, he put on a cloth bandage, and let me go on my merry fucking way.

I called a cab for Carletta, and another for me. They both came around the same time. I got in mine, and Carletta got in her’s, because we weren’t romantic. We just left. That was the end. The taxi driver took me to my apartment, and I could see James and the white kid sitting inside. When I walked in, they were both tied into wooden chairs, and somebody hit me in the back of the head with a frying pan. In my mind’s eye, I could see the words “wake up.”

Then I woke up.

James had a few of his ribs broken from the fall. After I called 911, a paramedic and a police car pulled up. James was still breathing, beside the fact that he had fallen off the second story, after breaking glass. Some shards were sticking out of his legs, so he couldn’t walk.

James had always thought that it was my fault that he had gotten into a gang, and essentially that I was the reason that the three of us were in so much trouble all the time. Every time something bad would happen to me, he would tell em about it. He would always say something like, “why did you do this to us?” or “what were you thinking?” For some reason, in his mind, I was always the bad guy.

This wasn’t the first time he had tried to kill the white kid either. One time he pointed a gun and stuck it right into his face, and started screaming demands at him. The white kid met the demands, which were step the fuck off, and in return, James agreed not to blow his head off, and leave me with the gun.

I knew that James was the type of person that would do anything and everything that he was told. One time, I asked him to kill some random person, just because he was behind on coke money, and James slit his throat right there. James didn’t care about his actions. If there was nobody to hold him back, James would kill, slaughter and otherwise rape anybody he wanted to. If he wanted to do it, we would, no questions asked.

The police questioned me. I told them all about James. Well, not really. I didn’t tell him he had a history of violence, that we were both in a gang, or that I had come from Tallahassee. So basically, I was lying through my teeth to this police officer. Once I told him the entire story, I knew what I needed to do. It was time to run away. Just one more time.

The hotel that we stayed at was high end, and right near the airport. I took about 15 minutes and walked over there. The ticket to salt lake city was about $400. Which was not too much for me, because from the time I started selling coke in Albuquerque, I had already made about $20,000. I walked a few blocks over and got a soda from some restaurant I forget the name of. The flight was set to leave in about five hours. I had all the tie in the world to do basically whatever I wanted. But I still needed to protect myself.

I had a gun, a knife, and a corkscrew on me. I dumped them all in a nearby trash can so that security wouldn’t give me too much trouble. I was on my way back to the airport, when something had struck me in the back. It was sharp, and a loud bang followed. I fell onto my stomach. As I heard people screaming and could feel the presence of somebody coming closer and closer to me. He flipped me onto my back, and I could see his Colombian smile under his bushy mustache before he said “wake up.”

Then I woke up.

The room was musky and dirty. There was nobody near me. I sat in a twelve inch chair that only held half of my body. I was leaning to my left with a door sitting in front of me. There was a wall directly on either side. It was dark, and all that was lighting the room was a small 50 watt light bulb above me. I could barely stand up, because the door was so close to my face. The knob twisted before I touched it, and James was on the other side.

He pulled me out, and I fell over. He helped me up to my feet and said “dude, are you alright.”

“Yeah, just haven’t really moved for a few hours.”

The room outside was the living room of Carletta’s house. She let us stay there for a few nights while we had our apartment bug-bombed. We had just moved in, and there was already so many cockroaches inside, we couldn’t sleep.

I stepped up, and we walked into the next room over, where Carletta had let out some cereal for us all to eat, and the white kid had already poured himself some fruity pebbles.

We both sat down and Carletta said “Hi. How much are you guys gonna eat.”

“We haven’t eaten in three days.”

“Answer the question.” she said, in a joking manner.

James thought she was serious, and said “ I’m fucking hungry.”

She looked at him kind of confused as her smile changed. She walked away, just to get away from him.

“Good job man.” the white kid told me, and I was just as confused as Carletta was.

When we were done, we all left the house as fast as we could. We didn’t want the same thing that happens every time we are somebody’s guest. Which was that our host dies. We decided to head  over to the Felony to get some coffee. Carletta didn’t like the smell so she wouldn’t let us drink any in her house or when we stayed in the motel.

The Felony seemed more claustrophobic than ever before, and we sat down. Coffee smelled strong and we all paid a bit for our coffee, and booked it. We didn’t want anybody to find out where we were. Especially any police. We wanted to avoid anybody in our gang, so we wouldn’t have any more jobs to do. We didn’t want any police to know where we were because we have killed plenty of people in Albuquerque, and we didn’t want to got to jail very much.

Once we were a few blocks away, we decided to stop and look at the construction happening on central. They were just starting to dig up the road. The days were about 80 degrees, and I was very sure that the workers for the city were hot as shit out there. They were getting ready to put in some trolley system or some shit that everybody was bitching about. I didn’t understand it, but it did make it harder to get around. You mostly had to walk, and there was a much higher charge for taxis.

We all walked around, and didn’t do much the rest of the day but wait for the bug bomb to clear out of our house. When it was done, the exterminators called me and told us about it. We walked about ten blocks back and made it back to our house. It stank, but none of us were sick.

I slept on a bed that folded out from our couch, James and the white kid took a lumpy, stained and disgusting piece of shit in the only other room. I stayed up late listening to music. It was almost like we were back in Tallahassee again.

That was, until somebody decided to try and break in.

Behind the couch, was a window. Somehow, despite the lock and the fact that we were living on the third floor, somebody opened it up and jumped over me to try and steal our shit. He didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know who he was. Maybe he was on of our clients. He saw our shitty tv, and moved into the room that James and the white kid were in. I stood up, and pulled out my gun. He could hear me and turned the light on in the room I was in. I was already pointing the gun at him, and he was scared as shit.

I got a good look at him. He was maybe 20. Scrawny as shit, and unarmed. His hair was dirty, and so was his clothes. He stood there silent, as he could hear James and the white kid waking up and getting out of bed in the room behind him. He looked like he was in so much fear, that he was going to piss himself. I told him “You picked the wrong house, motherfucker.” and cocked my gun.

James got the shotgun in the next room and pressed it against the back of this kid’s head. He started crying. He begged “Please don’t kill me. Please.”

I whispered, “you’re gonna jump out the window then.”

James poked him with the shotgun, directing him back the way he came. His hands were up, as he walked slowly toward the couch, and stepped up onto it. He put both his hands on the windowsill, and jumped onto the pavement. I heard a crack, and a scream. I knew he broke a lot of bones. I didn’t call a paramedic. He knew what he as doing could get him hurt, and it did.

I went to bed. I was tired as shit, so it didn’t take too long. I had a dream where I was in a closet, and somebody busted open the door and hit both my knees with a hammer before screaming at me to wake up.

Then I woke up.

Carletta was sitting across from me. So was the white kid and James. Block wooden chairs held them still, as they looked at me. They weren’t even tied up. No duct tape. Just sitting in a room. The room was an interrogation. As I looked to the side, I could see a baby blue room, and one way glass. We were all there in the investigation of the kid who leaped from our window. He was trying to press charges. We knew he wouldn’t win. He broke into our house. We all knew what happened. I mean, I knew everything. But I told them what happened. They believed me, because it seemed to all line up. Also, I didn’t lie to James and the white kid that often.

A police officer walked in, and sat down at the end of the table to my right. “Good afternoon.”

“You too.” I said, trying to seem polite.

There is something that I have learned about police officers. I mean, you have to have learned something if you have to evade getting in trouble as many times as I have. You just act polite, and be extremely nice to them. Pretend you haven’t been in trouble. Have them explain all the charges, rather than acting like you know them. Try and joke around.

Most of all, act like the good guy. Make the other person look as bad as you can. It will make them look worse as a person. Even though you do this, don’t put yourself on a pedestal. Gloating makes you seem like a worse person.

“What happened here.” said Carletta. She was genuinely concerned.

We didn’t have a lawyer present. That makes it look like you don’t need somebody telling you whether what the next thing you say will be incriminating. Besides, I was right. The kid came into our house, and we pointed guns we bought. Illegally. Shit. maybe we did need a lawyer.

“Well, the boy is saying that you invited him in and threatened to kill him if he didn’t jump out of the window. He is saying that you lured him into your house with the promise of an illegal job, selling drugs. All we need is your statements.” The cop said all this with a small smile. I think he knew that the kid came in through the window. He was already on our side. I don’t totally know why.

“I wasn’t there,” said Carletta. And it’s true. She wasn’t.

“Yes, well, you did use to lease the apartment, didn’t you? Because if you did, you could be liable to it again.”

“Well I did. I moved out years ago. Why would it possibly matter.”

“There’s just a possibility that you could have been involved.”

I could feel a thumping in my head. From the back of it. It was almost like somebody was hitting me repeatedly. I could hear this strange gunshot kind of sound too.

“Well, see what happened was that Me and the white kid were both sleeping, right. And all of a sudden we wake up because our door was wide open and the light was on in the other room. I sat up far and I could hear Gerry yelling at this kid in the other room. He had his gun out, so I reached behind the nightstand, and grabbed the shotgun. I walked up behind the kid and pressed the gun behind his head. He let out a whimper and begged not to die. So we said ‘okay’ and made him jump out the window. We thought that would be a good punishment for him. We didn’t call any cops.” James seemed smart. Smarter than usual.

Sometimes I forget that James is black.

The cop looked at the rest of us and we all nodded our heads.

“Well, his statement…” he was cut off by Carletta.

“Look, we told you the whole thing, can we just go to a holding cell or something.” she was breaking all my rules when dealing with police. She cut him off, talked in a smart ass voice, and she was demanding action be taken in her favor. I had to do something. But I didn’t.

“Okay.” said the policeman, seeming more satisfied with the situation than they usually are.

When he left the room to get paperwork, we all leaned over to James. This was the first time he had spoken up to someone that was superior to him, without killing them with a knife of course. The cop walked back in and let us go. They questioned the kid again and he came clean after hearing our statement. We were free to go, after we signed a couple papers. When we left, we all went to our respective homes and went to bed.

Then I woke up.