OH COME YE MERRY GENTLEMEN THIS IS THE CITY OF OUR DREAMS	

—Neon Sign overlooking 59th Street Columbus Circle, Manhattan Island, NYC.

Three months remain before the end of the world.

Ethan Holt looked out at his city from the tony apartment folded into the circumference of Trump’s 59th Street Columbus Circle.  There was a hybrid homemade modular FIM-92 Stinger rocket system broken down into its component parts under the doona where the pillows would be. He had brought it through on a C-130 gunship three days before. The bird tattooed half of Khandar Province so very casually on its way out of theatre. Like an afterthought. Or an afterbirth.

On the CNN tower facing the digs his father’s empire had bought him the Son of Screaming Jack Holt watched a Post Office burn. He threw his ALICE pack on the bed and checked the loads in his service issue Glock 19 and the backup throwaway G26. He put the Glock 19 aside. The G26 was strictly cold carry and was not registered anywhere in the databases of this world or any other.  A penitentiary offense if Bloomberg’s goons caught him within the city limits on the street. Three years in Rikers minimum. Doesn't matter what your name was. Plaxco Buress

blew up the post office and back to fort tryon park, uncle jack holt's answer to never-never land.  the factory washing the money and bringing the workers in.  with the stiff blue collar and the free 

	There was sand from Afghanistan tracked in onto the floor alongside his desert tan jump boots. Aftermarket so as not to break his goddamn ankles during static line night jumps. The gear [kit, he reminded himself for the millionth time, when you go full Delta it is kit, not gear; it is mates, not brothers at arms. the origins of the commando led straight back to Charlie Beckwith and his time spent with the SAS in Hereford, UK.

Toby lay in his ridiculous waterbed in his ridiculous gold-pink hotel robe and thought about the first time he had met Zazie Lenore.  Her halo in the deep-sea green wash of the night vision array clipped to his helmet.  His father had ribbed him about that.  Why the hell do you boys carry so much stuff?  In my day it was a knife, a parachute, and a week’s supply of Snickers chocolate bars.  His father had been SF – a Green Beret, if you liked, and most of the SFOD-D did not - in Project Greenlight, back in Indochina, right around the time the Legionaires got their asses handed to them at Dien Bien Phu. Pop had orders to sit there with a goddamn satchel nuke and watch and if the wind blew a certain way, to pull the pin.  The wind declined the dare, and Ethan Gad had done the Q Course twenty years later and was selected.  And the Kennedy family still sent them a Christmas Card every year.

	You see, the Kennedys knew that after they had finished bootlegging that there was another industry to be founded pre-prohbition, and that was the soda water and soft drink business. One hand washed the other. The Dorchester Soda Works was born.  

WOTN.  We Own The Night.  

It was South America.  They had scrambled the Little Birds right before dawn. The company men were still in Quito fucking up the transfer of power from Rafael Correa to his Number Two, so at least there were no triple-PhD Ivy League Chaperones on this op, for once. Whupwhupwhupwhup.  Sitting on the landing struts with his M-4 clipped to his shoulder.  They hadn’t switched to FNSCAR weapons systems yet.  Only for photo ops. Not for clandestine ops. Not for black mask jobs like this.

Holt cleared the reticle of what they were using for Starlight scopes these days, infared Leupold 7 x 1000. He could read the warnings on their cigarette packs with this fucking optic. A forty-thousand dollar piece of glass if it were one. The eye-relief was pure. Figures swam into being. And Ethan Tobias Holt nearly shit himself.

It's the same girl. Look at those dick sucking lips, those eyes like dark chocolate drops.
It can't be. It isn't. It's not possible. There are no coincidences in a world this shallow.
It is. 
This is the girl. The one Samuel has lit out after. It all comes together somehow.  His father  always wanted him to go officer. He did OCS on a lark - he didn't expect the Regiment to let him, but his CO said fine after he had stopped an attempt to scrag him in his sleep using an IED that they had drug all the way back from a road twenty miles out of Qatar. Kandahar Province, which was just a black goddamned inkspot on any political map Command thought to dress up to their A-Team.

They had lost one in the Peace Corps. What they didn't tell most of those candy-assing liberal college kids was that the PC was technically the military.  Even the forms were the same. The only one that was different was the pledge that you were disavowed from ever picking up a weapon during your time in grade or service or goodwill pattycake or whatever the fuck it was they did out there. 

He wasn't in the Peace Corps, however. He was a by-God Ranger, a Batt boy who met Colonel Watkins, and Watkins was like the next fucking Charlie Beckwith. He didn't give a fuck about the needs of the Army. He gave a fuck about taking his boys and putting them in the pole position like a bunch of stock cars, the best of the best, and halfway through turning the race into a demolition derby.  And when the smoke had cleared and the pit crews were running around with extinguishers filling the metal cages with  all the panels blown off with C02 and Halon, Watts took the two or three survivors and then gave  them two days off and then lined them up in the next race against everyone else who had survived the previous umpteen races. And that was what SFOD-D was. Or CAG. Or whatever the fuck they were calling the Unit these days. Morphing like a shifting antigen virus.   

Colonel Watkins picked the crush out of his green beret where a full silver bird sat proudly pinned  to the birthmark-red flash patch showing that he was one of the 8th Special Forces Group. Holt's  beret - the apex of so many Army grunts military careers, was already obsolete. He had actually  forgotten it in a cab in DC and when Watts heard THAT, he was flat on his face riding the forward rest position for eight long hours, piss running into his boots.  He did not drop his eyes the whole time from the Colonel, and Watts stood there and gave it back to him. For eight fucking hours. That was love. That was how you got men to fight and die for you.  When the Colonel finally gave the order to recover, Toby would have gone back to 207th Street, Inwood and killed his father if Watts had asked him to.

But not Samuel. He owed Samuel Noel too much.

At the top of his game - after Colonel, even full-bird Colonel, they pushed you behind a desk and you watched smart bombs eat up the white space on monitors until it was time to draw your pension check. He was a hard man. 

Ethan sat in his black mask chaps, the thin snake eating it's own tail dagger of the D-Boys, Delta Force, safety pinned through his flesh, piercing his right bicep. He had not blinked. The soldiers in his unit were resigned to their fates. They had a sixty percent mortality rate by age thirty five. Holt was already a Master Sergeant. That many people had bought it. There was a time where there was just two of them in the Western Hempisphere. They had a betting pool to see who would win it. The loser had to take his letter and deathbag back to his woman.  His girl went lez in college anyway. Said she didn't know him anymore.  Said she couldn't understand why he would want to be a killer like his father. That she thought he was different. Then called him up four days after she graduated saying she needed him. Tobias thought of her eating out some co-ed and wiping her mouth on her bra.  Told her: "I thought I knew you too" and was ashamed for two weeks after for giving her that much.

Join us.

The CIA spook tapped the ash on his cigarette, a Players Navy Cut.  Toby hated the fucking CIA. All a bunch of fatherless, motherless bastards with their IQ's pinned to the top of the CONUS parabola. 

They thought they were in fucking Impossible Mission Force. Their expense accounts were like departmental budgets.  Disavowing any and all knowledge of their people’s actions.  Leaving men behind until their consciences ought to be blushing like the motherfucking day. Stanford. Harvard. If bullshit were music they’d be a big brass band.

"Officer's Club is on the East Side of Midtown, boys."
"We're not in the service," said one of the sunglassed, grey flannel suited fruits.
"I never would have guessed," Ethan Holt said, and dropped his Spyderco Harpy from beneath his wristwatch into his palm while placing his drink back on the wet bar and signaling for another. Oldest misdirection piece of tradecraft in the book and College Boy one through six had missed it. Not saying much in terms of military intelligence. Two words combined that can't make sense. Oh Dave Mustaine, where are you tonight, he thought. The bartender brought him another whiskey, neat as you please.

"Not interested," Toby said, and blew on his Cutty and water. The barkeep was salting the Colonel's beer after beheading the foam with a practiced flick of the wrist. Toby thought that Colonel Watts was the last man on earth, hardass or not, who even did that anymore. The bulletproof window blew out of the Fort Bragg Officer's clubhouse with the first shot. The second caught Watts in the flash of his beret. The inside of the dead man’s skull looked like ambergris.  Tobias Holt backed up 

"Do we have your attention yet?"

The hell of it was, they did. They had just gunned down a full-bird colonel in the most secret and prestigious unit the US Army had. This was beyond the pale. Watty was a solider and soldiers died. That was their fucking job.  oby did his. He buried him.  But not before sliding off the barstool and getting right in the spooks face.  Knowing he could cut him open with his fingernails by the throat if he wanted.  Knowing that he would eventually lose in the end, when the Special Activities Division safehouse was hip to the scene, three dozen of his own – domestic doorkickers, probably retired SF on contract status – they wouldn’t use Rangers in-house for that sort of party, and they’d wind him to the floor in a shower curtain or down comforter, and pull him out by his chilblains to the street.  Days later broken by torture, his teeth and fingernails pulled out, an icepick in his balls and rough chawed divots in his side where they had sicced the dogs on him, dragged floppy timber sawblades across his chest, eardrums hooked to alligator clips and then slow-as-she-goes weeping, cooked black eyeballs blown out with tractor batteries, his penis taken with boltcutters early and tacked to the wall where he could see it as they hooked up the IV bag to keep his fluids steady, a vetted medic on hand with combat training to monitor pulse, blood loss, alpha waves.  While the Man asked “Why?” in seven languages, patiently, like there weren’t flies eating all the parts of you that could never grow back without a freezer and a surgery wing of a megahospice.  All the things he himself had done. 
 
          But then comes the pain. The real shit.  The IRS freezing your accounts.  Your credit rating disappearing. Men sent out to rape your wife, your dog left poisoned and shitting green foam across the living room carpet. There were worse things than dying. There was living in reset. Everything you worked a lifetime's worth of proud sweat for, gone. All the things that they forget to teach you and you just sort of pick up along the way. These skinny CIA fucks that looked like skinny indie rock losers that had gotten lost on their way to Seattle, with their perfectly capped teeth and their bossanova educations. Their PhD’s and their KUBARK manuals. He wanted to know what their game was.  
You interested yet?  
Toby leaned forward and gestured at his ear.  Hard of hearing, yanno?  Gunshots, close range, indoors, like ya do.
The two spooks leaned in like fucking sea bass hip to grind-and-shine of the spinner lure kicking.  Toby yanked his rod and reel.  Their heads were bushy in the back, gave him purchase to grip onto, tangling around the fingers he had broken in the drawer of some Iraqi General’s fuckhouse for shits and giggles in 05’.  He shattered their skulls against one another.  Caught them right in the sweet spot of the skull where everything kissed like eggshells.  Wham and splatter.  All that education just dripping off the back of the bar.  Felt like napalm, like victory, like an Academy Award. The Gandar district.  Ghazni.  All nothing to those men. Just leftist Hollywood, laying down the lie.  Started with Trumbo. Never quite stopped.

Another, he called, dropping the bodies and raising the dead whisky glass.  The barkeep hesitated only for a second, then left the bottle.

We'll find you, Delta. A voice behind him.  The man’s lungs and respiratory system couldn’t be more than 140 pounds soaking wet.  No weapon or direct orders not to use it.  He would have fired it already if he had.  Which meant that Toby was special.  They wanted him bad.
No one calls us that anymore.  Obsolete, yanno.
It’s immaterial.
Not on this base, little girl.  Go run home to your mama, peckerwood.  Before you get a pasting that makes this look like hot brekky on a cold spring morning.  Look up the Fan Dance.  Run it.  Come back to me when you’ave.  I’m done dancing with children, ken?  
The door, spinning on its hinge.   
Toby tipped the bottle at Watty’s potted skull and drank deeply, pouring some across the bar.  He imagined bagpipes, flowers, Arlington Cemetery.  Then went to find one of Manhattan’s last pay phones.  A Cleaner showed up forty minutes later – half the time it took to find the Bell kiosk.

By that point, his father had already called Manilow Bonn, the most dangerous man in the world.


	Toby woke drenched in sweat.
	I’ve seen this girl before.  Samuel, you red-headed stepchild with the jew-boy name.   Her halo.  Her halo of fireflies like a crown of peace caught in the sandstorm of FARC-swept Ecuador.
	Time on target.
	“Time,” Toby said, and thumbed back the relief switch on his Remington M-70.
	“Call the ball.”
	Shut the fuck up, Toby hissed into the mike, his thumb ground into the MUTE button.  He switched his helmet cam off.
	Rainbird, your optics are gone.  
	“Lost them on the jump.”   
	“Switch to reserve.”
	“Negative. Helmet dashed.”  Billy looked at him like he was crazy and mouthed the words COURT MARTIAL. Toby unsnapped the thumbbreak on his sidearm and gave Billy a look that could freeze a mammoth. Billy stopped mouthing intonations and looked away. They all were men with some rank on them. Some even had a little war on their chests, a CIB, some purple hearts, one Bronze Star that was more the commander’s generosity than any real valor on his part - but this was Tobias’s party and they damn well knew it. 
	Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.
	Tobias couldn’t.  In the scope the fireflies were blinding the green optics of the massive Leupold Starlight Scope. He broke the sight from the gun from the twistaway mount and went for his red dot laser iron sights.  That face.
	That face. He knew that face.  Too round to be in the jungle long on starvation rations, a nose too Roman to be Latin American.
	Zazie.
	“Can’t be,” he whispered, fouling the mike with his emotions.
	“Repeat, Rainbird, Unclear.”
	Toby yanked the radio system paid by US tax dollars that could have kept him in a hospital bed in New York City for two weeks at the finest care imaginable and dashed it against the rock he crept behind.
	Billy was staring at him.  “I can take her from here.”
	“Stay off of the rover,” Ethan Gad told him, and not kindly.  
	“I have the fucking shot, Ethan!” Billy had been raped in Afghanistan.  They didn’t just rape women over there.  It was camel jockey policy.  He had seen it in Mexico as well during Spec Ops training, where they practiced on the Sinaloa and Culican drug cartels. Who were they going to complain to? These were people that fed their babies Coca-Cola rather than formula. Billy got the rash end of the lash, and was pulled out by the PJ's about two days before they were going to decapitate him in the name of whatever. It was a sick business. Capture your enemy and fuck him until you got the order to kill him.
	“Fuck this noise, Ethan, I’m going.”  Bill Innes squatted over his weapon. He was capable. Very goddamn capable. Not a surgeon, but he could put meat in the freezer. And this girl was from the neighborhood.  The Kitchen.  Hell’s Kitchen before they gentrified it into Clinton and the rest of the Westies tore ass up to 207th Street and began breeding like guppies to hold back the niggers that threatened to spill over the thin concrete walkway into Highbridge Park and tell Irish Catholicism to go spit.

	Ethan left the rifle in its bipod and drew his baby Glock. The G26. The little one. The one not on any weapons logs that he had taken off a dead Haji. It was his throwaway piece and Bill Innes knew it.  “Not unless you want me to tell your wife about the raghead blowbang you gave in Qatar.”
	“Ethan.”
	“Is it cool?”
	“We’re cool,” he said. “I’m your brother, Ethan.”
	“Say it into the comm.”
	“I don’t have it.  Repeat, negative.  Dark cover.”
After a second the word came back, scratchy and scrambled.
        "Copy, Rainbird. I say again, Good Copy. Negative Double Zero. No shot. Exfil Path Alpha. O&O."
        "Rainbird out." Innes clicked off and gave him a face, began breaking down his gear. 
	Girl had gotten herself lost.  Operators get sent out on these missions.  It’s little known that the Peace Corps is protected by the Operators of the region.   She was lost.  Caught by the FARCs in the hills. But she was laughing and it carried.  She sounded as happy as any woman could sound.
	That was Zazie.  Zazie. Why did they say her name was Lina?  Fucking intelligence spooks. Couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a search warrant.
"What the fuck was that, Ethan? I mean, what the goddamn motherfucking nightfighting jesus come lately kind of rube shit was that? What are you, ten days out of the fucking Darby Queen all of a sudden?" Bill Innes turned to throw his ruck over his shoulder. It was a three hundred pound swing if it were one.
	Damn it.  He had to figure this out.  How to get his story straight.
"I mean it, Ethan. Command is going to hear about this. There's no-" he paused to swing his 338 Lapua over his other shoulder.  Ethan Holt waited for this, tipped off his brother's helmet as neat as you please and shot Billy Innes through the top his head. Canoed his ass. There was nothing left of his face to identify.
	"Sorry," he said. He changed the barrel out on his throwaway weapon to one of a dozen like barrels he had collected during his time in sandbox, in the mix, pick your pejorative. Because you never knew, did you? He would cut it up enroute.
You just never did know.

That grey section. He scored 320 on his AFPT.  Hungover and drunk.  The kid had a compass in his head. He could plot an azimuth using a wristwatch and a blade of grass.  Stoned out of his eyeballs watching the Journey of Natty Gann on the Wonderful World of Disney, ABC-TV, the subtitles dubbed in Farsi. Lots of guys passed their language quals this way.

Be very careful, Samuel said.  Zazie’s lover.  Before he got educated and fell in love and lost his mind.
This girl. 
You bet your ass he was interested.

***

Nathaniel Ladd was Portland's own and raised in 162 months of gray (18 years times 9 months/year).

The Ashlands of Mount St. Helens were stuffy with dust and the red four-wheel-drive had turned to the side of the road.  Samuel would get concerned and would need the truck time to rest. The underground pool.  These caves are everywhere she said.  The Cold War ended and caves were left in the dirt and the dust and the apartment buildings time immorium/al.  Some have couches and some dinette sets. 
Did you ever think this would happen, she said?  Yes, he said.  I knew I would see you again. I never thought this would happen, she said. So what, then?  The boy asked and the girl said I killed my monster, is what.  Do you promise, he said and she said nothing.  You never promise, he said.  It is one of the few things I don’t like about you, that waffling.  The girl Zazie said nothing.  You know my true name, she said.  Noa, he said, like the ark. You had two of everything. Two sides to every story. Two names.  Two lovers.  Don’t ask who the other man is she said I won’t tell you. I already know he said. It is Nathaniel Ladd.  How did you know that she said and he said I introduced you.  I changed his tire once.

How are your feet he said and she said Fine.  Shit he said.  That’s not good.  No, she said.  She slid into the water with her bathing suit from 1943, stodgy black one piece with the white ruffle along the bustline.  That’s some bust, he said appreciatively, adverbially.  You shut up, she said.  She does not see the Valium in his bag or the Adderall or the benzodiazapene or the oxycodone or the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and he feels he is home free and early in the morning when men feel the house is their own he is tiptoeing through the azalea of sleep without his contact lenses seated yet, feeling for the pills and hearing their telltale rattle, the smoking gun, even though he has stuffed the bottles with toilet paper and she says to him when he comes back to him “you take a lot of pills” and he says “I love you” to which she turns her ample back to him and he presses himself up hard against her body, her round body, her pearplum body, always schoolgirlish, always a woman who looks like she has those last three pounds of babyfat she is trying to shed, and it makes her young, and her skin glows like radium in those nights of morning where the cock crows from the window outside and she says shoot it, please, you are the violent man, the man with the blue collar swing, the tattered steamwhistle every five pm upbringing, you are my rough trade man, go out then, go on, go on and ring that birds craggy neck.  And he did it and she looked at him dumb and horrified.  He had stuck it in a pot, feathers and all, the legs still doing a compass circumscription like a second hand, those hardstick poultry feet just chasing the rim of the pot and she said Samuel you are a lunatic and the fringe all rolled into one and he said you are a sociopathic lover, a house with only one window and you open it once every ten years but I always find my way inside don’t I and they made love like actors without training and she wore ostrich feathers in her hair and he his glasses and he wrote valentine across her bare pubis with the invisible bikini line underwriting it all and she pulled him to her on his birthday and there was no condom and to him that meant trust and to her that meant lazy and it didn’t matter fuck all cos all the results were the same.  Some island, South Pacific.   83402384.234 latitude w091-34123-4- longitude. Pat pending.

The last time we did this it was the Galapagos cos you said if the world exploded from us meeting we wanted to be far and away.  There were sparrows eating off your chest and they would steal the sugar from the coffee which was thick and black and was brewed at exactly the right temperature.  They had a navy of three boats and not one of them had cannon of any sort.  There were restaurants made of nothing that served food that cost nothing in a city that no one could find without a seaplane and a whole lot of something in the bank.  

And the men by the side of the road with their shotguns out and their gold marshal’s badges. Seems we need that truck.  I guess you do. Are you gonna make us take it?  You’re going to have to, I expect.  

 How did you find this place he said and Zazie said in a book silly.  I am a librarian and my world is books.  
-Seems like that world’s changing.
-They’re all changing, Samuel Noel.  Yours, mine, all of it. For women and for men too.
-I guess I am a bit rough for you.
-You don’t know a fucking thing about what I know, Mr. Man.
-All right then.
-Last time I saw you would cook mustard in a vat of pork and beans and call it supper.
-Well, wasn’t it?
-It better not still be, is all I’m saying.  And I found it in a book.  To answer your question.  It was a book I had to take down to mark DISCARDED.  I save those for my favorite learners.  When you are teachers in the Pacific Northwest you call them learners but when you go International they go back to being students.  Isn’t that funny?  And he smiled and touched her leg and she smiled cos she let him and went on with her story, about how she was closing the library up one night and just finishing stamping out the last ragtag pile of discards to make room for the new wall of graphic novels they had coming in (space was such an issue when it came to the librarian trade, it rode her panties up damn near as high as the budget, and both of those things were total bores and made her feel super adult all in the same breath, so there it was, tell the truth and shame the devil).  It was in a book on building houses and Tesseracts.  A Wrinkle in Time.  Newbury Award Winner.

	I read it when I was small.

	All of my learners are small.  Not so small but small enough to where they are delightful, like puppies are delightful before they burst into their big dog selves and start breaking picture frames with their tails and trying to make ground chuck out of the mailman.

	And inside there was this map but it was a map like the government would draw, not like a child.  It was stenciled on onionskin paper and the salient parts were outlined in red.  CURTISS WRIGHT, was in one corner. 

	They made airplanes in the war.  

	They also made relative components to the atomic bomb.  Samuel had known that part too and did not have a chance to say.  They had a complex near his house that all the kids went to late at night.  It was like a challenge. A game. They would unscrew the yellow manhole and head down into the dark tunnels.


~FIN lchristopher, Friday, June 12th, 2026 12:18PM - Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC.

—FIN - lchristopher, Weds., June 10, 2026 9:34AM, Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.

—FIN - lchristopher, Weds., June 10, 2026 9:34AM, Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.

                                                 this blue light. lchristopher.

                                  Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.

                                                             prologue


I wanted to frame her in the bedroom. When she sleeps I wish to wind her up, make her dance. 
I do not know why I speak of these things. They cannot seem to understand.
It isn’t wrong to talk to walls. Inside I see you every night.

The Nile turned as the door sifts closed. If the blood was not of the lamb and not spread across the doorways of the children of Israel, the black death would take them. The Nile would turn red. The blood runs from between the stirrups at the gynecologists office. And she just wants to be introduced.

Standing in the archway of a convenience store, some town. Jackson, NJ. A litter of old men with decrepit lapels stand with their backs to the building. This is outside. They are holding the perimeter and waiting for the weather to change and it’s only beginning to get cold. An avalanche of tobacco has been pressed into the cashier’s booth alongside the register and foot-alarm. A Lincoln Continental is idling inbetwixt
the slashed yellow stripes of the fire zone. Its straight pipes are packed with glass. His mother had silicone tits. The Nile is turning from the inside of the no-parking sign. He can hear the river rushing by like corduroy.

Whipping the backs of her legs. It's in a seashell like her whisper when she was latent, sticky with use. The car strips rubber from the tires all eight blocks of Herent Boulevard.

* ⽶ *

“Do you like small cramped spaces?” He is claustrophobic inside of her. In the Renaissance period, the orgasm was first compared to death. Scratched into the surface of his mahogany door: FUCK ART LET’S KILL. Something not yet biblical. His grip has loosed on the situation. He locks al three deadbolts and clicks
the chainhasp shut. Smashing the pitons into this rock for support. The flame at the end of some highway ergo industria that licks the walls, then the night they have been built to withhold. She is laced to the wooden planks of his futon. Her skirt is up and her eyes are swallowing the pupil, iris, retina. He is hard. And the night is nice but we don’t like to without the cellophane.

“Do you close your eyes when you kiss?” she asks him. He is one of 43 others. He is the control in this experiment. One of his eyes is missing. She doesn’t remember what it is like to scream.

“Leave the bedroom door open while you fuck me.” She is twenty. Habits and their fugue. A cacophony of drug. She licks the walls and the walls begin to bleed.

***

Streetlights and the sunsets which welt from fuscia to aubergine to black stars and nebulae burning pinholes and pinwheels of light and the violets crammed into his olfactory report like some ludicrous funeral wreath. Menarche; menarche. She is bleeding into the cotton. Uterine expulsion. She lives in a dormitory.
Seventy-six women. Their wombs are al tuned to the same station. Luna. Clarisse thinks she can smell it filling the halls some days, that it is grown like tapioca, yeast gone over. The boys can smell it and some girls too. Like dogs. She takes him by his shirtcollar, pushes him back into the shining brass elevator. Everything is explosions, everywhere everyone is going down. It is on the downward track.

Soma Prelude, 2:51am. January 5ch, 1999.

If you strike a man in his solar plexus hard enough you will cause unconsciousness.
The stomach is a starting point. After being struck, your opponent wil lean forward. This is your opportunity to knee him full in the face, or punch him in the neck repeatedly until he falls away from you.
A direct blow to the kidneys with a toe or heel will cause death.
The spinal column houses the nerves. A wel directed blow will kill or paralyze your enemy.
A sharp blow to the collarbone with either elbow or the knife edge of your hand wil neutralize your opponent.
The bones of the instep are very small and weak and can be broken quite easily.

A blow to the Adam’s Apple wil kill.
A blow to the nape of the neck will kill.
A blow to the upward nose cavity will kill.
A blow to the….

                                                                         And so on. *

***

Each six o’clock the steam would pour out of the factory and into the night sky. In summers he has known, the tar from the street would dissolve and stick to his shoes. He learned to enjoy the scent of turpentine because it was poisonous and reminded him of work. It blotted out the smell of violets. The steam would pour out of the chimneys and form clouds of noxious pink venison, leaving the blue sky mottled with the raw and uncooked. He loves it when the sun begins to fall. Mixing reds with wine again.

Meret Oppenheim when you’re nude that’s who I imagine I am with when
we need the fantasy to come with. Are you there?

***

"God?"

***

Her pen is soft like he imagines the insides of her eyes must be. He traces the signature, the loops, the whorls, the lines without segment, the dots without meaning, a cross with no religion. He does not know what she looks like. There is a street sign at the end of her block. HERE, it says. They are sitting in a tall wooden chair, a spire - some tower. Some New York bench. The wind is dark salted with dreams, hers. He
touches her cheek and watches her pupils fall. He smelled the violets for the first time since childhood. He wants to tell her, soon.

She dances in front of her mirror as the chemical sky outside falls into twilight. The room is a strange amber colour somewhere between sepia and urine. She takes off her clothes slowly and begins to pray. Downstairs her mother is making eggplant parmesan and her father is cursing out the straight-six engine on their 1971 Buick. It is rust-eaten and full of holes. Full of character. Fade to life.

Her room is pink and grey, now. She is dressed for sleeping. The nightgown is pale against her eyes, which are reading the Bible from a small lamp attached to the bedpost. She heard the scream and the tearing sounds but was only eleven then. She didn’t yet know what it meant to be devoured. Now she is sixteen and
the hi-fi stereo in the den is on. Old Doors records filter in through her bedroom wall. She can only make out two words throughout it all, and the wall begins to hum. Bedsprings are popping like bits of cork, confetti streamers, satin colon cancer stain. And the pushing brings the moans. She is attentive. She will have to know
how to do this for her husband, someday.

“let’s run,”
[beat]
AIEEEEEEAAAHHHHHH*

                     she falls asleep soon after. Revelations was beginning.

He collects library cards at the high school and stamps the books next to each signature that comes in. When he finds a good one, like Mary Kate Svenson or Latica Moore, he takes them. He isn’t usually interested in the names without any motion in the penmanship. Yet there was one girl who never signed her full name,
just slashed intials into the oaktag minder pressed into the spine of her library book and
                                                D I S C A R D E D
was writ there.

Invitation. Fourteen years later.

I would like to marry you. I would like to deserve you. I would like to move to some great city after we had wed and grow ivy and lilacs upon the brownstone face of an apartment we would share. I would like to share myself with you. I would like to know the birthmark under your left breast, its dimensions. The way you flush the color of brick with each orgasm.

We both don’t answer the phone when it rings and ignore the doorbell when no one has called to announce their visits, what of it? We are perfect for each other. Discard, Discard, Discard.

                                                         n e u

When it comes time for children we would move to the country. Hills of Vermont, the springs of Maine - someplace quiet where we could both work in peace. You would bring your grandmother’s sewing box and I my father’s pheasant gun. Taking our clothes in thrift. The laptop computers seeming insulting perched next to the woodburning stove. again. We wouldn’t talk of our families. We wouldn’t speak to our children, but teach them only what they needed to know. This is how you make toast. This is how you change a tire. This is how you load a pump shotgun. Important things, grown vital and dull with underuse.

The Nile was spinning. Spinning like hourglass sand. He thinks:
We are so young and unemployed.

                                            interior, miss clarisse doyle, inc.

My name is Clarisse. I am seventeen years old. I was born on April 7th, 1974. You have never met me. Your name is Paul. You are a child of Christ. Your hair is dyed black.
We met for the first time on the stairs at the Gershwin Primary School, in the stairwell. Some bullieshad pushed you down the landing. You were covered in loose-l leaf paper and upended penmanship texts. You didn’t recognize me. You had a concussion and the world seemed very, very smal. You asked me to write my name
and your eyes were full of blood. I took your hand and pressed it to where my breasts would be two years later. The nipple was erect there. I said I couldn’t write my name in English for you but in French I did very well. You asked me for my name and I told you. You asked me how to spell it and I told you. Your hand dipped and rose across my chest, the c, one l, the vowel a, then r, I, s, s and the e. Clarisse, you said. You
repeated it over and over before you passed out. My undershirt stung for the rest of the day. You told me then that you would come back. I asked who you were. You told me nothing. I pressed my heart in your hand and still you told me nothing. When you returned to school a week later, it was only to clean out your locker. Your parents had transferred you and you had a knot on the side of your head. The next time I saw
him, saw you — it had faded away to nothing but scar. You wore blue jeans and faded workshirts and your nails were always dirty. I wore dresses and liked the way you looked at my legs but still you couldn’t find the strength to speak. It has been three years do I lie to you now?

Stoplight Transmission. 7:49am. August 30th, 1998.

DON’T WALK.
STOP.
WAIT.
GO.

Twenty-one. Three years remaining.

Paul Slovak chambers the pistol slowly. His radio is not yet on. There is an eye in the coverlet window that he does not see. There is a world hiding in the crack of his ceiling which he has yet to understand. The floor is bright and polished. A jumprope can be heard hitting the pavement eight blocks away. Garbage trucks are backing up. Garage doors impugning themselves against the street.

***
In three years they would be married. He would have to hold on to that. He would have to believe, in that. The meningitis was lying, the Lupus would not hold. Yeats. The center would not hold. Hold. 

Phone call/4:17pm. That Day.

“Sisters of Mercy Hospital. Please hold.”

He is; he is.

Then, the ominous click of the dial tone, the phone lines realigning themselves.
It is not a personal affront.
“Let’s forget how to breathe,” he says. The smoke feels different when it smells like her.
On sight and sound. Everything is macrofocused and very, very brittle.

***

Gumball machines turning over inside child’s straining fist.
Screaming Jay Hawkins, some coffeeshop. Downtown.

***
Library book overturned on childhood bedside. Tapioca stockings heeled around wrists that stretch toward him. With open palms.

Tommy:

....
need is there the are this cannot tirade let them be. the bees
and trees are fucking this world apart. want to. need be. the bees
and trees are fucking this world apart. want to. need streets
debacles school world apart. want to. need healing open want just and
to. something need here in the middle of new york city and there
are tirade and debacles and nursery school genocide. the streets
are open and healing and we just cannot let them be. the bees and
trees are fucking this world apart. want to. need trees the fucking
middle are of new york city and there are tirade and debacles and
nursery school genocide. the streets are open and healing and we just
cannot let them be. the bees and trees are fucking this world apart.
want to. need york city and there are tirade and debacles and
nursery school genocide. the streets are open and healing and we just
cannot let them be. the bees and trees are fucking this world apart.
want to. need and there are tirade and debacles and nursery school
genocide. the streets are open and healing and we just cannot let them
be.

the bees and trees are fucking this world apart.

want to. need are and and nursery school genocide.

the streets are open and healing and we just cannot let them be.

                                                                   claris

                      ....everything is blue.

On Fine Violence: An Introduction.


                                                         epilogue


“Hello,” the girl with the violent eyes told him. In another town. In another life. “My name is Clarisse.”

He smiled. His lips were warm. It is autumn. All of their leaves are red and yellow. The car is the exact color of a bluebottle fly. They kiss on the porch and wait for the lights downtown to change. They are patient, now.

“Thomas,” he says, taking her hand. “Say yes.”


~FIN. lchristopher. Tuesday, June 9th, 2026; 4:01AM; Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC. 

Noa Lenore, we are singing together.  The ancient Chinese thought opium to be the flowers of the blood and sometimes when I feel old I think to her - why, there's nothing wrong. I cannot make her understand that it is just a matter of vanity. I want to love myself inside and I want flowers in my blood. It’s just the flowers in my blood. 

Here on the other side of town Noa sprawls herself across the coverlet decorating her bed, this shoebox room. Her turntable is spinning laps towards and around the hours of midnight. The couches are plush mauve plums. Her child crackles in the womb. Euthanasia calls the doctor in times like these, and she is not afraid. She never allows her body to exceed the statute of limitations, she tells me. 

When there were eclipses her mother would keep her inside to save her from damaging her eyes. The light has been eclipsing for twenty years. She collects ashtrays of blown smoked glass. A small calico kitten bats the Venetian blind cord in the mornings. There are no clocks here and so it is a way of keeping time without electricity, it is an alarm timed for the dawn. 

Noa is in the kitchen. She is in the kitchen singing. She isn’t mindful of my narcotic infidelities, and why should she be? We are still young, invincible, strong. We don’t yet realize the nightly news involves us directly. We drink wine from the bottle and smoke cigarette ends we find on the stairwell. It is easy to do, leaving responsibility inchoate and less confused. 

What is that you are singing, I ask her and she tells me about The Song Italia. The first time a boy kissed her in Milan. How the spring felt, an early frost, a simple green skirt, ankle-length. His hand against her thigh. I feel lonely when I sing, she says. 

Why don’t you take up the guitar, I tell her, an acoustic guitar, with riffs and chords and valleys. And there would be calluses on your fingertips and they would scratch little sighs into my belly when we lay awake at night in the sticky heat, heat because we could not afford air-conditioning for the house was new and built on poor design. And your songs would have strings to sit upon like birds lighting and landing off the telephone wires. 

Her voice grows deeper, scratched from tobacco and lush. Her hips have widened and I wonder sometimes if she has perhaps caught pregnancy, like a cold from being in love, and the special hugs we give each other. Explanations like a child, and I think of accents, umlauts, and hash marks. Numbers of apartments, dollar signs. SOS. 

She is singing. I light my cigarette and let the smoke settle down across my palms, my dinner that cools, keeping time with the stuttering of the single cherry-scented candle, which stutters and falters, changing my vision into a series of jumpcuts as I watch you make up the plates for me to clean the dishes. It is like a chamber of a revolver ticking over. White drawers, drainboard, black slip, calves of pale white. Bones peeking through. Your eyes brown. You would hold your mouth open for me before you turned in to read and the birds would fly out, getting lost in our mouths, the feather-touch of our tongues scribbling soft reminders of why people sleep spooning, side by side.

I’d rather be Icarus than Daedalus any day, you said. 

The words you sing are Italian but across your chest and around your neck is a star, a star of David, and it is jeweler’s steel, stainless and you don’t talk much about it. 

Your parents they live in modern-day Levittowns made of prefabrication and sheet rock, and the first time I stole a Chevrolet to come see you in the middle of the night you had told me to look out for the sign marking *your development*. All of the old ways have been lost. Keep singing to me, I whisper, gentile and tired. Don’t stop. 

Passing each other in elevators. We take the mail in late and I watch the neighbors forget to have the oil changed on their automobiles, the sounds of engines rattling themselves apart from lack of lubrication and love. You attune to the clothing suicides from the landlines that pass between apartment buildings, because that is how we cover our backs since The Fall. The rent dissolves in the back of our minds, as latent as sugar-water, and we forget to go to work. Our hold on things slows down. 
                                    *     *     * 
After we left town I found a place for us that the local toughs had deserted after a mass arrest at a local bar, built amongst the reeds and railcars on the outskirts of New Constantine. I remember shaving our heads against the lice by the railroad track, the abandoned switching station, 1 and ½ miles from town. The tapwater clouded with the rust colored blossoms of discoloration. Our nudity inbetween clothes washings. Our toes scratched Christlike and bleeding through the chaff and gravel that so surrounds electric tracklines. Skin and hair and white skin wrinkling in the dawn. There was a room that was still wired that no one knew about. 

It ran off the track current somehow. My father the television repairman showed me wires and electronics when I was younger. There was a small refrigerator and a ceramic hotplate. We could make hot sandwiches on the iron. The bed was 5 inches thick and when we shook it out every week we never caught bugs. She grew flowers outside and they took right up until the moment she left. I stayed in that brick sidecar with her for 2 years, the marks on my arms fading into the yellow skin, my strength returning. 

The abandoned switching station with its pluvial cellar and its woodburning stove, the heavy hemp blankets and the kitten we found curled in a chipped porcelain teacup, starving, too hungry to mew. You saved its life as I picked up a brick to smash it for I thought it was a rat, you said my name, and that was our first year. You had finished university and I taught you about jazz and firearms, the .22 pistol we found and used to shoot small game. You hated guns then. You hated guns before you learned to fear people. 

Cigarettes were still cheap and the only reason we went to town anymore; we got such lovely sun in the mornings - once we woke up to a train crew working on a track further up the line with their reflective vests and tanned forearms and sledgehammers that were clotted with grease. We hid in the brush. We tanned naked in the granite fields of industry they left behind, all unquarried rock, no trees, just deep, clear pools that caught the sunset and held it, impossibly, up to an hour after night had fallen.  

We take up space in the doctor’s home that winter, she was sick, catching her legs on rusty wire strung up to keep the homeless from camping on the estates nearby. Sometimes there were beartraps and pits dug out by earthmovers, steamshovels. Human traps set in a most affluent America. The doctor was almost the same age as I and looked at her like an animal. I could have killed him then and pocketed his well-fed, hyper-educated eyes. 

She has an infection. It is a bad one. He prescribes us the cheapest drug there is and serves contempt with a handful of vitamin supplements. 

Is this what it is like after you are raised by wolves I say to her after smashing open a parking meter and paying the druggist in nickels and dimes, twenty dollars worth. My hands were bleeding from the effort. 

And she says, let’s not ever go back to the city, let’s us stay right here. 
You could have died, Jane. You could have died.
 
We quit smoking that night and took up storytelling and firesides. 

We learned to spit our lungs out from the withdrawal. I could spit more, you further. 

When we go to town, to the City, we have to scrub. Too many questions otherwise. We chew tree bark to clean our teeth when our toothbrushes wear down. Jane cuts my hair and braids her own back behind her head, out of the way. She cuts my hair and slices my ear, like Van Gogh you are, you are to me, she says. I decide that night I am in love, that this is what it means. 

I don’t want to grow up I say. I don’t want to be insane. 
Not even for art? 
Not even for art. Art is the inability to see things as an adult. 
Distant electric vision is what they used to call television. Do you miss television? 
No. 
Can we move again? 
It’s only been two years. 
I’m restless. 
Give it time. 
I’m trying. 
Try harder. 
I’m trying. 

She spoke of distant electric vision and miles mean nothing to me, so I left her and the chemicals together, something I should not have done. So in time we had to move and change accordingly, a place where the familiar could just not reach. I took her quickly to the freight railyard after stealing a retired taxicab from the local junkyard, trading out the battery and the oil. 

It died en route, but we were close enough for me to carry her. She was so thin, then. She was almost too weak to make the leap aboard the moving boxcar, but I caught her and held her tightly for two days until the shaking stopped. 

 *     *      *   

So here we are in Georgia and the roads are colder and we don't think much about misgivings out here. The house is warped, it bends in the hole the sun makes, but there are no more poppies, and so all of the telescopes and mirrors behind our eyes refract correctly. Noa sits in the passenger seat of our old Dodge, her short hair twisted into knots that stand up on their own like pencil erasers. Jane is the perfect 4  name for her this time and we all call her Jane even though Jane is not her real name, her name is Noa. Back in Wayside Beach her name was Heather Lewis and we pulled her curls when we wanted attention. 

But we call her Jane now because she likes the girls and sometimes boys and sometimes it doesn't matter because I know her and she knows me and all she wants is a crisis of identity, she needs to disappear but knows too much.   She knows that I have a small cataract birthmark on my right testicle and I know her labia are large and tickle my nose, sometimes when we are inside the night, and with the night, looking for some primal sort of release before the dawn, and then she is sleeping while I watch through the storm windows, waiting for the traffic lights to change. She teaches herself the manual transmission on my car while I sit in the west room on the second floor, reading. Our cat, Green, bats the typewriter lever and I hear the gears grinding but somehow I don't care. She calls me from her job when Anne, her boss, wears a short dress. Anne's slips are myriad and ever changing. Today was blue and even as she gives me head on our secondhand couch and I try to smooth the aperture of my life into some kind of sweet, swift focus - I sit back and marvel and rejoice in the fact that today, Anne, some woman that I have never met was wearing a blue slip and somehow it was all right. 

 ***   

Sometimes when Jane sits by the windows I can see right through her clothes, they become translucent in the sun. Sometimes the room is dark and overripe and her figure seems too smeared, to me. And sometimes she just lies naked and says “paint me.” I sit down. I sit down by the coverlet on the unmade bed and say, “Jane, you were born in 1974 in a small convent in Topeka, Kansas. Your father disowned your mother because you were both Irish Catholics and you were borne with black hair, although your mother and your daddy's hair was red. You lived seventeen years and in those seventeen years you have spent going over with a small eraser. Soon, there will be nothing left and you will be in the womb again.” And she will smile and hold my head in her small girl hands and say `you are a chauvinist and a pauper but I like you anyway.' And I will tell her: “You are a cunt and sometimes a lesbian but I am glad you are here.” Then we fall asleep in the middle of the day, wondering who the hell is paying our rent and whom the house really belongs to but it not mattering overmuch. Jane has had two abortions in her lifetime and is good at paring reality aside. 

Her boss Anne was wearing a cream-colored slash of white lace on the morning I learned that my father had died. He would never go to funerals and I was too far away from home to even make his a consideration, but I did have his reading glasses in my uppermost desk drawer. When I am lost I put them on and the world seems more blurred. Migraine sets in but my thoughts get clearer and I don't pretend to understand why. Jane was in the bedroom and the slip was draped over a nail on the bathroom door. When she left there were blonde hairs on my pillow and they smelled of chamomile and insouciance and a respiration so thick that when I pulled the lace away I could almost taste the screams. Her sweat was strong and Jane, she told me that she loved me. Our goodnight kiss swelled of marine but my father, he, he had never taught me what it was like to swim in times like these. 

And there are classes and then they are over with, and hands that have been where they shouldn’t be, with people they didn’t know, and when the gunshots come – as they are known to do in Lisbon, GA - he wakes suddenly and carries her without speaking to the porcelain tub in the bathroom, because he knows that it is steel underneath. There is not room for two, so I read a newspaper through the ember of my tenth cigarette of the morning, not wanting to draw attention to this tiny attic room. The apartment must have been the superintendent’s, he has decided, because proportionally it is half the size of the pre-war high-ceilings below, this brownstone from the 1890’s. 

It is morning and the cats are poking their noses into everything, as it is grocery day and the smell of Cuban bread fills the kitchen. It is a dollar a loaf and worth ten times that amount when assimilated with cinnamon and butter, or salted garlic with sun dried tomato slices, thin like guitar picks or a blade of grass, soft as ash. The fruit she steals from the stand from which she works keeps him strong mornings. Sometimes her words make money. 

We take our lunches like businessmen, like kings and queens. There are fresh cut flowers on the edge of the bath, and twin glasses of gin, tonic and ice. The sun sweats through the blinds to pore over her breasts, my eyes. We are 28 years old. It is a birthday, a holiday. There are rooms without reason, envelopes for time that we mail away carelessly, bill me later, bill me later, bill me later. 

Richard Nixon is on the television and Jane is on the phone, but it is not 1974 any longer. We have stolen a hotel room for the night on our trip to see the doctor, she is pregnant again. Jane asks me if she should shave her legs. “Why?” I reply. 

Her dress is a thin black thing with a red design cutting through the opaqueness of it all, like a black widow or an eclipse of some kind. She wears it each year on her birthday and mother’s day. Her day dress she wears all other times, it is ragged and the hem is slipping. She takes it over her head as the seven o clock steam whistle cuts into the evening.   

I make her cake in the wood burning stove. The telephone sings the same old song. When we hear a song we know, we crave the repetition; we desire the hold of knowing what will happen next. I did not know her name would change, I did not know that she would remain with me. Men are not strong enough to watch women disintegrate. Women can, in times of war, watch men blow fragments of themselves all over the battlefield, and coo to them, and shudder inwardly at our idiocy. We are the weak and therefore the instruments behind which countries fall. 

The telephone sings years later and I am almost used to it. Her white slip is open at the collar, her pale neck, and the unpainted cerise curl of her lower lip, her pageboy haircut. The Rolling Stones are on and Mick Jagger is lamenting the sadness that comes with fellatio. The moon is out and it is a week that she is not bleeding. I don’t want to grow up, she said, and it was the year we figured out the phones and computers and realization. The year we rejoined society.

You were dirty and your fingernails ragged but I loved you that way. 

Do you do you really? 
Yes. Many kinds of really. All sorts. 
You’re sweet to say.  
I love you, Jane Evers Weatherbee. 
Who was I the first time? 
Noa, like the ark. You had two of everything. 

Sipping Sangria in the fields, I wanted to make love to her right there and such moments should be seized. My son is galumphing through the twenty acres of foliage that stand on a lot and a house that is bought with only fifteen years left on it. A hell of a beautiful mess, I think, and tell my wife that it is wonderful when things turn out all right. She smiles and takes my hand and leads me to the fields beyond our property where we pretend like children of the past. For our children, to better understand. The song has changed but we remain the same. It is a song of hellos and goodbyes, but all I want is right here.

 FIN ~lchristopher. Sunday, June 7th, 2026 1:01PM Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.

--
DON'T HANG UP.  LCHRISTOPHER.

[so] remember that time you had tickets and visas for the Galapagos with the woman you loved but stuck your foot in some ungodly gopheresquehole whilst in hiking through Cajas in South America and had to hitch a ride back to Cuenca and it was your birthday by the time you got back to Quito and you were leaving for the Galapagos via Guayaquil Airport in less than a days time and your lady of the shadows had to go to work and pick up final documents since Galapagos = Fort Knox of places to travel so that the marine/aquatic/tortuga life there remains protected and inviolate.  

So she drew you a map to the Hospital Metropolitano and you hailed a cab that took you the distance of new jersey to Pennsylvania for like a buck seventy five.  And they wheeled you in to do an x-ray and then forgot the lead curtain for the radiation cos really who GAF about anything, really.  So after screaming MI HUEVOS MI HUEVOS MI COJOOOOONESSSS someone took mercy on you and covered your no-children-ever-parts and then wheeled you back and in a bit the doc came in and said in not-bad English your ankle is broken I will need to mix a cast for plaster to which you shook your head in the internationally recognized negative semi-circle roughly translating to no fucking way, buster and instead handed him a list and two hundred American dollars and said these are the drugs I will need and these are the quantities I will need them in and he said, smiling: she must be very beautiful and special to which I replied you have no idea. 

And when I got home that night in her Quito apartment watching the sun slide between the purple Andes mountains my young woman friend ("my special fuckin lady friend, man!" -TBL) came upstairs from a day of working hard as an international librarian and said, well, what did the doctor say, c_____   _____ (when things are serious we boys sometimes get the full first-name last-name treatment)!? is it broken? are you ok? can we still go?  and I knew already that it was to be our last trip together this particular throw of the die and we had already spent thousands upon thousands of non-refundable dollars on the boats and apartments and food and cars and the chance would never come again, not in a lifetime. 

so to her question which I replied: no, love.  just a sprain.  phew!, she said which was quite like her and phew squared I replied which was very me to the hilt. how was work and she said work-like I am going to get dinner started.  can I help I asked and she said no thank you would you put our show on please and I queued the torrent feed and hobbled off down the hall.  so I went into the bathroom and unwound the gauze and wanted to cry with each pull of medical tape bringing pain but knew better; knew that it would get a thousand-million times worse before it got better so all tears were not only impossible but useless too.  I could hear her singing in the kitchen.  I remembered it from when we lived together in college eleven years earlier.  She was singing cos she was worried and unhappy and now things were just fine.  Just a sprain, I said.  Just a sprain, I lied. Just a sprain.

I unwound the gauze and that is what I saw.  I unwound the gauze and springy medical bandage and took that awful; picture to remind me that I was capable of great things.  

I opened the first of twenty-plus separate phials and began a course of anti-inflammatories. I would be on my feet for nine days once our plane touched down.  I saved the pain pills for later.  I guess I loved her a lot, you know?

When I got back to the States and saw the specialist that treated my plantar fasciitis when I was training for my Option 40 and running 20 miles at a clip he physically struck me in the face.  My foot had gone nearly black. He did not ask if she was very beautiful. He told me that I was an idiot of the first order and I was damned lucky they MAYBE didn't have to AMPUTATE and POSSIBLY with a year of physical therapy I would be lucky to get 45-65% movement retention back.  Likely I would need a cane.  I got 95% after six months and never regretted a thing. It was the only way I knew to say goodbye.

-FIN. lchristopher, Friday, June 5, 2026 4:01AM — Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC. 

[~In The Down Collection, lchristopher, circa Jan 2027].

three and one half hours later, i am home. my head is aching like my brain has been stretched. it's nearly half-past midnight and i've got to work tomorrow.

she was wearing a short string of real pearls and ragged plaid canvas shoes without laces. shorts, a halter top, a light summer cardigan the color of sealskin. her hair is up, sort of, exploding in dark waves in the summer heat, refusing to be pinned.

she shines her light on people. the evening was like staring through a crack in the world of both our histories.

the start was like i was being interviewed, almost. socially interviewed, quality tested for assurance. but in a good way, a challenging sort of engagement.

she didn't take her elvis sunglasses off for nearly twenty minutes in. finally i asked and got to see her eyes. then we walked from washington square park to the east village. she teased me about being bigger, more muscular, having more of a man's body. i played shy, which isn't that hard to do, as it took me awhile  to get used to being bigger, faster, stronger, etc: [apologies to daft punk]

she asked me if i had married at one point, or if i had been. which was strange. this reminded me to check her hands for engagement rings, of which there were none [not that she's the sort to wear one anyway]. it's hard to read her sometimes, because so much of what is said is couched in terms that can be taken in a myriad of ways (which is obvs a defense mechanism, but it doesn't make reading her any easier). a lot of our conversation is doublespeak. it is apparent to me that we flirt hard, and i can see how i've since carried said behavior into other relationships i've had since then (some people can't take it, or think it is stressful, or hard teasing, and i can understand why).

e.g. :

so christopher, about this joining the military business. are you in 
the army? you don't look like you're in the army.
not exactly. it's a different sort of army.
did you pussy out?
no. 
really?
look who you're asking. *sideeye; scoffs* 
i'm not going to have to worry about you when you're deployed, then?
would you?
would i what?
worry.
no. not at all.

wash, rinse, repeat. sometimes i pitch them back at her.

she asked me if i was seeing anyone (paraphrased: "of course you are, you're probably seeing everyone") and i told her "i have a social life," because i'm cool like that (and it just so happens to be true). she mentioned a few old boyfriends in passing (including
the schmuck the size of an avalanche, who did not show up, and a boy i read poetry with in long island who died of an unknown overdose in alphabet city with a russian mail-order bride, who was probably haunting the bar we were drinking in, as he had introduced it to us), i mentioned a few old girlfriends to up the ante. i don't believe she's seeing anyone seriously.

having her tell me stories about her motorcycle, the geckos in her room in thailand, the nude beach she just returned from in north jersey, the pot cookies she smuggled through customs. our conversation comes  easily. it always has. it likely always will. walking through saint marks place through japanese restaurants to get to the penny
arcades at the back, then not buying anything at all. our families. people we know, old friends long gone. how things have changed. the hipster scene, and how our own social collective had no real driving force, was unidentifiable (and not necessarily in a way preferable). 

her trips in monterey, california, visiting steinbeck's worlds (i am obsessed with steinbeck right now), setting foot in cannery row (!!), telling me of the jellyfish out there. vietnam. paris. politics. music. she's lit on two potent margaritas and i am unhinged by her smile, which is her default setting. jane kept taking her light heather grey sweater off and putting it back on again repeatedly. she must have done this fourteen or fifteen times in the course of our sitting.

her hands genuflecting rhythm and time. she moves them a great deal to footnote her stories. here's where we were, here's where they parked, here's how we did this, that and the other thing. she's still not a ridiculous little girl, and i love it.  her soft solidity is so reassuring; her hourglass curves
such like leaning into the most challenging, glorious turns of Le Mans; 
[Porsche, Pont, Karting]
her skin is so perfect it's unreal.

the finest eyes i
have ever looked into whilst 
their owner's hair
 was spread in orbit across a pillow.

i have loved her body for as many years as she has spent hating it. that tale as old as time told between women and the men who love them.
her whole life or
in Georgian vernacular
All day long. 

there were a few moments of our past life that cropped up and were pleasant. she sings sometimes to herself, and was doing so as we passed tompkins square park (blondie, sunday girl). she called me by my first and last names, which is something she used
to do when she was charmed/pleased/pissed as all holy fuck at me, and it was something she knew i liked, and that was nice, like roses blooming in my heart, all at once, 1, 2, 3.

hurry up
hurry up, hurry up and wait...
come see
what you do to me...

crossing the street to cooper union, eating frozen yogurt (walking through new york city whilst eating frozen treats on a not-too-hot evening with a lovely girl is an incredibly early woody-allenish feeling), a bus jumped the light and i put my arm in the small of her back and sort of hurried us past, which is something *i* used to do. 

the touch crackled in my eyes, and i can replay that moment at will in my mind in perfect print 70mm Panavision. she was so light beneath  her summer blouse. her body temperature was exactly the same  beneath the tips of my fingers as it was when we shared a bed and a home and two cats that chirruped like a carillon when we  came to the door at the day's end.

it was funny, being back in that bar in the east village, sophie's, an old spot of ours from way back when. amazing jukebox that hasn't changed, with television, old dylan, the cramps, the fall, joy division, etc. she went to use the restroom and i picked up my 
billfold and pushed my money into it and realized that my hands were trembling. when i went to the bathroom i took my wallet with me.  i've carried her picture in it for ten years now, the one where she's standing on the deck of a house palatial estate we were watching on the long island sound. the one where we went in not long after to have sex in the moneyed owner's glorious feather bed roughly the size of a helipad.

walking jane to her car, she drove me to the subway. i didn't say no because her driving was one of my inital points of being attracted to her. she drives like she's going to tear the engine out of the car, and it is a treat. but she'd not been in the city for some
time, and kept getting the stops wrong. i let her until finally we parted ways on spring street, which was a local train (i take the express & live wayyyy the hell uptown). she told me not to get jumped. i didn't tell her that i still carried a thumbswitch
pocketknife sharp enough to shave with on me everywhere i went.

i do not know what any of this means, or how serious to take it. i just know that a great weight has been lifted, and replaced by something else. the need to create is still pressing me. somehow it is tied to her - she is definitely my muse - she alluded to the question of whether or not still i wrote about her and i of course played it off. she's still moving and the goal is to keep up. 

the optimal result from this meeting would be to continue a correspondence of some kind (coupled with lots and lots of hot sex, but i will take the correspondence, gladly). and now i am going to be quiet and see what happens in lieu of knowing what the next step will be. she may be in new york for the summer, i am not sure when she is returning to the far east.

so i guess the long and the short of it is:

i am only just back from a spinning evening.
my heart.
my heart is so full.
i have to write faster.

i must write faster.


-FIN. lchristopher. Thursday, June 04, 2026; 4:01AM, Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.

_

The work-wife, work-husband trope fucking baffles me.

It’s funny. That neo-contemporary fold of popular culture baffles the shit out of me. Your wife is your wife. That’s what makes her my wife [John Mulaney knocks this trope out of the park in his stand-up in The Comeback Kid]. It’s not my wife until you get to work or my wife until you get on the internet. 

It is too close to openly expressing a need to engage in emotional affairs with other people who didn’t make the cut, didn’t bend their knee, didn’t swear in front of god and everyone that you were all that is. That you would trade places upon the wheel with her if circumstances called for it. That is everything. That you would gladly give everything you owned up to and including your body and then your life for another.

A woman I loved [and refer to here often: Jane Evers [Weatherbee],  a beautiful author in her own right] once sent me a series of instant messages the morning of 9/11/01 from the VA/DC metro area [The Twin Towers had already been hit but the Pentagon had not]. She had left me for another boy she grew up with who had connections in Washington through his father and helped get them set up there. They worked together in the same government building and had cubicles alongside one another. I was still cobbling together my own life so I couldn't argue overmuch. It was not the sort of parting where we remained in contact regularly. 

[I still contest that Jane is and was the original inventor of ghosting, except she applied it to all aspects of her life; added compartmentalization, and then disappeared into the geosphere.]

I had left the connection on my computer overnight [all hardline in those days] on so when the entire eastern seaboard telephone switchboard was jammed i had one of the only unbroken lines of communication in town.

She was sitting right next to the guy - not only her serious committed boyfriend but her work husband to boot typing this to me and I couldn’t believe it. 

I told her to get the fuck out of the building because who knew what was being targeted.  She was with him but when push came to shove and the world turned over — such as it is turning over right now — I was the person she reached out to. The whole while wondering just what the fuck is the silly schmuck you ran off with DOING TO PROTECT YOU RIGHT NOW? There were warplanes [F-18’s/I believe certainly] blowing through the swamps of Northern New Jersey at Mach 2+ so low that the fields of cattails had straight lines of singed black/blown to either side like a valley of reeds for miles, but it was too little, too late. 

I broke the connection to call her folks and check in on them for her and of course the whole phone system fell to shit and i couldn’t get back on. There was an 18 year old hippie blonde girl who had the IQ of housepaint sleeping nude in my bed behind me. She had been working on a paper or something the night before on my computer. She was concerned it would be late. I wouldn’t worry, I told her. We’re being invaded. They just hit NYC. 

Oh wow, she said, happily — schoolwork could go hang for the day, and opened her pretty teenaged legs from atop my bedspread, her coiffed blonde muff already fast becoming an anomaly amongst your sex, her teardrop breasts, erect nipples pointed at the ceiling like chocolate drops and all I could think of is what the fuck am I doing here? as I switched the receiver on trying to find the news. 

Dialing across the entire band through nothing but static before finally finding a station broadcasting in real time, the whole time wondering if the East Coast had just been turned into Hiroshima West.

***A. author's note - actual realtime 9-11.html dev file transcript added 3/30/2026 in post [-production]. It's accurate. 

***B. i cannot fucking believe this still exists. here is what your God has done to me: forced to carry the weight of an entire lifetime, to remember forever:

...like the final act in that Cold War Classic, War Games 

***

That scene, that scene in the bunker when NORAD goes silent and all of the American cities begin to explode on the world's largest projection television set array, caught in what my father used to refer to as "the fireball" [to wit: when discussing nuclear war at the age of three, he told me not to be concerned, that we wouldn't be in the fallout - we were two miles from Manhattan [as the crow flew. We were in the fireball. We would all be dead, he said, before we knew it. We would feel nothing it would happen so fast. Then he said good night and closed the door. 

This is a man whose Top Shirt [affectionately referred to as "Top" to the highest ranking NCO in an enlisted team of the United States Army] drove a car with a bumper sticker that read in red/yellow ronald mc donald land [and CCCP, one expects] colors: I'D RATHER BE KILLING COMMUNISTS. 

I love my father.

***

All of this flashing through my mind in an instant.That sense of impotence filling all that a man is with dread, being unable to be there now, to make things right. Women talk a gang of shit but there isn't one of you out there who doesn't want to be rescued, if only once. [like every woman on earth wants to see their man effortlessly drop someone who egregiously insults her - though loathe to admit it, under pain of death]

[THAT THE TURTLE COULDN’T HELP US — Stephen King/IT; those who know, know.]

I was inside of that girl [who just got to college four whole days ago] and she was in media res of her second [surprisingly real, how? our whole world had just been set afire] orgasm as the radio behind us announced that the Pentagon exploded. 

——

The ones that aren’t the ones do much more damage than one thinks. My first girlfriend ever was [a still gorgeous] Dutch girl and taught me an expression I am absolutely going to fuck up for you now: 

liefde of toneelspel?

"Is it love or is it stageplay?"

We make it too easy to throw it all away, these days. We have gone from Do you know how lucky we are to have found each other?!  to swiping our way into social oblivion, hoping, hunting for the next best thing.

Thanks for calling. 

-----------------

*the counselor [unrated director's cut only, you lose too much of McCarthy's genius script otherwise} is a film very close to my heart. I feel that I have transcended the Counselor's absolute ruin of a love due to his own overconfidence, missteps, counting coup, and failing to El Jefe's - established, erudite, economically powerful, educated, with that calm, masculine confidence that is quite possibly the most missed brass ring in most men's lives. 
Would I trade places upon the wheel? Where they cut the outskirts of your face off with a box cutter, peel it away, and show it to you with a dressing room mirror held up so you can see your humanity actually lifted from your eyes? Your fingers. Your toes. Smash your teeth with ball peen hammers. Violate you with hot chiles. Geld you. Keep the best doctor money can buy to run a steady stream of pharmaceutical methamphetamine in an IV drip so you don't pass out and feel every nerve ending until your last breath. Cauterizing your wounds with propane torches so you won't bleed out. I am not talking about death, Counselor, because death is easy. 

This is the monologue of the world. When El Jefe [cast impeccably] mentions the great poet Antonio Machado, Cormac McCarthy is speaking directly to us, and it ties directly to the monologue he continuously tries to impress upon The Counselor, who has no world. He does not know where the bodies are buried. That world is not his. Nor is the other. McCarthy's script is speaking to us by omitting The Counselor completely from either when or where. He is nowhere and it is now.

El Jefe goes so far as to speak the title of the poem he is referencing [while the Counselor corrects his pronunciation, showing again just how he does not belong and never will to the world he has attempted to fleece. The amount of disrespect is PALATABLE, and he doesn't get it; but El Jefe does, and responds as if you would to a child - how do you spell that?]

The title of the poem? TRAVELER, THERE IS NO ROAD. Enter precis.

Caminante, no hay camino / Traveler, There Is No Road 
by Antonio Machado

“Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

having spent years with a just lovely gamine mexican-jewish woman [who was also practicing Roman Catholic] in El Paso [bordering Ciudad Juarez, which at the time made Mogadishu look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm] whose father was a prosecutor, from stories expressed and experiences shared, Cormac McCarthy doubles down from his work in No Country For Old Men, demonstrating his absolute understanding on point with cartel culture. 

As someone [read: me] who managed to nearly get slaughtered in Tamaulipas alongside the aforementioned lady friend, this is a story for another time. Many people do not care for the film, and likely won't like the story very much, either. I don't want to hear it. 

Until you have been herded off a commuter bus by men in all black with single eyehole ski masks, flak vests, automatic weapons [sound familiar?] and separated BY SEX like they do in the preludes to Nazi concentration camps whilst they liquidate the ghettos, all of the senoras and abuelitas shhhing her, whispering "tranquila, tranquila" as they herded a man in a poor fitting tweed suit that i realized was sitting behind the driver not as a supervisor or bus aide but because he was armed with a pitiful revolver [only the military and police can carry military and police calibers in Mexico, and one round of ammunition misplaced on the floor of your truck in Texas is a 30 year MEXICAN prison sentence if discovered.]

 All whilst on the outskirts of Ciudad Victoria ["No one drives through Ciudad Victoria at night. It is a death sentence." **starts luxury automobile most certainly not belonging to me, points it at Ciudad Victoria at dusk at 135mph in a country where the potholes on the autopista [read: narcocorridor] are occasionally actually the size and depth of Winnebagos**], you don't know how flashbang accurate it all is. Where a soldier with a fully automatic Colt M4 Carbine rested the sharpened flash suppressor/muzzle brake on my left orbital [it was surprisingly light] as four other men searched me [i was the tallest, whitest guy there, i didn't hold it against them. The battle rifle was so close to my eyes I could easily read the markings on the side of the barrel: WARNING MISUSE CAN LEAD TO INJURY OR DEATH. It was going to be a dull and uninteresting evening. 

LCHRISTOPHER WILL RETURN IN THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN 007

FIN - lchristopher, Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026 Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC 3:59AM 

OH COME YE MERRY GENTLEMEN THIS IS THE CITY OF OUR DREAMS	

—Neon Sign overlooking 59th Street Columbus Circle, Manhattan Island, NYC.

Three months remain before the end of the world.

Ethan Holt looked out at his city from the tony apartment folded into the circumference of Trump’s 59th Street Columbus Circle.  There was a hybrid homemade modular FIM-92 Stinger rocket system broken down into its component parts under the doona where the pillows would be. He had brought it through on a C-130 gunship three days before. The bird tattooed half of Khandar Province so very casually on its way out of theatre. Like an afterthought. Or an afterbirth.

On the CNN tower facing the digs his father’s empire had bought him the Son of Screaming Jack Holt watched a Post Office burn. He threw his ALICE pack on the bed and checked the loads in his service issue Glock 19 and the backup throwaway G26. He put the Glock 19 aside. The G26 was strictly cold carry and was not registered anywhere in the databases of this world or any other.  A penitentiary offense if Bloomberg’s goons caught him within the city limits on the street. Three years in Rikers minimum. Doesn't matter what your name was. Plaxco Buress

blew up the post office and back to fort tryon park, uncle jack holt's answer to never-never land.  the factory washing the money and bringing the workers in.  with the stiff blue collar and the free 

	There was sand from Afghanistan tracked in onto the floor alongside his desert tan jump boots. Aftermarket so as not to break his goddamn ankles during static line night jumps. The gear [kit, he reminded himself for the millionth time, when you go full Delta it is kit, not gear; it is mates, not brothers at arms. the origins of the commando led straight back to Charlie Beckwith and his time spent with the SAS in Hereford, UK.

Toby lay in his ridiculous waterbed in his ridiculous gold-pink hotel robe and thought about the first time he had met Zazie Lenore.  Her halo in the deep-sea green wash of the night vision array clipped to his helmet.  His father had ribbed him about that.  Why the hell do you boys carry so much stuff?  In my day it was a knife, a parachute, and a week’s supply of Snickers chocolate bars.  His father had been SF – a Green Beret, if you liked, and most of the SFOD-D did not - in Project Greenlight, back in Indochina, right around the time the Legionaires got their asses handed to them at Dien Bien Phu. Pop had orders to sit there with a goddamn satchel nuke and watch and if the wind blew a certain way, to pull the pin.  The wind declined the dare, and Ethan Gad had done the Q Course twenty years later and was selected.  And the Kennedy family still sent them a Christmas Card every year.

	You see, the Kennedys knew that after they had finished bootlegging that there was another industry to be founded pre-prohbition, and that was the soda water and soft drink business. One hand washed the other. The Dorchester Soda Works was born.  

WOTN.  We Own The Night.  

It was South America.  They had scrambled the Little Birds right before dawn. The company men were still in Quito fucking up the transfer of power from Rafael Correa to his Number Two, so at least there were no triple-PhD Ivy League Chaperones on this op, for once. Whupwhupwhupwhup.  Sitting on the landing struts with his M-4 clipped to his shoulder.  They hadn’t switched to FNSCAR weapons systems yet.  Only for photo ops. Not for clandestine ops. Not for black mask jobs like this.

Holt cleared the reticle of what they were using for Starlight scopes these days, infared Leupold 7 x 1000. He could read the warnings on their cigarette packs with this fucking optic. A forty-thousand dollar piece of glass if it were one. The eye-relief was pure. Figures swam into being. And Ethan Tobias Holt nearly shit himself.

It's the same girl. Look at those dick sucking lips, those eyes like dark chocolate drops.
It can't be. It isn't. It's not possible. There are no coincidences in a world this shallow.
It is. 
This is the girl. The one Samuel has lit out after. It all comes together somehow.  His father  always wanted him to go officer. He did OCS on a lark - he didn't expect the Regiment to let him, but his CO said fine after he had stopped an attempt to scrag him in his sleep using an IED that they had drug all the way back from a road twenty miles out of Qatar. Kandahar Province, which was just a black goddamned inkspot on any political map Command thought to dress up to their A-Team.

They had lost one in the Peace Corps. What they didn't tell most of those candy-assing liberal college kids was that the PC was technically the military.  Even the forms were the same. The only one that was different was the pledge that you were disavowed from ever picking up a weapon during your time in grade or service or goodwill pattycake or whatever the fuck it was they did out there. 

He wasn't in the Peace Corps, however. He was a by-God Ranger, a Batt boy who met Colonel Watkins, and Watkins was like the next fucking Charlie Beckwith. He didn't give a fuck about the needs of the Army. He gave a fuck about taking his boys and putting them in the pole position like a bunch of stock cars, the best of the best, and halfway through turning the race into a demolition derby.  And when the smoke had cleared and the pit crews were running around with extinguishers filling the metal cages with  all the panels blown off with C02 and Halon, Watts took the two or three survivors and then gave  them two days off and then lined them up in the next race against everyone else who had survived the previous umpteen races. And that was what SFOD-D was. Or CAG. Or whatever the fuck they were calling the Unit these days. Morphing like a shifting antigen virus.   

Colonel Watkins picked the crush out of his green beret where a full silver bird sat proudly pinned  to the birthmark-red flash patch showing that he was one of the 8th Special Forces Group. Holt's  beret - the apex of so many Army grunts military careers, was already obsolete. He had actually  forgotten it in a cab in DC and when Watts heard THAT, he was flat on his face riding the forward rest position for eight long hours, piss running into his boots.  He did not drop his eyes the whole time from the Colonel, and Watts stood there and gave it back to him. For eight fucking hours. That was love. That was how you got men to fight and die for you.  When the Colonel finally gave the order to recover, Toby would have gone back to 207th Street, Inwood and killed his father if Watts had asked him to.

But not Samuel. He owed Samuel Noel too much.

At the top of his game - after Colonel, even full-bird Colonel, they pushed you behind a desk and you watched smart bombs eat up the white space on monitors until it was time to draw your pension check. He was a hard man. 

Ethan sat in his black mask chaps, the thin snake eating it's own tail dagger of the D-Boys, Delta Force, safety pinned through his flesh, piercing his right bicep. He had not blinked. The soldiers in his unit were resigned to their fates. They had a sixty percent mortality rate by age thirty five. Holt was already a Master Sergeant. That many people had bought it. There was a time where there was just two of them in the Western Hempisphere. They had a betting pool to see who would win it. The loser had to take his letter and deathbag back to his woman.  His girl went lez in college anyway. Said she didn't know him anymore.  Said she couldn't understand why he would want to be a killer like his father. That she thought he was different. Then called him up four days after she graduated saying she needed him. Tobias thought of her eating out some co-ed and wiping her mouth on her bra.  Told her: "I thought I knew you too" and was ashamed for two weeks after for giving her that much.

Join us.

The CIA spook tapped the ash on his cigarette, a Players Navy Cut.  Toby hated the fucking CIA. All a bunch of fatherless, motherless bastards with their IQ's pinned to the top of the CONUS parabola. 

They thought they were in fucking Impossible Mission Force. Their expense accounts were like departmental budgets.  Disavowing any and all knowledge of their people’s actions.  Leaving men behind until their consciences ought to be blushing like the motherfucking day. Stanford. Harvard. If bullshit were music they’d be a big brass band.

"Officer's Club is on the East Side of Midtown, boys."
"We're not in the service," said one of the sunglassed, grey flannel suited fruits.
"I never would have guessed," Ethan Holt said, and dropped his Spyderco Harpy from beneath his wristwatch into his palm while placing his drink back on the wet bar and signaling for another. Oldest misdirection piece of tradecraft in the book and College Boy one through six had missed it. Not saying much in terms of military intelligence. Two words combined that can't make sense. Oh Dave Mustaine, where are you tonight, he thought. The bartender brought him another whiskey, neat as you please.

"Not interested," Toby said, and blew on his Cutty and water. The barkeep was salting the Colonel's beer after beheading the foam with a practiced flick of the wrist. Toby thought that Colonel Watts was the last man on earth, hardass or not, who even did that anymore. The bulletproof window blew out of the Fort Bragg Officer's clubhouse with the first shot. The second caught Watts in the flash of his beret. The inside of the dead man’s skull looked like ambergris.  Tobias Holt backed up 

"Do we have your attention yet?"

The hell of it was, they did. They had just gunned down a full-bird colonel in the most secret and prestigious unit the US Army had. This was beyond the pale. Watty was a solider and soldiers died. That was their fucking job.  oby did his. He buried him.  But not before sliding off the barstool and getting right in the spooks face.  Knowing he could cut him open with his fingernails by the throat if he wanted.  Knowing that he would eventually lose in the end, when the Special Activities Division safehouse was hip to the scene, three dozen of his own – domestic doorkickers, probably retired SF on contract status – they wouldn’t use Rangers in-house for that sort of party, and they’d wind him to the floor in a shower curtain or down comforter, and pull him out by his chilblains to the street.  Days later broken by torture, his teeth and fingernails pulled out, an icepick in his balls and rough chawed divots in his side where they had sicced the dogs on him, dragged floppy timber sawblades across his chest, eardrums hooked to alligator clips and then slow-as-she-goes weeping, cooked black eyeballs blown out with tractor batteries, his penis taken with boltcutters early and tacked to the wall where he could see it as they hooked up the IV bag to keep his fluids steady, a vetted medic on hand with combat training to monitor pulse, blood loss, alpha waves.  While the Man asked “Why?” in seven languages, patiently, like there weren’t flies eating all the parts of you that could never grow back without a freezer and a surgery wing of a megahospice.  All the things he himself had done. 
 
          But then comes the pain. The real shit.  The IRS freezing your accounts.  Your credit rating disappearing. Men sent out to rape your wife, your dog left poisoned and shitting green foam across the living room carpet. There were worse things than dying. There was living in reset. Everything you worked a lifetime's worth of proud sweat for, gone. All the things that they forget to teach you and you just sort of pick up along the way. These skinny CIA fucks that looked like skinny indie rock losers that had gotten lost on their way to Seattle, with their perfectly capped teeth and their bossanova educations. Their PhD’s and their KUBARK manuals. He wanted to know what their game was.  
You interested yet?  
Toby leaned forward and gestured at his ear.  Hard of hearing, yanno?  Gunshots, close range, indoors, like ya do.
The two spooks leaned in like fucking sea bass hip to grind-and-shine of the spinner lure kicking.  Toby yanked his rod and reel.  Their heads were bushy in the back, gave him purchase to grip onto, tangling around the fingers he had broken in the drawer of some Iraqi General’s fuckhouse for shits and giggles in 05’.  He shattered their skulls against one another.  Caught them right in the sweet spot of the skull where everything kissed like eggshells.  Wham and splatter.  All that education just dripping off the back of the bar.  Felt like napalm, like victory, like an Academy Award. The Gandar district.  Ghazni.  All nothing to those men. Just leftist Hollywood, laying down the lie.  Started with Trumbo. Never quite stopped.

Another, he called, dropping the bodies and raising the dead whisky glass.  The barkeep hesitated only for a second, then left the bottle.

We'll find you, Delta. A voice behind him.  The man’s lungs and respiratory system couldn’t be more than 140 pounds soaking wet.  No weapon or direct orders not to use it.  He would have fired it already if he had.  Which meant that Toby was special.  They wanted him bad.
No one calls us that anymore.  Obsolete, yanno.
It’s immaterial.
Not on this base, little girl.  Go run home to your mama, peckerwood.  Before you get a pasting that makes this look like hot brekky on a cold spring morning.  Look up the Fan Dance.  Run it.  Come back to me when you’ave.  I’m done dancing with children, ken?  
The door, spinning on its hinge.   
Toby tipped the bottle at Watty’s potted skull and drank deeply, pouring some across the bar.  He imagined bagpipes, flowers, Arlington Cemetery.  Then went to find one of Manhattan’s last pay phones.  A Cleaner showed up forty minutes later – half the time it took to find the Bell kiosk.

By that point, his father had already called Manilow Bonn, the most dangerous man in the world.


	Toby woke drenched in sweat.
	I’ve seen this girl before.  Samuel, you red-headed stepchild with the jew-boy name.   Her halo.  Her halo of fireflies like a crown of peace caught in the sandstorm of FARC-swept Ecuador.
	Time on target.
	“Time,” Toby said, and thumbed back the relief switch on his Remington M-70.
	“Call the ball.”
	Shut the fuck up, Toby hissed into the mike, his thumb ground into the MUTE button.  He switched his helmet cam off.
	Rainbird, your optics are gone.  
	“Lost them on the jump.”   
	“Switch to reserve.”
	“Negative. Helmet dashed.”  Billy looked at him like he was crazy and mouthed the words COURT MARTIAL. Toby unsnapped the thumbbreak on his sidearm and gave Billy a look that could freeze a mammoth. Billy stopped mouthing intonations and looked away. They all were men with some rank on them. Some even had a little war on their chests, a CIB, some purple hearts, one Bronze Star that was more the commander’s generosity than any real valor on his part - but this was Tobias’s party and they damn well knew it. 
	Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.
	Tobias couldn’t.  In the scope the fireflies were blinding the green optics of the massive Leupold Starlight Scope. He broke the sight from the gun from the twistaway mount and went for his red dot laser iron sights.  That face.
	That face. He knew that face.  Too round to be in the jungle long on starvation rations, a nose too Roman to be Latin American.
	Zazie.
	“Can’t be,” he whispered, fouling the mike with his emotions.
	“Repeat, Rainbird, Unclear.”
	Toby yanked the radio system paid by US tax dollars that could have kept him in a hospital bed in New York City for two weeks at the finest care imaginable and dashed it against the rock he crept behind.
	Billy was staring at him.  “I can take her from here.”
	“Stay off of the rover,” Ethan Gad told him, and not kindly.  
	“I have the fucking shot, Ethan!” Billy had been raped in Afghanistan.  They didn’t just rape women over there.  It was camel jockey policy.  He had seen it in Mexico as well during Spec Ops training, where they practiced on the Sinaloa and Culican drug cartels. Who were they going to complain to? These were people that fed their babies Coca-Cola rather than formula. Billy got the rash end of the lash, and was pulled out by the PJ's about two days before they were going to decapitate him in the name of whatever. It was a sick business. Capture your enemy and fuck him until you got the order to kill him.
	“Fuck this noise, Ethan, I’m going.”  Bill Innes squatted over his weapon. He was capable. Very goddamn capable. Not a surgeon, but he could put meat in the freezer. And this girl was from the neighborhood.  The Kitchen.  Hell’s Kitchen before they gentrified it into Clinton and the rest of the Westies tore ass up to 207th Street and began breeding like guppies to hold back the niggers that threatened to spill over the thin concrete walkway into Highbridge Park and tell Irish Catholicism to go spit.
	Ethan left the rifle in its bipod and drew his baby Glock. The G26. The little one. The one not on any weapons logs that he had taken off a dead Haji. It was his throwaway piece and Bill Innes knew it.  “Not unless you want me to tell your wife about the raghead blowbang you gave in Qatar.”
	“Ethan.”
	“Is it cool?”
	“We’re cool,” he said. “I’m your brother, Ethan.”
	“Say it into the comm.”
	“I don’t have it.  Repeat, negative.  Dark cover.”
After a second the word came back, scratchy and scrambled.
        "Copy, Rainbird. I say again, Good Copy. Negative Double Zero. No shot. Exfil Path Alpha. O&O."
        "Rainbird out." Innes clicked off and gave him a face, began breaking down his gear. 
	Girl had gotten herself lost.  Operators get sent out on these missions.  It’s little known that the Peace Corps is protected by the Operators of the region.   She was lost.  Caught by the FARCs in the hills. But she was laughing and it carried.  She sounded as happy as any woman could sound.
	That was Zazie.  Zazie. Why did they say her name was Lina?  Fucking intelligence spooks. Couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a search warrant.
"What the fuck was that, Ethan? I mean, what the goddamn motherfucking nightfighting jesus come lately kind of rube shit was that? What are you, ten days out of the fucking Darby Queen all of a sudden?" Bill Innes turned to throw his ruck over his shoulder. It was a three hundred pound swing if it were one.
	Damn it.  He had to figure this out.  How to get his story straight.
"I mean it, Ethan. Command is going to hear about this. There's no-" he paused to swing his 338 Lapua over his other shoulder.  Ethan Holt waited for this, tipped off his brother's helmet as neat as you please and shot Billy Innes through the top his head. Canoed his ass. There was nothing left of his face to identify.
	"Sorry," he said. He changed the barrel out on his throwaway weapon to one of a dozen like barrels he had collected during his time in sandbox, in the mix, pick your pejorative. Because you never knew, did you? He would cut it up enroute.
You just never did know.

That grey section. He scored 320 on his AFPT.  Hungover and drunk.  The kid had a compass in his head. He could plot an azimuth using a wristwatch and a blade of grass.  Stoned out of his eyeballs watching the Journey of Natty Gann on the Wonderful World of Disney, ABC-TV, the subtitles dubbed in Farsi. Lots of guys passed their language quals this way.

Be very careful, Samuel said.  Zazie’s lover.  Before he got educated and fell in love and lost his mind.
This girl. 
You bet your ass he was interested.

Nathaniel Ladd was Portland's own and raised in 162 months of gray (18 years times 9 months/year).

The Ashlands of Mount St. Helens were stuffy with dust and the red four-wheel-drive had turned to the side of the road.  Samuel would get concerned and would need the truck time to rest. The underground pool.  These caves are everywhere she said.  The Cold War ended and caves were left in the dirt and the dust and the apartment buildings time immorium/al.  Some have couches and some dinette sets. 
Did you ever think this would happen, she said?  Yes, he said.  I knew I would see you again. I never thought this would happen, she said. So what, then?  The boy asked and the girl said I killed my monster, is what.  Do you promise, he said and she said nothing.  You never promise, he said.  It is one of the few things I don’t like about you, that waffling.  The girl Zazie said nothing.  You know my true name, she said.  Noa, he said, like the ark. You had two of everything. Two sides to every story. Two names.  Two lovers.  Don’t ask who the other man is she said I won’t tell you. I already know he said. It is Nathaniel Ladd.  How did you know that she said and he said I introduced you.  I changed his tire once.

How are your feet he said and she said Fine.  Shit he said.  That’s not good.  No, she said.  She slid into the water with her bathing suit from 1943, stodgy black one piece with the white ruffle along the bustline.  That’s some bust, he said appreciatively, adverbially.  You shut up, she said.  She does not see the Valium in his bag or the Adderall or the benzodiazapene or the oxycodone or the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and he feels he is home free and early in the morning when men feel the house is their own he is tiptoeing through the azalea of sleep without his contact lenses seated yet, feeling for the pills and hearing their telltale rattle, the smoking gun, even though he has stuffed the bottles with toilet paper and she says to him when he comes back to him “you take a lot of pills” and he says “I love you” to which she turns her ample back to him and he presses himself up hard against her body, her round body, her pearplum body, always schoolgirlish, always a woman who looks like she has those last three pounds of babyfat she is trying to shed, and it makes her young, and her skin glows like radium in those nights of morning where the cock crows from the window outside and she says shoot it, please, you are the violent man, the man with the blue collar swing, the tattered steamwhistle every five pm upbringing, you are my rough trade man, go out then, go on, go on and ring that birds craggy neck.  And he did it and she looked at him dumb and horrified.  He had stuck it in a pot, feathers and all, the legs still doing a compass circumscription like a second hand, those hardstick poultry feet just chasing the rim of the pot and she said Samuel you are a lunatic and the fringe all rolled into one and he said you are a sociopathic lover, a house with only one window and you open it once every ten years but I always find my way inside don’t I and they made love like actors without training and she wore ostrich feathers in her hair and he his glasses and he wrote valentine across her bare pubis with the invisible bikini line underwriting it all and she pulled him to her on his birthday and there was no condom and to him that meant trust and to her that meant lazy and it didn’t matter fuck all cos all the results were the same.  Some island, South Pacific.   83402384.234 latitude w091-34123-4- longitude. Pat pending.

The last time we did this it was the Galapagos cos you said if the world exploded from us meeting we wanted to be far and away.  There were sparrows eating off your chest and they would steal the sugar from the coffee which was thick and black and was brewed at exactly the right temperature.  They had a navy of three boats and not one of them had cannon of any sort.  There were restaurants made of nothing that served food that cost nothing in a city that no one could find without a seaplane and a whole lot of something in the bank.  

And the men by the side of the road with their shotguns out and their gold marshal’s badges. Seems we need that truck.  I guess you do. Are you gonna make us take it?  You’re going to have to, I expect.  

 How did you find this place he said and Zazie said in a book silly.  I am a librarian and my world is books.  
-Seems like that world’s changing.
-They’re all changing, Samuel Noel.  Yours, mine, all of it. For women and for men too.
-I guess I am a bit rough for you.
-You don’t know a fucking thing about what I know, Mr. Man.
-All right then.
-Last time I saw you would cook mustard in a vat of pork and beans and call it supper.
-Well, wasn’t it?
-It better not still be, is all I’m saying.  And I found it in a book.  To answer your question.  It was a book I had to take down to mark DISCARDED.  I save those for my favorite learners.  When you are teachers in the Pacific Northwest you call them learners but when you go International they go back to being students.  Isn’t that funny?  And he smiled and touched her leg and she smiled cos she let him and went on with her story, about how she was closing the library up one night and just finishing stamping out the last ragtag pile of discards to make room for the new wall of graphic novels they had coming in (space was such an issue when it came to the librarian trade, it rode her panties up damn near as high as the budget, and both of those things were total bores and made her feel super adult all in the same breath, so there it was, tell the truth and shame the devil).  It was in a book on building houses and Tesseracts.  A Wrinkle in Time.  Newbury Award Winner.

	I read it when I was small.

	All of my learners are small.  Not so small but small enough to where they are delightful, like puppies are delightful before they burst into their big dog selves and start breaking picture frames with their tails and trying to make ground chuck out of the mailman.

	And inside there was this map but it was a map like the government would draw, not like a child.  It was stenciled on onionskin paper and the salient parts were outlined in red.  CURTISS WRIGHT, was in one corner. 

	They made airplanes in the war.  

	They also made relative components to the atomic bomb.  Samuel had known that part too and did not have a chance to say.  They had a complex near his house that all the kids went to late at night.  It was like a challenge. A game. They would unscrew the yellow manhole and head down into the dark tunnels.


~FIN lchristopher, Monday, June 1st, 2026 4:01AM - Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC.

my hometown god knows when. i had already gotten out at 19.

this is not staged; yes, that is their living room, yes, a woman lives there, yes, there is a four year old stumbling around like a drunken sailor with an inner ear infection directly out of frame.

I am about to ride this basketcase down to a garage belonging to somebody’s unbonded-brother’s-cousin’s-mechanic at 2 in-the-goddamn-morning. since it has a straight pipe exhaust [read: none], it sounded like someone had decided to chain fire a string of German 88’s upon where Garden Street met Industrial Road.

I was elected to take the ride because i was the only one without open arrest warrants and therefore could not say no because I grew up in a contemporary North Jersey city of industry - a veritable allegory and/or microcosm of the goddamn Outsiders.

The Davey's rubber tube/gasket/grommet on the fuel petcock of course was fucked and sprayed gasoline all over my left leg as I rallied down the boulevard. Later in the evening someone lit a cigarette sitting next to me being all flashy with their Zippo and my since-dry fuel spattered trousers promptly caught on fire.

I leapt off the couch and tore off my pants in front of god and everyone and ran for the garden hose [that was for some blessed reason in this backwards-ass homestead, permanently screwed into the faucet of the kitchen sink]. if i didn’t regularly wear long thermal underwear in the winter i would have been very badly burned.

So much for my neighborhood reunion tour.

The point:  — charity is relative. The man taking the picture could not read. He was a union stoneworker and had the first Mustang Shelby Cobra convertible with a manual transmission I had ever seen [aluminum engine block to trim weight, there were like seven of these ragtops ever made]. Riding in those deep leather passenger bucket seat you felt as rich as Croesus every time he swapped gears.

He named his daughter Shelby, after Carroll Shelby. We went to the Chrysler Nationals    together in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with a bunch of friends. I had to leave early to meet my Chinese model girlfriend in Eastern Europe. People talk about imposter syndrome. I always think of culture shock. They're practically related.

Thanks for calling.

Cruisin' down the boulevard where
Chrome was king in the street lights
Where dreams came true every Saturday night
Turning on the radio the nights just came alive
And we thought that life was just to drive

One look in the mirror to comb my hair
Turn the key and I don't care
About anything but miles and miles of road
I know I can't feel this way forever
But here and now I got it together
I got a fire in my heart and American steel...

**-The Bruisers**

~FIN lchristopher, Sunday, May 31st, 2026 4:01AM - Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC.

The Princess of San Antonia. lchristopher

The hospital would not take him. What do I do Lila asked and they said we are sorry.
The hours are over. You have three or four weeks at most. Lila said I see and thank you and she hung up the party-line telephone. All up and down Poplar Street she heard bored neighbors clicking off with their mouths full of new gossip. Lila did not own a cellular. They were bad for you.

David wasn’t going to be a part of this. It was agreed. He didn’t want the child. David she says when she calls I am so sorry and I know we discussed this but I am not sure what to do. And she told him and he said with a sucking breath that told her he was still smoking cigarettes or not-tobacco or worse, I’ll be there in an hour. He lived in Camden and it was dangerous for whites to move around at night but for some reason they tolerated David. They do not like me he would say, I don’t pretend differently. Lots of whites like to believe that they are special because a black man is not firing bullets into his brain. They aren’t. They are fools. I am tolerated. Until something goes wrong. Then I will suffer. Like the black family that moves into a white neighborhood after the real estate lady tries to steer them everywhere else but there. And Lila said then why David why live there at all. And David said to her, becos poverty has no color. And Lila believed she could love him, and they went to bed. At eight months exactly the baby had come, and the stork lay dead on its side.

Come over she said. 
And he said. Give me two hours. 
Wait, she said. 
Yes, Lila? 
Do you love me, she said, without knowing she was going to say it. Her throat closed.
No, Lila, he said, in a tone of pupils forced to recite sentence patterns by rote.
Okay then. Come as quick as you can.
Rock and roll, he said.

The child’s name was Ramona but she would never live to the age where Ramona would be read to her, nor her father, or mother, or sister Beezus. Beverly Cleary has cleared the planet. Beverly Cleary has cleared the planet.

David arrived wearing his houndstooth greatcoat and had a bruise under his left eye. What’s wrong, what happened, she said, of course.
Nothing, he said. It’s my fault. I started it. Where is she?

Here she is. And he looked down at what he had wrought, and Lila just smiled and cried. The baby was so little. So little. 

She will be dead in a fortnight.
How long is a fortnight?
I’m not sure. Two weeks at least. Three at the most.

It was four weeks and twenty seven hours later that Ramona finally stopped.

Are you still drinking?
No.
Will you buy me wine?
Yes.
I mean will it bother you?
No.
He gets up. Stops. Moves to speak. Thinks better of it. Then opens his mouth anyway.
Her face looks crushed. Like a wet grape. Purple.
They said babies come that way.
Do they?
I don’t know. I believe so.
Hm.
What kind of wine?
Red wine.
What kind of red wine?
I don’t know, David. Pick something and get home.

He leaves. The street is wet. It is Only and it is Ever. Not lonely and not owned. He is free. There’s nothing binding him to this house, this woman, the child. It is his child but he sold it before he arrived, like a projectionist, like someone who gives things away for free, like a speculator of land. A man who deals in futures and then cancels all checks bearing his name. Joe’s Liquors was on the corner. Where he remembered it. He picked out a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a ten dollar marker, and slapped it down. Off-good California red. He could pick the wine for any table setting but not the horses. And now wine wasn’t even allowed anymore. Life was too short to hurry along. 

The neon of the place warmed the bums sleeping in the grotto outside. The window was large and taped over with cardboard where the denizens of the night had driven holes in with broom handles, rocks. Probably licked the holes they made around the edges like a miner of oil, might. Like a prospector trepanning for specie to be weighed out by the sack, eyes starry with the promise of silver and gold and American rotgut whisky. See what springs up out of that massive and slack Rorschach, some wet American Dream; contracting like an aggravated spinchter-muscle pushing the last gasps of the  its way through time.

Lila gets the door on the second knock the way her mother, a socialite, had instructed her when expecting a caller.

He wakes up on the fourth day and she is squalling into the telephone.

I have insurance. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
It doesn’t matter.
Surely something can be done
There isn’t time.
What can I do?
Pray.

She didn’t know how to pray. There wasn’t a bible in the house so she got out the red leather bound Torah and cleaned off a spot on the floor and tried to think good thoughts. David...

Is it a boy or a girl?
[last line.]

~FIN lchristopher, Saturday, May 30, 2026 10:31AM - Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC.

-------------------------------------------------

TW: No trigger warnings.

All of this equals just writing as authors have done since the dawn of time. Anyone who tries to insert their opinion into anything you have to say is impugning on the writer’s time. Anyone who finds the subject matter going back or is offended by the fuck-word or takes umbrage with, I don’t know, the average rainfall in the Amazon basin or the mating habits of the Koala Bear or whatever it is you have to say can simply. close. the. book. 

It is not the writer’s responsibility to do this. Our job is the mirror opposite - we have enough trouble trying to get readers to not only open the book but to stay engaged, every sentence, two or three hundred pages until the end - and hopefully, think reflectively about what we have to say long after you are done with us and we with you. 

How dare anyone try and shovel more responsibility onto the pile of truly emotional labor that steadily grows larger for us scribblers? 

At present: 

We must write the book, edit the book, market the book, build a target market for the book [hello substack readers!], find an agent for the book, get them to agree to represent us by both the strength of our work and proposal and the chance there is a hole in their schedule wide enough to accommodate us. If we come to terms, we must comfortably pay the agent 20% for their effort off the top of all future earnings, and somehow prau they have both the mojo and can-do to go up this beanstalk all the way to the only publishing houses that can carry us anymore [the conglomerate, patched over [MC version of merger & acquisition] the so-called Big 5, and their umpteen imprints sprinkling down to earth], where, if we just happen to win that particular lottery, we may be graced with an editor that is not only talented but actually believes in what it is we are trying to do [as well as her/himselves own drive in the industry and love of the game] like a legend, such as Maxwell Perkins or a Bill Thompson [Stephen King from Carrie to The Dark Half in 1991; you do the math on whether or not that helped or hindered his work from an editorial perspective], that will place the book at the tippy top of their booklists and hope to Christ they have quality veteran soldiers in their ranks who can do the proper PR and promotion — basically living on the telephone day and night — to ensure we are seen and our voices get heard. Because without that, you have lost. 

To get to this stage will place our books on shelves and in online retailers warehouses if we are smart, agile, hardworking enough — and hopefully have a concordance/body of work at this time that is large enough to keep our bettors buying our work and contracting our rights to those who might deign to pay us an actual living wage, one day - if we are lucky enough. If we don’t get remaindered. If we aren’t out of print before the first edition print run even completes its lazy jog around the press.

Now — to add insult to injury — you want us to advertise that our book might be harmful to those who pick it up prior to the first actual, creative word being struck? Like we are cancer causing like a pack of cigarettes or deadly, like a firearm? Are you actively betting against us? Do we look like we *need* another handicap? 

Begging your pardon, but you can suck a fart out of my asshole.

You have problems? So do I. So does everyone. Welcome to real life. My job is to write books. There’s already a warning label on what we do in every library and in every bookseller. It’s called “Children’s Books” and “Adult Books.”They are conveniently placed in separate sections for your ready reference.

If you can’t deal with shit fuck satan death sex drugs rape [in the immortal words of Scott Ian], then get the fuck out of my house and go pick up Ann M. Martin and read about the Babysitter’s Club or maybe if you’re feeling extraspecial racy and it’s a Friday night a Christopher Pike thriller in the Young Adult section. I promise you won’t have to contend with very much reality there. No bad words. No racial epithets. No naughty fuck scenes.

Other than that, how fucking dare you.

With gratitude and grace,


lchristopher.


-or, as the man in all things Christopher-related, I give Mr. Tracy Marrow, known more colloquially to you all as the musical polymath Ice-T. [I got my first kiss at a Body Count show, you cannot doubt my sincerity to this man.]

Freedom of speech, let ‘em take it from me
Next they’ll take it from you, then what you gonna do?
Let ‘em censor books, let ‘em censor art
PMRC, this is where the witch hunt starts
You’ll censor what we see, we read, we hear, we learn
The books will burn
You better think it out
We should be able to say anything, our lungs were meant to shout
Say what we feel, yell out what’s real
Even though it may not bring mass appeal
Your opinion is yours, my opinion is mine
If you don’t like what I’m sayin’? fine
But don’t close it, always keep an open mind
A man who fails to listen is blind
We only got one right left in the world today

Let me have it or throw the Constitution away.

-ICE-T; [JELLO BIAFRA/DEAD KENNEDY'S] BODY COUNT - FIRST ALBUM


-FIN. lchristopher. Friday, May 29, 2026; 4:01AM, Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.