ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 36
aluminum box and a form letter and your mother's tears. Am I too honest?
Kill. You have to kill ...you ...have to kill. So I kill him and he kills me, so this
is just some bizarre enactment on some warped food chain and I am the dead
man. Ha, ha. Hooo. A dancing, dead young man.
Oh my~h my God. He set down the stone and dropped to his knees,
facing me. Yes. The knife was quite sharp; it cut through his damp T-shirt
quickly enough, exposing his gaunt, topographic and scarred torso. That
knife, that notched iron tooth. He plunged his carefully prepared blade into
his ...his abdomen and drew a line of crimson across his brown skin. Just a
straight, red line. It was as if you could have wiped it off but he drew the
blade out and cut upwards and that just opened him. A glistening bruise
grew and bulged and the ground ran rich red ... and his eyes never left me.
Even as he fell, slowly, to nuzzle the earth with his shoulder like a child
getting closer to mother, the eyes never left me. God.
There was yelling. The officer who had produced this scene just
walked away. Just walked. But the Dog's eyes didn't leave me. I looked. Still
coal. The Dog who wouldn't kill. He wouldn't kill. That was what it was all
about. He would no longer kill. And when it was them or me he found the
only way out that would equal was neither. Dark eyes. But coal can give off
a warmth if sparked, can't it? No, the eyes hadn't changed. Not at all. It was
me. /had changed. Those eyes, and that soul, were the sun, and it was I who
revolved around them. What really do you see? What truth in another's
eyes?
A soldier with a look of shock on his face walked up, put his gun to Dog's
head and finished the life that was seeping out. The soldier, his duty done,
for a long, long time,just ... walked. Walked away, throwing his rifle hay-nay.
He was done. And so was I. They crowded around the body ... my chance. No
one was paying any attention to me, my meager life grandly upstaged. My
gaze fell on the kid. The other campesinos had run, chickens seizing their
chance. But the kid had stayed, and was just looking at me. Still, still, as
ifhe knew. Did he? Or was he just good at this simple game? All I wanted
to know was that a bush was twenty feet away. Before I really knew, it was
green on green, my legs pumping. Like I said, who needs hands? I had legs
and they went up and down and my heart was beating and I had a message.
And a meaning.
My hell had changed. I never killed again. If I ever did pick up a
weapon, it wasn't long before I'd put it back down again. They beat me, took
my hands away again and gave me iron bars instead of wooden cage, but once
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