Mind pointing them out Neverending?
I
suspect they're just errors because I learned to read and write in Australia and we spell some words differently, such as colour, but I'd like to be sure. As for punctuation, yeah that wouldn't surprise me at the least. I write like I'm actually telling someone a story so it doesn't always convert well.
Anyway, here is another...
Presented for your enjoyment:
Introducing Joey Carmichael; a two-bit hood whose hopes and dreams fit snugly into the dime bag tucked into his back pocket. Joey’s was never the sharpest crayon in the box so as far as opinions go his have never been particularly important but that’s all about to change… because Joey is about to learn the hard way that when the chips are down his opinion of himself is the only thing that matters…
Liam Gray’s
CHINOOK
Pirelli’s used to be a swanky place when that word didn’t sound like some backwards sex act or cheap cardboard cereal but the times have changed even if Pirelli’s menu hasn’t. This the kitchen; plates stacked like skyscrapers, cutlery from when America remembered how to produce quality, and Joey Carmichael sweeping floors—a nagging testament to inhibition, work ethic, and Pirelli’s poor judgement.
With the floor partially swept and no one to tell him otherwise Joey takes his fifth cigarette break of the morning. Outside the air is thick and sticks to his skin but to Joey anything is better than being shackled another minute to that kitchen and he takes great comfort as he paces the back alley far from the angry calls of Mr. Pirelli. Here in the shadows where all mummers can be spoken aloud Joey is the master of his domain and everything he says is law. Yes, here he can light up without judgement or worry, he can defer to instinct and thoughtlessness and any wrong choice can be laughed off or blamed on the weed… but like every utopia before it, it never lasts.
Mr. Pirelli’s screams rattle the plates and shatter the silence—an offensive clutter of noise and bother that rips Joey back from the edge of peace like a snapping rubber band and slings him hurtling into the thinnest reaches of his sanity. Frothing anger combined with a linger sense of self importance, or perhaps an urgent feeling to irrationally deny the truth and irrelevance of every wasted moment of his life drives Joey’s step by bloody step back up ally. As thoughtless as in his nirvana he bursts through the kitchen door and comes face to face with the plump scarlet countenance of Pirelli. Then there, in the face of a terrifying roar Joey finds his courage in defiance and strikes out—against his father, his mother, his school teachers, his ex-girl friends, and every other poor soul whoever dared reflect the reality of his impotence!
Though it is Pirelli who receives the blow; a sharp and wet blow to the chest, above the collar bone but below the neck. As the colour drains from his face and his palate grows cold, only whimpered gurgles slip his gaping wound… perhaps pleading, perhaps screaming—words uncertain by any measure but to say they were his last.
The floor is dirty again and it sings up at Joey like a choir of gibbering cherubim and though his hand remains tightly closed around the meat cleaver and the blood stains to his elbow there is no trembling or doubt. Only the blissful nirvana of a new life, of a new man standing atop a scarlet shroud of shed rage, a man lost within the savage beauty of his own visceral drug-addled rebirth, in awe of an undeniable moment of brutal clarity, in the liberating simplicity of his nightmarish baptism. Joey’s father once told him that the Native American’s wore war paint when they went to war because men didn’t kill men… but monsters could. The thought comes rushing into his mind almost as quickly as the rats scurry from the shadows to fill the wound in Pirelli’s neck and a malicious smile tucks at his edge of his lips.
Kicking the limp hand from his ankle with a bestial snarl Joey kneels down and marks his face with the blood of his first kill and scoffs a little at the fragility of life.
Then just like any other the moment passes and the meat cleaver skitters from his hand. Anxiety isn’t far away, jittering, panic, twitching, nagging, burning guilt—guilt for what he had done and worse still for all he hadn’t, for lies told and maintained, for anger spoken and intended, for life wasted and hopes destroyed, for the death of the faith and pride in his father’s eyes, for the loss of his mother’s dignity, for the tears shed by battered girlfriends, and the vandalism to the cars of his teacher’s, for the blame and the predigest, for the betrayal and the hate, for the inconsequential measure of his life and the one he had taken!
He closes his eyes but he can hear the rats eating. He can see the disappointment in their eyes—pulling him to his knees his every action a bamboo lash across his back. His father’s words pounding through his mind like a hammer, worse than any fear or irrelevance, hammering on his soul like a smith on hot steel…
“Our ancestors used to believe that men don’t kill other men… only monsters kill men.”
“Only monsters kill men!”
The same words over and over, a nightmarish dream more real than the ever expanding range of his senses, more terrifying than the waring hate and shame that burst the blood vessels in his eyes or the pulsating blisters that burst whiskers, louder than the chitinous squeal as his fingers knotted and webbed, more intense than the unceasing itch as course black hair bristled from his body, more painful than his spine bursting free of his back into a long bald tail, and somehow, against all logic, more horrifying than the craven hunger gurgling in his swollen black belly.
***
Portrait of a Rat—a vermin, a lowly beast given to the parody of man or Joey Carmichael—an unwitting victim of weakness fear and an ancient belief. Anyway about it one thing I think we can agree on that Joey was a lost soul intent on dragging as many others as he can down with him if that would mean that he stayed out of the abyss for just one more minute…
The End