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My mouth is sour with whiskey and the loaded shotgun lays heavily across my lap in my sofa chair. This is my Christmas Eve ritual.
I hate Christmas. The holidays. The time for families to gather to share love and good cheer. Bullshit. I try hard every year to forget there is a Christmas precisely because it reminds me of my family, but this fucking world won’t let me. They’ve romanticized a nightmare.
As he awoke under the cement overpass, Jonathan heard the distant growl of cars, his own raspy breath, and the old woman’s gentle weeping. The last thing he remembered was Kiro and Sushime cackling over the squeal of tires, although those sounds had escaped into the smog hours ago. Wiping the long, grimy strands of his dyed dark brown hair from his face, Jonathan opened his eyes blearily, gravel biting his back through a beer-stained t-shirt. Steel-tipped black boots, leather pants ripped at the thigh – Fuck! – and a head full of heroin dreams, rolled by his best “friends”…
“Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.”
— Puck to Oberon,
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act III, ii
The funeral was today.
I wrote a film some years back about morgue workers. I watched tape after tape of interviews, the mortician’s assistants telling frightful tales about bodies unrecognizable from their wounds, which they dressed and coated with layers of cosmetics. They had learned to make Death rosy-cheeked and peaceful.
Titans and ambulances rage as they emerge from their caves, and sleep, twilight-bound and restless, when they return…
“Head injury, 15 minutes!”
The radio room PA system beeped frantically with the paramedic call for the latest trauma patient. Nine-year-old Rachel Anne Roberts tested at a “1” for every phase of the Glasgow Coma Test: unresponsive. Triage quickly ushered her gurney through the double-layers of automatic glass doors and into the trauma room. Blood draining from her right ear. Many cuts covering her frail body…
