January 2006
Rishi looked at the imposing figure of Yama, the God of Death. The deity’s large, muscular arms didn’t carry the legendary mace and the looped rope with which he was supposed to pull the soul from the corpses of those he came to execute.
The room was dimly lit and my eyes were slowly adjusting as my head was crunched between the bed and the wall. I could only see the floor and I began to feel sick. Beneath the bed against the wall was an empty box of tampons. The box was littered with spent condoms.
Ostensibly the stripper wanted some sucker on the stage. Rab was forced to his feet.
I tried to out-business The Business. And when that didn’t work, I tried to kill my boss.
Pulling out his little wallet to pay, he
remembered the Lotto ticket, which he had never checked. He looked at it and put it back in his wallet.
I know what I am now, how complicit I am, but that doesn’t deter my fascination for my job or my raw need to perform it. Capability always supercedes culpability as the arbiter of our fate.
I felt a vein. The alcohol I used to clean off the area gave off flumes burning my nostrils. My heart pounded in my chest with the fear I would fail and hurt the boy more than necessary. The needle to my surprise slipped easily into the vein as I heard clapping coming from behind me.
Out into space floating with the expansion of every atom there, and also just beyond. This sun and the other stars too numerous to count or conceive, and the space that space is expanding into, in this moment, in the moment it first came to pass, in the moment it will cease to exist.
Another tentacle made it's way up the girl's leg and under her skirt. She grabbed at it. A pair of tentacles wrapped around her wrists and pinned them to the sand.