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Shorts
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| Prologue | |
| By alamo | ||||||
| 14 March 2007 | ||||||
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This is only the beginning of something longer I've been working on for a while. It's kind of short so I suppose it can go in the short stories section. Please let me know if not. The girl had been in the bar for an hour, and already felt a little drunk. She got the bartender’s attention, ordered another. Looking into the big mirror in front of the bar, she saw a man walking in. He wore a black suit, looking like a businessman; his head shaved short, a scar visible. To her, he looked good. Her heart beat faster when, of all places, he sat next to her. “Get me a beer,” he said to the bartender, dropping cash on the bar. The girl watched him roll a cigarette. It seemed like a ritual, the tobacco moulded to a cylinder, the paper wrapped around, the all-important lick, and the look of satisfaction he got when he placed the cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, inhaled, exhaled. The girl waved a cloud of smoke out of her eyes, smiling. “Hey,” she said. He looked at her, at her eyes, at her smile. “Kindly blow your smoke elsewhere.” He smiled back, half-convincing. “I expect there’s a story as to why you aren’t smiling properly,” she said. “I mean, I’m not bragging, but I’m an attractive girl, and I just flirted playfully with you, and you don’t smile back properly.” He took a big swallow of his beer. “I mean, here I am, the aforementioned attractive girl, and you… you’re this…” She thought for a moment, got her smile back. “You’re this Mysterious Stranger.” The Mysterious Stranger smiled, genuine this time. “That’s better,” she said. “Now why couldn’t you smile properly before, just like you are now?” He stopped smiling, drank more beer. “C’mon, what’s the matter?” The Mysterious Stranger had never done this before. He kept his feelings hidden from all, often from himself; it helped in his profession. “Well, my girlfriend dumped me,” he said, hesitant. She filled with drunken sympathy. “Honey, I’ve been there, who hasn’t?” “Yeah.” He said, finishing his beer. “So, like, why she do it?” The Mysterious Stranger thought about it, finished his cigarette. “She didn’t like my job.” The girl, confused for a moment, watched Milo get up, start rolling another cigarette. “Why, what do you do?” she said. “What? Are you a mortician or something?” He finished rolling, smiled at her. “Y’know this is funny,” he said. “You saying I’m a Mysterious Stranger.” “Why?” “Well, I am, literally, a Stranger.” Milo lit his cigarette, walked out of the bar. The girl, puzzled look on, ordered another drink. She never saw him again. Milo Stranger looked down. The punk had tears in his eye. The other eye had rolled out of its socket, down a drain, along sewage-clogged pipes, into systems. His neon blue Mohawk listed dejectedly to the left, as if the (now missing) eye had exerted a gravitational pull. Tight black denim jeans soaked up a muddy puddle, blood filtering through. Milo thought, this is a messy death. The punk squirmed. Milo pushed harder on the punk’s throat with his foot. Swallowing, the punk looked up. Eye contact. “Please,” he said, or croaked. “There’s been a neugh-.” Milo pressed his foot down. He’d heard the pleas before, the squeals of desperation, the promises, the lies. This one wasn’t any different. Milo let the punk twitter on for a while, splitting himself in two, trying to reconcile his actions with his current situation. Milo counted to seven, cutting the punk off mid-sentence with a kick in the ribs. “Listen,” he said. “There’s only one way out of this. Know what that is?” Milo paused for the rhetoric to sink in. The punk’s red lips moved. Almost inaudibly he acquiesced. “No you don’t,” Milo, suddenly angry, said, feeling like someone had stolen something precious, maybe his rhetoric, from him. He aimed another kick at the punk’s ribs, simultaneously swapping the gun to his left hand and brandishing his seven-inch blade in his right. The punk double-recoiled. Piss seeped down the drain. “You got money?” Milo said. “Or your daddy got money?” The punk looked white, blood moving to various wounds, shock settling in. The punk said nothing. Milo looked at him, counted to seven, and punched him in the face. The punk spat teeth, breathed blood.
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