These Moments of Silence - Stone The Crow

He was doing about 85 miles an hour in the middle of Delaware Ohio and Down was blasting 'Stone the Crow' at him from the quickly degrading dashboard speakers of the stolen car.

He knew exactly what they were talking about.

The song drowned out the police sirens behind him. Gave him just that right kind of edge to avoid running down a few middle management businessmen that were looking at their phones as they crossed the street instead of being intelligent humans and looking both ways first.

As if the little white line hand they looked to for guidance would keep them safe.

They screamed as he passed them. As the chrome mirrors of the stolen car brushed the frayed seams of their cheap suit jackets and they dissolved like the people in the old atomic bomb training films. Just black smoke and a pattern on the ground that looked like it was drawn in chalk. Their mouths were open even wider than their eyes.

He couldn't hear them.

He wasn't listening.

Dark green eyes that looked like they were made of crystal when the light of the setting sun caught them through the windshield were already looking further down the block. There was a certain kind of madness, the most terrible kind aside from child molesters shining through them. They narrowed when he saw the cop pull his car into the next intersection. A smile that was little more than a straight line. As straight a line as the one that was pointing his two thousand pound missile at the cop.

He leaned forward and put all his weight on the pedal that was already flat on the floor.

The cop got out of his car the way they had taught him to at the academy. His uniform was perfectly pressed. His collar was sweat stained and completely starched. He ran around the car to the other side. Lost his breath along the way. There were letters on the side of the car, but the blue and red flashing lights made them hard to read. It didn't matter what they said. It didn't matter what color the lights were. It didn't matter when the cop pulled his service revolver with shaking hands. The gun wasn't ever his strong suit. He was really much better at paperwork in the academy. The street wasn't nearly as comfortable to him as his desk. But Ramirez was sick.

The man in the stolen car knew there was only ever one way this was all going to end.

The cop was overweight. His chin was slick, both of them. His nerves were not made of steel. He believed in the training. He believed in the words in the manual, the guide to how he should react that promised him a certain outcome to his actions. That promised him that if he followed the guidelines set forth herein he would not only live through whatever madness the life threw at him, but that he would emerge a hero. The gun shook a little harder when he pulled the trigger. It didn't make a sound and neither did the bullet that flew through the windshield of the stolen car. The second shot hit the dashboard.

He was flying through the air with the aftertaste in his mouth.

The cop dissolved as the stolen car passed over him. Just sort of turned black all at once or maybe he turned into the kind of fuzz on a television with no station tuned in. All white dots and black that didn't make any sense in the world. Some of his lo fi memory stuck to the spinning wheels and then he was smoke that drifted along the bottom of the bumper as it slammed into another cheap metal box someone had payed too much for.

There wasn't a sound on impact.

There wasn't a scream or the groaning of metal and plastic crushing itself under the pressure and heat. There wasn't a squeal of hot rubber sliding across the cold concrete street. There wasn't the moan from the passengers whose car had been the tarmac, obliterated under the spinning, careening bomb that had been an accountant's brand new ride an hour before.

Nobody heard the explosion.

She hadn't ever seen anything like it.

She watched with a shaking hand over her mouth as the two used to be cars slid down the road, sparks igniting the gasoline that was pouring out of the little hybrid landing pad's shattered tank. Her wide eyes followed the cars as they slid with fire shooting out behind them like some badly built rocket ship that some over educated, underwhelming technician had pointed the wrong way. A twitch as the twisted metal slammed hard into a row of parked cars along the other side of the street. Then another massive explosion that lit up the world in perfect silence. The concussive force of the blast hit her petite frame and she took a few steps back.

She felt hands on her waist.

When she turned around the man whose hands were on her smiled down at her. Then he squeezed her hips a little bit.

She jerked her body away from him.

He put his hands up. They were cracked and red and smeared with old dried blood that had seeped from the cracks that spider webbed across his palms. He smiled and took a step towards her.

There were people running but she didn't hear them screaming. The commotion hadn't reached her ears.

He started talking but she didn't hear him. For a few seconds he watched her as she walked away. Smiled at her when she looked back over her shoulder. Then he sighed when she disappeared into the crowd of people stuck at the curb. There wasn't a little white light hand to tell them it was safe to cross the street. So they were just watching the fire burn. Phones were out, blinking in silence as pictures and videos were taken. Tweets were sent and selfies with raging inferno behind smiling clueless faces were already flying out into space where they would be redirected by satellites so a bunch of strangers who didn't give a fuck could look at them and maybe push the little heart button that didn't mean they gave a fuck.

Liberal victims were already trying to figure out how to blame the President.

The man with bleeding hands took a couple of steps forward. He glanced over his shoulder but the girl was gone. His fingers balled into a fist without him realizing it. When he got to the curb he looked across the street. The fire was spreading to the other cars. He couldn't hear the crackling of the flames, even as he watched the paint peel back under the relentless heat of a gasoline fueled fire. His hands started to hurt so he looked down and forced them to open. They were bleeding again.

Someone slammed into him.

He turned around, saw the four policemen. None of them looked at him as they jogged past but all the same his body was tense. His auto reaction to the boys in blue was doing its best to make him run. They all had radios in their hands and it looked like they were screaming into them but he couldn't hear what they were saying. Then they were running across the street towards the fire.

He thought about the girl who had backed into him. How her ass had felt against his crotch. How her hips felt in the palms of his hands.

He turned the opposite way and started walking.

The girl standing in the doorway of the coffee shop watched him walk past her. She sighed out the breath she had started holding in when she saw him walking towards her. Relief filled her tiny frame. She wouldn't have to suffer through his clumsy attempts at hitting on her. At least not right now. For a second she considered quitting, just walking away from it all. To never have to hear his voice again, to never have to see his eyes. The way he always looked at her while he sat there and drank his coffee.

A stretch of her long thin neck as she turned to look across the street and the braided ponytail that nearly reached her thin waist moved in the hot wind that blew across the street as more cars went up in the rolling flames.

There was a fire engine across the street.

She hadn't heard it pull up.

The flashing lights were almost blinding, so she put up a thin hand on the purple stone she always wore around her neck. A sigh but she knew she wouldn't do anything about the way she felt. Then she looked back into the coffee shop, saw the shift manager. The big girl that got to wear the red apron. The one that said she was in charge. The big old shift manager was reading the checklist. Her thick, stubby fingers were as red as her apron from the grip of authority with which she held the clipboard. Her moist purple lips were moving as she touched everything on the checklist with the back end of a pen. She always read out loud. She always touched things when she had to count.

The girl standing outside couldn't hear her.

She looked back at the fire. But there were too many people around the wreckage. She couldn't see anything except the tips of the flames reaching up into the growing darkness. Impressions of first responders that looked like still wet watercolor paintings from the heat coming off the flames. The street was being shut down. There were crews setting up barricades in front of the line of blue that stood there like statues until a car came. Then one of them would step forward and hold out either his right or left hand. After the oncoming car had turned he would step back into the perfectly practiced line. Just like the book had taught him.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't look at it. She didn't have to. It was nobody at all. It wasn't the one person she didn't have the courage to talk to. It was just another picture of a face on an app that wanted her to get naked for him. That would tell her how beautiful she was without even bothering to ask about the secret fears she held in her heart. That would tell her he loved her until she wouldn't send him a video of her screaming his name with something shoved inside her. Then he would stop messaging her and she would feel bad that he had unfollowed her.

One of the construction guys that was setting up the barricades looked over and smiled at her.

The girl in front of the coffee shop didn't smile back at him. Instead she looked down at her watch and then turned and walked back inside. So he shook his head and kept sliding the heavy wood and steel barrier into place. Then he held the steel sign that said detour up while another worker screwed it to the barrier with a cordless drill.

All of the commotion around him didn't bother him. It was like white noise, very soft and somewhere in the distance. He thought it should be louder. More in focus. But he had been working for nearly twelve hours before the call had come in, out on the highway clearing away the remains of a tractor trailer that had spun out and flipped onto its side just as the sun was coming up, before it had time to burn away the ice from the night before, to get down here and put up the barriers. He thought about getting a coffee before he headed home.

Then he remembered that the girl hadn't smiled back so he knew he'd just be embarrassed if he walked in there to get a coffee. They wouldn't have anything to talk about anyway. She didn't look like the kind of girl that hung out too late in bars looking for one night stands. Besides, all he really wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep a good long while.

He shook the sign. It was good and tight. Then he stood up, looked down the barrier. It was as good as it would get. If someone else decided to steal a car and drive it like a bat out of hell, well there wasn't a whole lot these barricades would do to stop him. But for the normal people of the city they would be enough.

The world was quiet when he nodded to his shift leader. The older man was talking with one of the firemen, pointing at the barriers. But he was good foreman so he always kept one eye on his boys as he called them so he saw him, gave him a tight lipped smile and a nod back. Then the barrier was good enough for the boss so he turned and walked to the opposite side of the street than the coffee shop. The hardhat was in the crook of his arm as he thought about the best way to get to where his truck was parked.

It was really starting to get dark.

The din of the commotion behind him faded away completely.

Two blocks and then he turned right. It was a little less industrial on this side of downtown. Not that it was much of a downtown, but that's what everyone called it. It was really the campus district of a small college. The town had been built around it. The real downtown, the closest one, was about an hour away to the southwest.

The street he found himself on was one of the old residential areas. It had been built in the late fifties for the original builders and professors, row houses mostly occupied by graduate students these days. It was winter break so the street was quiet. Above him the street lights fizzled a bit but he didn't hear them. Instead he saw the shaking light come into being without realizing it. There was a dark spot on the street to his left. No streetlights there for nearly a half a city block.

When he reached the dark spot he stopped and looked across the street. There was a man standing there, just on the edge of the darkness. It was a nearly perfect line where the flickering lights of the streetlamps ended and the nearly pitch black darkness started. The stranger was standing with one foot in both.

The construction worker looked at him for a minute but the man didn't move, so he sighed and kept walking. His truck wasn't parked too far away now.

The man standing on the edge of darkness turned around just as the figure that had been watching him stepped out from under the flickering light across the street.

Then he was alone again.

He took a deep breath, filled his lungs with the peaceful silence the night always seemed to bring, when the world calmed down and people all went off to do whatever secret things they do in the cover of darkness. A thin smile before he started down the footpath that led into the oldest graveyard in the city.

It was always quiet there. That's why he went there. Even in the daytime the people that he ran across weren't much for talking. They would just smile at him, that smile people always give when they are in a certain kind of pain, or when they assume the person they were smiling at were in a certain kind of pain. Maybe that's what kept them quiet. The respect for pain. Not the fake kind of pain the professional victims of the world claimed to suffer. No, those people were always screaming, trying to make a point from their pointless existence in the loudest most obnoxious way possible. Their personal offense at other people's opinions on life was always turned up all the way. To full, ear shattering volume.

People in true pain very rarely raise their voice.

Instead they tried to hide it, to mask their pain from those around them because true pain is always a very personal kind of pain. The kind that most people cannot understand no matter how empathetic they may be. The simple fact of the matter is that true pain is only ever understandable to the one holding onto it and so there is really no point in going around marching about it. No point in making signs in your basement hoping that some news channel will put it on TV so that the uncaring mass of humanity will somehow take your fake pain from you. Nobody really cares about the pain you inflict upon yourself for the sake of being a part of something, some movement that is nothing more than people who don't have the courage, the fortitude to change their own situation. In their desperation to feel like they are special instead of knowing they are they use their made up pain as an excuse to be a part of something.

No matter how worthless or destructive that something is.

Just like being in love with someone who is afraid to love you back.

Mobs are always mobs no matter if they wear a swastika or a pink pussy hat, whether they kneel before a cross or burn it.

He just looked at the crosses, the tiny stone ones that had names on them as he walked slowly through the graveyard. There were names on the crosses and the stones but he didn't bother to read them. He had read them once but the names all reminded him of other people. They reminded him of people he had known at one time or another. Most of those people hadn't meant anything to him so he decided he wouldn't bother reading the names because the people they represented didn't matter to him either. The dates were far more interesting. He read the dates and wondered what could have killed them. That's the thing about a graveyard. You rarely think about life while you're there, despite what you tell yourself later. You seldom wonder how those people lived in the moment when you're standing over what remains of their earthly body below the dirt. Maybe you wonder later how they lived, who they loved, whether they deserved the death they got. In that moment there is just the musing on how they died.

Further into the graveyard he wandered.

A smile as he passed a few of the more unique grave markers like the little log that had 'Wood' carved in it. He remembered the picture he had taken of her sitting on it like she was riding it. He wondered what ever happened to those photos. If she was using them in her attempt to get famous by being a pretty girl on Instagram. Then he shook his head to get the thought out.

He had a fortune to make for her.

A light out there in the darkness among the old twisted trees further from the street behind him.

And there wasn't really anything else to do except go to it.

The dead leaves, frozen in what was left of the last snow didn't make a sound beneath his feet as he approached the circle of light. Torches set into the ground. The kind you put on your back porch with citronella in them to keep the mosquitoes away. He could smell them. In their flickering light a vague shape moved about within the circle. Dark robes that were dirty, like someone had rubbed mud all over them. They were frayed and tattered at the edges that swept over the loamy earth. A deep hood that hid whatever sort of face may have been lost in the shadows of it.

He stopped a few feet from the circle.

There were three men sitting around a small wooden table.

They were splitting up a pile of money. None of them looked at the others. None of them spoke a word. They simply counted the money that had been the pot of whatever game they were out there playing in the middle of the graveyard beneath the flickering light of the moon and the torches. As he looked closer there was no sign of the hooded, robed figure.

His eyes found the empty fourth chair.

After a few silent minutes the money was finished being split. Each of the three men had a stack in front of them. They each filled the small glasses in front of them with dark liquid from a very old looking bottle before returning the cork that hung from a small string to the mouth of the bottle. Then they raised their glasses and clinked them together but he didn't hear the sound it made. The drinks were drank in silence.

For another few minutes the three men didn't do anything. One of them checked his watch while another looked at his cell phone.

Finally he stepped forward.

When he got to the torches the three men looked up at him. They each smiled or nodded or just stared at him. He got the impression they all assumed he knew what he was supposed to do. His eyes searched the graveyard as he looked around but there was nothing out there except the stones. Rows upon rows of them each with the least explanation of the life they were supposed to mark as humanly possible. Everyone was a father or a son or a mother or a daughter or a sister or a brother. All of them were loved or did love. All of them were, if one were to believe the writing on the stones, all the greatest most wonderful kind of person to ever walk upon the earth.

He saw the lies for what they were.

So perhaps it was the futility of it all that made him step into the circle of flickering light.

Perhaps it was simply that it was a place for the lost and the lonely and so there was no other place for him to be.

There was an empty chair in front of him so he sat down. One of the three poured a glass from the ancient bottle and it slid across the roughly carved wooden table towards him without a sound. Before he picked it up he could smell it. The whiskey didn't burn much as it went down his throat. He set the glass down and looked into their eyes one after the other. None of them said a word but the third man, the one on his left, nodded to the center of the table.

Nodded to the gun.

Then the man on his right put a hundred dollar bill beside the gun. The man across from him matched it. The man on the left put a hundred and a fifty. Each of the other two matched with another fifty. He pulled his wallet out but there wasn't any money in it.

He had already spent it all sending her gifts she didn't bother to even thank him for.

So he picked up the gun put it to his head and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. There may have been a dry click when the hammer came down but he didn't hear it.

Then he set the gun down.

The three men nodded.

The man on his right pushed the pile towards him. He shook his head and left the pile in the center of the table. After a few minutes and another round of drinks the man on his left put four hundred dollar bills and a fifty on the pile. The man in the center did the same.

Without a sound the man on his left picked up the gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.

There wasn't a sound as the back of his head exploded into the night.

The other two men didn't say anything. They simply began to split up the pile of money in front of the corpse that was sitting in the chair with smoke coming out the hole in his forehead. His eyes were still open but he wasn't watching them. There was no rustle but they all felt the cold breeze as it swirled around the suddenly dead man. Then the breeze was gone and a third of the dead man's money was on the table in front of him. The man to his right picked up the gun, opened it and put a single bullet into the six chamber cylinder before he spun it. The cylinder didn't make a sound when he clicked it closed.

Then he set it down on the table and sat back in his chair.

The man in the center poured the drinks and the three of them drank.

He looked at the other two men. The man across from him nodded, put three hundred dollar bills onto the pile of bills in the middle of the table. He counted out four from his own stack of the dead man's money and set them upon the pile. The man to his right looked at the pile. Then he looked at each of them.

The gun didn't make a sound when the hammer came down.

And then there were two.

Cold wind and another shot of whiskey. Another bullet. Another few bills he didn't bother counting.

He didn't count his money while he was sitting at the table. He just shoved it into his pocket when the game was ended. When he got up from the rough wooden chair and gave a final look to the three newly dead men in the center of that place of ancient death, he wondered for a second what would be carved into whatever shaped stone marked the lives he knew nothing about. For a second he considered checking their wallets, to at least see what their names had been. It didn't matter to him. He knew that even if he believed it meant something he wouldn't bother saying a prayer for their eternal souls so he just turned and walked back to the little foot path that ran down the center of the graveyard.

The world was silence.

As he walked out of the graveyard, drawn like a moth to flame by the flickering street lights he thought about what he should do with the gun in his hand. Paranoia got the best of him and he knew that he couldn't leave it there. Sometime the sun was bound to come up. Sometime someone would come to see their relative distant or near, their lost love, or the one they had known and are now forced to live without to the end of their days because of the whim of some unknown and fickle god, and they would find the table. There was nobody left to clean up the remains of the game. He wondered if he should have, if that was part of the game. But it didn't bother him very much that he had left it as he had found it.

Well, nearly as he had found it.

He crossed the street and turned right. At the end of the block he made a left towards downtown. He lived on the other side of downtown, in the quiet suburb that wasn't really a suburb the same way the town wasn't really a city regardless of how the powers that classify everything classified it. Two blocks and there were people taking down a barricade of some kind. The town had gone to sleep. There weren't many people out, not this time of night. He nodded to one of the construction workers taking the barricade down as he passed him and the man nodded back.

He considered asking what had happened.

When he got to the other side of the street the little hand that told him when to cross was deep red.

He looked to his left. The little neon open sign in the window of the coffee shop was the same color red as the hand so he walked over and went inside. The place was mostly empty. There was a man sitting at a table, his back against the wall. The man was middle aged with sunken yellow cheeks. A face that was not cruel because he tried to look that way but because that was just how he was made. The yellow faced man was clenching his hands over and over staring at the counter. He followed the man's gaze and saw the girl behind the counter.

She looked up and gave him a thin, forced smile.

He stopped at the door and for just a split second his eyes went wide. Like he had seen a ghost. Then he shook his head a bit and walked to the counter.

That was the agreement.

'Medium roast,' he said when he got to the counter. 'Black.'

She said something to him but he couldn't hear her voice. So he pointed to the big silver brewing pot behind the counter with the little card that said 'medium' on it. There were hearts on either side of the word. He knew the hearts wouldn't make the coffee taste any better. Nothing made with love really ever tastes better. That's just something people like to say when they're selling something to bored widows or even more bored housewives on the television set. She put a hand on the stack of small cups. There was a necklace around her neck with a purple stone in it. He shook his head and she put her hand on the stack of larger cups.

He nodded.

When she brought him the coffee he was going through a wad of money he had pulled out of his pocket. He set the wad down on the counter and she saw that it was mostly hundred dollar bills with some fifties sprinkled in. She thought about counting it. She smiled that she could count it without pointing at it, without moving her lips but then decided it would be rude to count it in front of him. So she looked over his shoulder and saw the yellow faced man clenching his hands, staring at her.

She looked back down at the counter and saw a bullet.

Then the man picked up the pile of money and left just a fifty dollar bill on the counter. She picked it up and then she grabbed the yellow marker out from under the counter. When she ran the tip of the marker over the bill the line told her that it was real. But she still didn't have enough in the register to make change. When she looked up to tell him that he was already walking towards the door. He stopped by the counter beside the door, grabbed a plastic lid. She watched him pick up the top half of the stack and take a lid from the middle. The same way he always had before. Then he set the top of the stack back in its place before he put the lid on his coffee.

'Thank you,' she said finally.

He looked up but didn't say anything. He just smiled and nodded.

The man clenching his hands didn't hear her say thank you. He didn't hear anything. But he had seen the pile of money. What's more he had seen the smile the girl behind the counter gave to the man who had just tipped her forty five dollars. It didn't matter what they had said to each other. It was something he didn't want to hear anyway. He knew enough already from the way she looked at this rich son of a bitch. The way she smiled at him. Like she loved him. No she didn't love him. She loved the tip. The way he tipped her for nothing. For just being her. That must be what she wants. Money. That's why she didn't smile at him like that. Because he didn't have the kind of money to tip her forty five dollars. She didn't smile at him because he always paid for his coffee with change.

She was just like all the rest.

No, she was different. She just didn't know it. She was an angel. She was his angel. She had smiled at him once. The first time she had met him. She had told him her name. But he couldn't remember it. He hadn't been able to say anything to her. Well he had been able to say something, she just didn't want to listen. She always pretended to listen but she didn't, not really. At least she pretended. Not like that bitch on the street earlier. She had just walked away without even trying to get to know him. Without even giving him a chance.

Now that son of a bitch he'd never seen in there before came waltzing in out of the dark and tried to buy her love.

It wasn't his fault he didn't have any money.

He was just unlucky.

That's all. He just didn't have the kind of luck rich people have. It wasn't his fault. He was born this way. Nobody ever taught him how to be rich. Nobody could teach him how to be lucky. That son of a bitch there, the guy with all the money, that good looking one she was still smiling at when he walked out the door, he was lucky.

No, he just thought he was lucky.

The yellow man clenched his hands a few more times, seven times to be exact, and then he stood up. He drank the rest of his small coffee, considered getting his fourth free refill but then he just walked up to the counter. She was so pretty even though her smile was gone. He set the empty cup down on the counter and smiled at her. She stepped back.

There was blood on the white and green cup.

He smiled wider so she could see that he really meant it.

Then he turned and walked out.

The door didn't make a sound as it closed behind him.

He looked both ways like he was going to cross the street. The man with the pocket full of money was about a half a block down on his left, just past the barricades that were almost taken down. There was a big flood light the workers were using to see what they were doing. The light was being powered by a portable generator. The generator didn't make a sound.

He passed the light.

The night smelled like burning hair and gasoline.

The cute girl from the coffee shop sighed as she locked the door of the shop. The smell was going to be in her hair. In her clothes. Another sigh. She would have to do laundry tonight after her shower. Then a few hours of sleep. Of dreams that would never come true. Because she didn't believe they could. The purple stone on necklace caught the reflection of the big flood light out in the street from the glass door. She looked down at it for a second and fought back the memories that came with it.

Then she turned and started down the street. Without realizing it she touched the purple stone that hung from the thin gold chain around her neck. She had just started wearing it again. There wasn't really a reason why, at least not a reason she was willing to admit to herself. She had decided after nearly two years to pull it out of the little handmade box she had put it away in. The memories swelled inside her as she reached the crosswalk.

The floodlight cast dark shadows around her.

She looked around but there wasn't anyone else on the street. Part of her was happy. She was always nervous when she closed. There were always ghosts and fears waiting around every corner. There were always terrible people waiting to do terrible things to her when she walked the block and a half to the parking lot where her car was waiting for her. She wondered if it would start. Thin fingers played with the stone around her neck. A habit she hadn't realized she had fallen back into. Her phone vibrated in the small clutch. Part of her wanted to look at it, but there was more of her that knew nobody special had called, nobody she wanted to call her. Worse, there may have been a voice mail speaking things she wanted to hear but wasn't quite ready to in that strange way that only humans can feel about something so simple as communication. She wondered for a second where he was. Who he was with now that she had pushed him out.

The edge of the ring of light the construction worker's flood cast upon the otherwise black night.

Something was there on the sidewalk.

It didn't make a sound as it picked and pulled at a larger shape. A dark mound on the sidewalk.

A dog. A mongrel, skinny and ragged. She could tell once her eyes adjusted to that strange spot where dark and light met. It wasn't paying any attention to her. Instead it was busy digging at the shape there on the cold concrete of the sidewalk. For a second she just stood there, watching the blood fly from its mouth to paint lurid shapes upon the ground in the near dark. Like one of the liquid oil splatter paintings he had done when she complained about the women he spent his time dreaming of with color upon stretched canvas. Then she pushed the memory down the way she always pushed them down. It was better to feel nothing at all than to feel regret.

'Get,' she said, just the way he showed her that day in the dog park. Well, it wasn't quite the same but it was the best she could do.

But the dog didn't respond. Didn't even act like it heard her voice at all. So she took a step forward and the cold, gasoline tainted air filled her lungs.

'Get out of here,' she said louder.

But still the animal tore and shredded wet flesh that smoked in the cold air.

So she clapped her hands, as hard as she could.

Not even a flinch. Just more blood upon the concrete. She looked around but there was not another living soul upon the street. The silent wind blew then, pushing the long braid down her back up as it passed by her. Something cold that may have been wearing tattered robes covered in the fresh earth of a newly dug grave breathed upon her neck as it moved through the dark silence of the world around her.

The dog looked up at her.

She wished he was there with her, to keep her safe from all the terrible things that she was not strong enough to fight off alone.

The dog sniffed the air.

And then it was gone.

Part of her wanted to cross the street, to make give as wide a berth as possible to that dark, blood stained mass upon the cold dead earth. But she knew the parking lot was only a few yards past whatever it was the hound had been feasting upon. So she took a deep breath. Then she reached into her small clutch, the one he had made her with the skull painted on it. The skull was cracked and peeling. She pressed the screen twice and then the flashlight from her phone shone a beam of light in front of her. Her other hand was still touching the purple stone around her neck. She rubbed it between her fingers, drawing strength from the memory of his.

Five steps on her tiptoes and she was standing above the two bodies.

One of them she recognized right away, despite half his yellow face being torn off. The exposed bones were nearly the same color. There was a knife in his hand. The blade was gone, lost in the rib cage of the other man. The one who had tipped her forty five dollars. She shone the tiny spotlight down the bodies and saw the gun. The hole it's single bullet had put in the yellow man's stomach. They had been perfectly posed in that last great breath, that last gasp of struggle upon this earth that it seems more often than not is made for little else. Around them their blood mingled and swirled and smoked in the cold air. There was something floating in the crimson pool.

Hundred dollar bills.

She looked up and down the street again, but there was nobody on the face of the earth except her. So she leaned down and started to pick up the bills. She didn't bother to count them, not even when she saw more of them sticking out of her memory's pocket. Within seconds the pocket was empty. She had a hard time getting the small clutch to close once she had shoved all the money into it. She made sure not to touch the bodies. She made sure not to step in the blood. Then, without a sound, she ran to her car.

The dog waited in the shadows for her to finish.

As it returned to the first warm meal it had had in its entire life, the skinny little mongrel saw her disappear into the parking lot.

She got to her car. It didn't bother her as much as she thought it would when the car refused to start the first time. The car didn't make the awful groaning sound she had almost gotten used to, but she could feel the starter shutter as it tried to do its job. She pumped the gas a little bit the way he had taught her one morning when the old van she used to drive back then refused to start in the cold. Then she took a deep breath, touched the purple stone around her neck with her left hand as her right turned the key. The lights came on and the car silently shuddered to life.

She sat back and resisted the urge to open the little clutch with the shattered skull on it. Resisted the urge to pull out the stack of blood warm bills and count them.

The urge to call him came suddenly, in that strange sort of way things happen in waves. It swept over her with almost physical force. Before she realized it her phone was in her hand. The low light lit the small car's interior. Fate, as we so often like to say it does so that we can have an excuse for the terrible choices we make, intervened with a little red X above the blank bars that told her she wasn't getting any service. Probably something to do with that crazy accident earlier. So she checked her missed calls, but none of them were his number.

It didn't matter one bit that she had deleted it from her phone.

She sighed when she realized he would never call her again.

Another sigh as she put the phone on the seat beside her. She wouldn't know what to say anyway. She was afraid to hear what he would say. The last time they had spoken, nearly four months earlier, had freaked her out to the point of silence. She still didn't quite understand why the things he had said had affected her that way. He hadn't done anything wrong.

The car's engine was warm enough.

She glanced over to where the dog had been feasting but she couldn't see it. The floodlight had been turned off. The radio had died in the Nissan they had convinced her to buy instead of the car she really wanted. Another part of her life she had given up control of. As if having the car she really wanted would have been a bad thing. Prudence is like beauty, it's more often than not in the eye of the beholder. Either way it was a car. Either way there would be problems with it for cars, like everything else in the modern world including human beings, were designed to fail. She may as well have gotten the car she wanted with all the trouble the one they had convinced her to get because it was more economical had cost her.

A sigh because she felt the driver's side front tire shudder as she turned out of the parking lot. She didn't know what was wrong with it only that it was getting worse. They didn't know what was wrong with it either. The longer she lived the more she realized they didn't know. They were very good at telling people what they knew, especially her. They had trained her for her entire life to believe what they said they knew.

A smile when she remembered him offering to fix it for her. Or at least try. She knew he would have spent half a day wrestling with it before he threw the tools down and called a mechanic. He always knew someone that could do the jobs he couldn't. She knew he would have gotten it fixed, traded hours and hours of his time doing what he did best in return for the work they would do to fix her car. That's how he managed to survive for so long with no money at all.

Like he was convinced that getting rich would be the death of him.

The world was darkness outside the beam of the headlights that shone a dull, yellowish color onto the street. Seconds of warm air hit her thin hands. Her knuckles were starting to crack from the cold. It had been cold for so long. She had been cold for so long.

Then she thought about the blood money in the clutch. Maybe it was enough to fix the wheel, or the bearings or the breaks or whatever was wrong with her car. She knew the mechanic would rip her off. That's what they did when they knew you didn't know anything about cars. They ripped you off. Unless you were meaner than them. Unless they thought you may very well pull them over the counter and beat their fucking face in if you ripped them off. She had laughed when he had told her that, smiled when he had proven it and now she knew that it was the truth. There is a certain primal thing inside of all of us that cell phones and smart refrigerators, that screaming liberals and fake victims would never change and that primal part of us was only ever one of two things, a coward or a warrior. A hunter or a meal. When confronted by one, the other would always collapse despite how it was dressed or what it did for a living while it was pretending to be woke.

She knew he would never hurt her. That he would hurt for her without a second's thought.

She knew he would die for her to never have to worry again.

A flash in the night off to her right. She slowed down as she passed the pharmacy on the corner where the traffic lights had already turned off and were blinking yellow. She wouldn't have stopped even if they were blinking red. Like the light above the pharmacy door was blinking. She thought there should be an alarm blaring. There was a big white speaker beside the red strobe light, just above the shattered glass of the door. A beam of light moving within the darkness of the pharmacy.

She put her foot down.

The darkness carried her home.

Once the car had shuddered itself off she sat there for a second. But she didn't open the clutch. She didn't want to explain to her mother where the money had come from. Not that her mother would believe the story anyway. She would just ask how much there was and then come up with a million different ways to spend it, none of which would actually help with any of the real problems of their life. So she made sure the clutch was shut tight before she got out of the car.

When she walked to the door there weren't any birds chirping. There were no creatures of the night moving through the frozen snow that was still in small piles on the manicured lawn.

She got inside and the cold lingered the way it always does when the sun goes down.

'Hey,' she said to her mother. She was laid out on the couch, still wearing the same t-shirt and pajama pants she had been in that morning.

Her mother didn't look at her. A very tan man with a Greek name was talking about ancient aliens on the television. A skeletal finger shook as it pointed towards the small kitchen of the condo.

There was something on the counter.

A small package wrapped in plain brown paper. There was no return address, just hers written in the scrawling hand writing she recognized immediately. Her name was written inside a small banner like you see people write their lovers' names on their arms when they get tattoos that only prove how insecure they are about their relationship.

She picked it up and looked at it a little closer. There was a post mark on it, dated a week earlier.

'When did this come?' she asked but the woman on the couch just shrugged.

The paper tore without a sound.

And there, in her hand, was a note.

It said simply 'You're Welcome.'