5 Bad Guys
I'm turning a white page into a bloody mess of arterial spurts. My heart spasms out messages of hope, hate and horrible awkward-ass overdrawn metaphors that jangle and crack in the mind.
All I'm really trying to do is put the least most expected word down in front of your wandering eye. It's like you've walked off the cliff and wherever you step, a magic stone appears for you to put your weight onto.
Lean on me, dear friend. We'll get through this together. It's hard. It's tough. But we're hard. We're tough. Tougher together. Four brain halves are better than two. Twenty toes are better than ten.
Tell you what, let's zip our consciences together like sleeping bags and chill on the couch in the den. The Simpsons is on and a bowl of Cheetos radiates between us. Your mom's in the kitchen, baking cookies and fending off five dudes in ski masks climbing in through the window over the sink.
She's got a baseball bat and – CRACK – she knows how to use it. Bad Guy 1 slides face first into the sink and the bubbles turn red. Mom's dodging bullets, cartwheeling onto the counter. She runs up the wall and just manages to finger out two knives from the block. A carving knife and a cleaver sing through the air and come to whistling thuds in 2 and 3's heads.
Now there's three people circling each other in the little kitchen, scrunching on broken glass as they step. Bloody water drips outta the sink. Then with a – HIYAA – your mom's sailing through the air, her bare heel leading and – POW – right in the kisser and 4's neck cracks like a walnut at Christmas.
Just one more, the lithest and quickest. She turns. Aarghh! A knife in the back. Ow. Again and again. No.
Mom turns, her eyes bloody, her teeth bared. She wields a shard of broken glass and feels a thousand generations of mothers lift her arm and bring it down and smash it down into the right eye of Bad Guy 5 until the heel of her hand rests against his knitted ski mask.
Guh, she says and then sits down and leans on over and that's how you find her – smiling but dead.