Heavy Metal

Writing is writing. Writing is thinking with another person. When I talk to you in the real world, you hear my voice and respond to it with yours. When I talk to you in these pages, I use your voice. I become you. We become each other for a moment in time.

Not only do I grip your conscious and subconscious, but your imagination, emotions, and instincts are mine. I hold your beliefs in the palm of my hand. Watch them scatter in the wind like chaff. Nothing’s left on my palm.

I give you the full 360 experience. I put you through a synthetic spin cycle and then dry you off with big fluffy towels. I push you downstairs to the basement where the panting, slinking, stinking things are.

I take you up to the top of a skyscraper, seventy-four floors off the street, take you out on the balcony and chuck you off into the willing arms of the masked and harnessed freedom fighter, hanging half out of a hovering helicopter.

Your stomach doesn’t even have time to drop before you’re sprawled on the inside the chopper and the bird’s dropping sideways and down with the glass and steel walls sliding past on both sides. The revolutionary rips off the mask and – holy shit – it’s your shadow, all fucked up and haggard like Dorian Grey.

You’ve got long dirty hair and a skull tattoo on your cheek. A purple scar runs from the corner of your mouth up under your eye and you’re missing half your right ear. But you’re grinning – gold teeth flash – and bringing you into a bear hug, then unstrapping a handgun from a holster and slapping it into your palm, your now full palm, full of heavy metal and you point out of the side door behind us to where three predator drones are dropping into formation.

Look at the gun. Feel its weight. Now look at me: this is it.