Ten Minutes. I’m thinking of lilacs in the summertime and orchids in purple fields. Thin cornstalks reaching upwards into a blue sky. Picture perfect. Snap. Crop. Cut into something other than what it is. I’m thinking of Yellow sunflowers dancing under a breeze. I’m thinking of a tie-dye back-drop behind poppies, and opium. I’m thinking of flowers budding in mid-spring, and wilting in winter. God’s simplest example of the circle of life. Life begets death. Turns into nothing. Melts into eternity. I’m thinking of running through fields without fences, and blue skies, and blue water, with the bright sun glimmering off the reflecting water like a prism, the sun rising over tall and snow-capped mountains far away. Standing like amused statues, watching everything and nothing. I’m thinking of the quiet hum of an airplane flying overhead.. An old One-Seated World War One plane that Snoopy would have flown while trying to catch the Red Baron. Bright Red. I can hear the propeller running, slicing through serenity. This Is happiness. This is ecstasy. Pictures of fields without fences. Snap. Crop. Cut back to reality. I’m in a car. Who’s car? I don’t know. Your car, maybe. Or my car. It doesn’t matter. I’m not driving--like usual, I’m in the back-seat, wearing panty-hose on my head, a veil to my eyes, and my face. Nobody can see me through brown polyester. I’m invisible. I’m tired. I don’t even remember how long it’s been since I had good sleep. Really good sleep, the type of sleep lions, tigers, and bears get. Suddenly I’m thinking of Judy Garland in ruby slippers singing about somewhere over the rainbow. Oh yeah, and a little dog too. I feel butterflies deep in the pit of my gut, and I think they’re having food fights with my stomach- acid because my belly, it’s doing barrel rolls. Nauseous. Nervous. Nine Minutes. I’m thinking of Marilyn Monroe now. I’m wondering what she would look like if she was alive today. Suddenly I’m imagining her in a revealing sundress, bending over with her hands tightly clasped on her knobby knees, and her platinum hair pulled into an Amy Winehouse bun. Marilyn Monroe, the great sex symbol herself. Epitomizing the seven year itch for men around the globe. The piece of chocolate you cant afford, the delicious treat nobody could have. Supply, and demand. I’m imagining her sundress, with a big flashy red bow made of simple lace tied around her curvy waist. Suddenly, Marilyn Monroe fades into my mother, my beautiful mother, and I’m remembering all the Christmases and birthdays where I never saw a big red bow tied on a box addressed to me. Snap. Crop. Cut back to reality. Technology is a most brilliant thing. They created this new thing, Photoshop, which allows you to literally edit, and cut people, places, anything right out of your photograph. A moment in time becomes a lie. It becomes a faked memory, an apparition of transparency. It becomes a parallel universe, and only the only truth nonexistent is shattered. Just like it never happened. Aaron Siskind said that “photography is a way of feeling, touching, loving. What you’ve captured on film is captured forever. It remembers little things--long after you’ve forgotten everything.” Is there anything more frightening than the concept that the details we see in our pictures, the things we know and hold to be true, have become nothing more than man-made lies, created for the sole purpose of hiding the truth? I’m looking out the window at the Baltimore City Bank. Big marble pillars seem to hover on big marble steps leading into a big marble archway reading “A penny saved is a penny earned.” I‘m glad that my intelligence isn’t being subdued by a Latin phrase, a “Carpe Diem”, or some other assemble it yourself anagram. I’m thinking about Poor Richard’s Almanac. Benjamin Franklin. Lighting rods. Did you know that lighting kills 58 people annually? I’m looking out a window through panty-hose at a city bank. I have a rifle resting in my lap. The butt is resting right in my crotch and is pointed at no one in particular. We stop. Breath in. Breathe out. Release. The driver turns around to the back, somehow contorting his body to face both myself and the front seat passenger at the same time, He says to us, “Get out. You got nine minutes. If you f*ers ain’t here by then, neither am I ,” I don’t even remember who this is. Snap. Crop. Cut. The passenger looks at me too, and I can’t tell who he is through the panty-hose. His eyes are brown, and his lips are brown, and his skin is brown, and his teeth are brown, and his nose is brown, and his hair is brown. Mr. Brown, the passenger, he looks at me and nods. I nod back, for no other reason than to return the seemingly nice gesture. He gets out so I get out. I’m his mimic. Mr. Brown’s mirror image. I’m thinking about Bruce Lee, and Patrick Swayze. Enter the Dragon, and Ghost. The actors Magnum Opus. Ditto. Eight Minutes. I grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky, I remember that. My father, he was a wise man. Wiser than I am, for sure. By the time I had turned ten, he had become old and withered. His eyes sagged by his nose, and his nose crooked wickedly. His hair turned white, and he stopped shaving, except for before Sundays when we would all pack into the Ford, the whole family, and Willis, the farmhand, and we would head into town for church and maybe a picture-show. That Ford, a faded blue pickup truck covered in the weariness of brown rust was a relic. Still it was important to my father. He treated her like it was his baby, regardless of her junkyard demeanor. My old sage of a father, in his age, said something to me once that I will always remember. We farmed, you see--and it was hard work. On weekends when I didn’t have to go to school, I would have to milk the cows, feed the pigs, and clean up the pasture. Cleaning up the pasture was something I remember particularly despising. Around the pasture was this great big electric fence. Barbed wire hung loosely from the top, and I would always stare at the fence in a tempest moment’s temptation. Curiosity drove in me an urge to touch it. It was almost unbearable. One day, as I was staring in curiosity at the fence, my aged, but child-hearted father walked up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. His eyes were wide with excitement, and the flannel shirt he wore over his sunburned chest breathed in and out as his lungs quickened their step. “What are you looking at son?” he asks me, a wide grin smothering his wrinkles covering his face like a zebra’s stripes. “You ever touch that fence pa?” I asked him. He smiled down at me, and I could see the gears behind his eyes turning quickly, like a wristwatch ticks. He said to me, “Why, sure I have. It don’t hurt too much. Just a bit of a pinch. Like an ant bite is what it feels like. Just a quick little----pinch” I yelped in pain as he mocked the scenario by pinching the thin layer of juvenile skin around my arm. “You ever piss on it?” I asked him He smiled wide with child-like joy, and his eyes grew big and bold, and widened like an owl. His eyes dilated, turned beady, and beads of sweat glistened down his cooked forehead. It was a hot day. July, in Kentucky, was something of a burden. Coolness became like gold, and if winter could have been sold in a little glass jar, I assure you, it would have been. “No, I sure haven’t.,” he said, already seeing where my thoughts were. “You think it would hurt if I did? Like, maybe, it would fry it off or something?” I asked. Now, I’m almost positive he couldn’t have known what would happen. We had never heard of anyone being so plain foolish as to urinate on an electric fence with 10,000 volts running through it. I assume now that he could make a guess though, and decided to teach me a lesson. “Who knows?” he said to me, smiling wide still, like an alligators grin, with sharp and old menacing teeth, his nostrils flaring up with amusement. I turned to the fence, and I thought about it for a moment. It seemed harmless. I must have only been nine at the time. I had never taken a science class, and I had yet to learn anything about insulators and conductors. I had yet to learn that urine contains a highly reactive metallic solution. I hadn’t learned that water and urine conducted electricity better than most other things, and I hadn’t learned the voltage could travel up through the urine, and into my body’s rather sensitive areas. I must have flown back from the fence. I woke up twenty feet away from the pasture, with my father standing over me. Relief washed over his face when he saw that my eyelids had flickered open, and right then, in my dazy hazed confusion, he said to me: Life’s greatest temptations are the one’s that leave us hurting the most. And I’ll never forget that. Seven Minutes I’m in bed. I remember that. It’s cold. The sheets are pulled around my ears, and I can hear this raging storm outside. Wind blows through the trees and howls, and I remember hearing the lightning colliding with the soft earth miles away from me. Still, I hear the boom, the explosion. When the lightning crashes and the sky lights up like fireworks in a night sky, sometimes I wish it would strike me down, for how poetic is the death of a sinner at the hands of mighty thunder, god’s greatest force. Perhaps it’s just me playing the martyr or perhaps it’s like a song, beating and bleating, singing loud through the dark. Death gives us the wings of angels. Lightning gives me serenity. I feel a body next to me. I feel the small of her back against my arm, and I almost jump out of bed because I can’t remember who she is. She’s like a ghost. When you’re uncared for enough, unloved enough, when you’re in most need of the things we strive, you become nothing more than invisible. You can stare right through. An apparition of reality is hardly a reality at all. I look at her face. It’s not beautiful. Her nose is crooked and long, stretching forward almost endlessly. Her hair is a glossy black, and her complexion is marred with acne, and scars. She’s been through a lot, I remember thinking to myself. Nobody else could look this damaged. And yet, through all her imperfections, all her broken features, there’s a glow in her sleeping face. It’s as if she was once beautiful, not recently, but long ago. Now, it looked like someone poured hot grease all over her face. Have you ever heard the story of the monster? The one where a once beautiful woman becomes permanently scarred. People won’t even look at her--they turn sideways, any which way to avoid seeing something so gruesome, and she becomes like a hideous ghost. When you’re ugly enough, people don’t look at you. They look anywhere but towards you. Because you’re nothing more than a freak. Welcome to the Nightmare. What’s worse, Is the person who created the monster. Who’s more horrible? Frankenstein, or the good doctor who created him? I shake her awake. She moans softly, and I wonder to myself has she been crying? Her eyes aren’t wet, and her cheeks are so covered in makeup that they look as if they had been dipped in hot wax. She lifts her head and it seems to take her a while to remember where she is too. I wonder to myself, if this is something she experiences a lot. She looks up at my face as my body leans over hers, and she gives me this sad little smile. It reminds me of a puppy that had just been beat. I see her eyes. Empty sockets stare back at me, cold and unnerving. Her eyes were missing, removed by some horrible force, and only the hollow shell of what could be seen remained. She had been blinded. Of all the horrors of this woman, this was the most noticeable. It seemed like she simply had an endless forehead, and this perturbed me. I ask her who she is. “Who are you?” I say, as politely as I can, but very confused at the same time. “What do you mean, who am I?”, she asked obviously annoyed. Her smile faded into one of confusion and disturbance. “I’m--I’m sorry. I don’t remember. I--Have a hard time remembering things sometimes” I say. I think for a minute. I try to think back to yesterday. I remember nothing but a black spot. It‘s almost as if it never even happened. I strain to remember so hard that it hurts, and my head begins to pound. “Like yesterday, I don’t even remember it. I’m not sure how I got here” I think back. I don’t remember ever having a black-out this long before. Then again, why would I? “Do you know who you are?” she asks me. “Of course I know who I am. I’m Derick Fisher,” I say. She eyes me funny. “You say a different name every night. When are you going to tell me your real name?” she asks me. “I mean--you can trust me can’t you?” “I’m sorry. I--what?--I don’t follow,” I have no idea what she’s talking about. She eyes me again. This time more suspicious than the last, and she says to me, “I’m Lucy. You paid for me.” she says. “I paid for you?” I ask her. I am the epitome of confusion. “For my--services” “You mean, I hired a prostitute,” Now, I am the epitome of blood boiling. “Yes, Jack, or Larry, or Derek or whatever your name is,” she triesto throw her arms over my shoulders and I throw them off of me. Now, I’m yelling. Screaming. Shouting that I’d never hire a prostitute. Screaming that I have a wife and kids at home. That I’m a happily married man. That I would never cheat on my wife. I call her a thief, and a swindler, and a liar. I’m standing over her and shaking her. Shaking her so hard. Who am I? I’m my own worst enemy. I let her go, and there are deep holes in her skin where my overgrown nails sunk into her flesh. She’s running out the door screaming--calling me names like freak, and nut-job. Saying I’m a complete crazy, and that I was the most insane client she ever had. I rest my head back on the pillow, and allow my heart to slow down. I let my mind wander. Who am I? And then Black. In 2001, Photoshop created a whole new business. They created the business of deleting memories. The foul smelling chapters and pages were erased. Poof. Just like that, cropped and cut to show only the good and never the bad, Now, I can hardly remember what I took out. Life never does seem to come with an undo button attached. Snap. Crop. Cut. Have you ever heard of selective memory? Six Minutes. This isn’t the first time. I’ve done this before. There was Jack Rhinestone in Minnesota. There was Michael Salis in Florida. There was Dereck Fisher in Utah. There was Barry Levinson in Illinois. There was Gerald Hamburg in Missouri. There was Larry Bettinson in New York. There was Mathew Quick in Ohio. There was Johnny Mason in California, and there was Jerry Smith in Vermont. So many lives, so many identities. Who am I? I don’t remember anymore. Suddenly I’m thinking of pictures of fields without fences. Five Minutes Wake-up. I’m in the Baltimore City Bank pressing the barrel of a bolt action Remington against a Chinese teller’s lips. She keeps looking at me, not in my eyes, but at my trigger finger, and then following the barrel towards her mouth, where she goes cross eyed. She does this a few times, and blinks heavily. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t move. She’s like a silent peaceful panda staring down a bamboo stalk. I say to her, “Can you open the vault?” She shakes her head no. I have never seen a person so calm. Now, I look her in the eyes, and she moves her gaze to meet mine, and I see a powerful fire raging hungrily in them. Slanted, and passionate, a furious hatred grew inside of her. “Alright then, can you tell me who can open the vault pretty lady?” I say with this hideous grin on my face. I flash my big yellowed teeth in her eyes, and smile wide like Cheshire cat, and the only fear I can see in her face is my fear in her iris’s reflection. She shakes her head no and in a heavy Chinese accent says to me, “You just going have to keel me”. My smile fades for a moment, then returns. I ram the muzzle of the gun into her cheek, and I tell her the story of the monster. “You know, it would be such a shame for a pretty girl like you to live the rest of her life without a face. I bet you get lots of attention with that beautiful face of yours. We can fix that, you know. We can make you just as ugly as he is,” I point to Mr. Brown, suggesting that I’m referring to his ugliness and he gives me the finger. “Do you want to look like that? Now, baby, if you can just tell me who has access to the vault, I can leave your head attached to your neck, and me and my assistant here can be on our merry berry way,” I say, still smiling grimly. She says nothing. “I find your silence quite disturbing,” I say. “Dearie, I think you’ve got yourself a death wish.,” She still says nothing. “Alright Then! How fun! I do love this part of my job the best,” Then I whisper in her ear. “Best not to let that pretty face of yours go to waste dearie,” I softly. I kiss her softly on both cheeks, and take her head in my hands, and look her dead in the eye. I wanted to see fear. I wanted to see terror. Instead, I saw, and see the cold, heartless bravery of a woman sentenced to death. I pull the trigger. Her face becomes nothing more than fragmented skin. A hole of blood seeps down her bright blue blouse. I hear screams coming from behind me, and throughout the bank, and then as loud as I could scream it: “This is not a Brave New World. This isn’t some pretty fantasy-land. This isn’t a movie. Bravery gets you nothing but a bullet full of lead. So, before you today, I make an example out of bravery. Bravery is foolish, and I tell you again people of Baltimore Maryland, do not f*** with me!” Mr. Brown walks up shoulder level with me, and he looks down at the Chinese teller, and he says to me, “I think this is your best work yet,” “You know, she did sort-of resemble a Mona Lisa,” Four Minutes Flashback twenty years. When the summer blockbuster was Back to the Future and there were only four Rocky movies. When Madonna reigned supreme, and Bon Jovi was at the pinnacle of his career. When people danced with Walkman’s, and VHS tapes were all the rage. Turn back to when Al Pacino was Scar face, and Miami Vice was a Friday night indoors. When Pat Morita taught a New Jersey kid karate, and when love was unbridled by deathly diseases. Go back to Hawaiian shirts and flannel jackets, big hair, and sparkle sunglasses. Go-go boots, and spandex. Spandau Ballet, and Duran Duran. Prince, and Michael Jackson. Turn back twenty years. I’m in my daughters bedroom, and moonlight is shining through the deep bay window. I can hear the crashing of the waves on the beach, and it soothes my broken conscience. My daughter is asleep and I have her carried in my arms. Her long brown hair nearly falls to the floor as I walk to her bedside. Inside the room, I can smell the smell of oranges. Oranges, warm and tangy. It was her favorite smell. It reminded her of a trip to Florida, she would tell me. I laid her down on her bed. She stirred slightly as I did so, but then went quiet again. She looked so peaceful. The way her eyelids covered her tired eyes, she looked like an angel fallen from heaven. I looked at her and couldn’t help reminding myself how much I loved her. She was young then. Small, and innocent. Nine years old at the most. All she had on was her underwear, and a big pink shirt her mother had given her. I placed my hand on her thigh and kissed her forehead. Daddy’s little girl. I pulled the covers over her. Her comforter was flowery and ornate, with yellow dandelions with vines spouting from it’s head and sprouting down the side, and dangling there like the hanging gardens of Babylon. I began to tiptoe out of her room. The room with the blue walls, and the bright blue trim. The room with the big vanity mirror, and the bamboo dresser and desk. The room with the dolls and playhouses scattered thoroughly over the floor. I step over all the misplaced toys, and I step to the door, and grasp the handle, and turn my wrist. I can remember the metallic feeling of the brass knob colliding with my hand, and I can recall the creak of the door against the rivets. I hear my daughter stir and I turn back to face her. She looks up at me wide-eyed, with this morbid curiosity on her face that I’ve seen so many times before. “Daddy?” she asks me. “Yes, honey?” I say, already regretting turning around and answering her. I wish I could have just walked away. I wish she could pretend like it never happened, like I could. I wish she would grow up faster than she did. I wish things weren’t this fucked up. I don’t have a daughter. I have a wish list. “Why do you keep touching me like that, down there?” she asks me, and I think my Adam’s apple got stuck in my throat because I forgot how to speak. “I told you honey. All Daddy’s do it,” I manage to choke out. “I talked to Sarah, and she said her Daddy never touches her--private parts,” she says and I feel like crawling in a small hole somewhere and dying. “Well, maybe there’s something wrong with Sarah’s Daddy. Get some sleep. Big day tomorrow, you know,” I say and I feel like sewing my lips shut. “Goodnight Sweet pea,” I say. “Night Daddy,” she says, and I start to close the door, and release myself from this hell I’ve created. Before I leave I remember to tell her something. I say to her, “Remember honey, don’t tell mommy,” And I hear her sleepy call back: “I won’t. Promise” I close the door shut behind me, and I’m standing in the hallway. I’m looking at the far wall, at this beautiful painting, this picture of a field with horses running, galloping through tall thin grass. There’s a lake nearby and the sun shines off it, and you can see the melting snow on the snowcapped mountains far away. It’s the picture of fields without fences. And suddenly, I’m sobbing. My horrors become my tears, and my sick wasted life becomes my more dreadful future. I haven’t cried this much in a long time. God doesn’t cry this hard, doesn’t make it rain, even in Seattle. No, this was hell. Daddy’s little girl. Three Minutes. Flash-forward Ten Years. It’s almost morning and she wasn’t home. Dawn began to startle the crows and the badgers, the mice and the spiders from their devout slumber. There was a smell of warmth through the air. The trees crawled with birds rummaging through their nests, the branches scaffolding and stuttering up and down, to and fro, almost in a vibrating vengeful fashion. I heard the bleak cry of a crow from outside the bay window in my daughters room, and turned to look through it. I crunched my back down to look through it’s porthole, and I could see the raging waters below the small town, perched softly atop a hill, nestled in a quiet valley. I could see the crow, in the trees, loudly hopping back and forth on what was one of it’s many branches. The wooden statue of a tree was precariously centered on a cliff, hanging over a steep drop. It’s leaves swayed towards that direction and I imagined myself as the tree briefly. I imagined the anxiety the tree must have felt, always waiting for the one day, where it like everything else would fall and topple over and leave nothing but a cloud of dust in the mire of it’s terrible wake. And when the tree glanced towards the cliff, and saw how far the tree had fallen, the tree would close it’s eyes, shudder one last cold tree-breath, and pass into death. The roots would rot, and dry out, and the trunk would lay a persuasive glance for other creatures who would want to lay it’s nest in it’s hollowed shallow soul. And so, then there would be the circle of life, and the tree would bring meaning to it’s unfortunate succumbing tragedy. Perhaps myself and the tree, are not so far apart as it would seem. Perhaps the tree and I, are in a very similar situation. Perhaps, the tree is me, and I am the tree. After all, life begets death. And then, melts into eternity. I’m waiting for my daughter. It’s morning and she still wasn’t home. I’m lonely. The cold, cold anxiety leaves me frozen and hardened and all I want to do is cry like the tree. I can’t help but wondering what happened to her. It scares me to think about. It makes me shiver even though the early morning warmth casts light from the window across and onto my somber face. I always wondered what it would feel like to be betrayed. I keep finding myself looking out the window, this time not at the tree, but towards the driveway. I keep expecting to look out and see a car pulling up through the gravel, brushing a cloud of smoke behind it. I keep thinking I’m going to hear the grinding sound of the gravel rushing and ebbing away from the tires as the car slowly ran over them. I kept expecting to smell the plume of the exhaust, and then see my daughters golden face through the window and over the dashboard. I keep expecting, and the only results to my expectancy was a mournful anxiety. And then, when I could hardly take it anymore, when the voices in my head screamed louder than I could raise my voice in defense, I heard the sound of the gravel ebbing and scratching their way away from the rubber tires, bouncing up and down so heavy. I quickly looked back out the window, and saw her driving the beaten-up pickup truck up the driveway. I could see her face through the windshield, and I could see her free brown hair, almost gold in the morning’s radiating light. I could see her well, well enough to see her smile was missing, and her lips were curved in an anxious frown. Oranges, the sweet tangy smell she chose as her perfume. I could smell it almost as soon as she stepped out of the car. The smell so heavy and pretty. It reminded her of a trip to Florida we took as a family once. It reminded me of her mother. I’m thinking about fields without fences, and beautiful orange groves, round with passion, and bright with fervor. The trees are so colorful, like the rainbows above god’s gates, and the smell is like the sweetest music you can ever even dream. When I’m there, I don’t feel human. It takes me higher. For the briefest of moments, the smell invites me to float instead of walk, and fly instead of run. And then, it’s gone. She’s so beautiful, she resembles a gazelle when the light of the sun emblazons her shoulders, and creates the running silhouette of a shadow, short and snubbed in the early morning wake. She opens the front door, and I’m standing right in the foyer, waiting for my eyes to meet hers. She’s wearing a tight little mini skirt that grabs at her thighs, and hugs them so tight I wonder to myself how the circulation hasn’t been removed from her legs. She looks at me and mutters something under her breath I didn’t catch, and I’m sure she can see the fuming anger riddled over my face. My cheeks must have been flushed too because I could feel the running warmth of blood quickening through the capillaries in my face. I looked into her, and couldn’t help but notice that she had more make-up on then a circus clown, and I feel my heart palpitate a moment, while I try to circumvent thoughts of what she did last night. Things that she couldn’t tell me about, places I couldn’t know about, with people she would never let me see. Welcome to the nightmare. Softly as I could, calmly as I could speak, like the whispering willows in a windy night I ask her, “Where have you been?”. She says nothing, and I don’t know if she really needs too. She wipes her forehead, and smiles a nervous and shy smile. “I don’t know,” she says to me, and I think I’ve heard mice squeak with more feeling, more volume than she said those words. “you don’t know,” I state firmly, as sarcastically as I could manage. “You don’t know? I don’t know where I left my keys this morning, but I can articulate to you every damn thing that I did last night. Now, I want you to articulate to Me every damn thing you did last night,” I feel my rage boiling heavy, and I feel like a pot of steaming lobsters, all anguish and fury. “I---I’m sorry,” my daughter says to me, and I feel the cold rush of blood to the head, and my nostrils flaring. I’m thinking of Lou Ferrigno, and the Incredible Hulk. You won’t like me when I’m angry. “You’re sorry,,” I say. I become re-calmed, and recollected. “I’m--Sorry,” she repeats. “Lucy, I’m going to ask you one more time, and please tell me the truth. What were you doing last night?” “I’m--Sorry,” Lucy says. “I--can’t tell you,” “Why can’t you tell me,” I ask, saddened by her lack of trust. “I mean--Damnitt Lucy, I’m your father,” She shakes her head at me, and I feel the furious rage becoming bestowed down upon me once more. A furious anger overtook me. People will say, in a moment of utter rage, your heart stops. Your brain stops functioning and all those other little vital organs shut down. You become possessed almost, by an evil devil. My heart stopped, and my blood ran cold through my veins like water through the roots of the tree. And then black. When I awoke from my rage, I was holding Lucy’s head above a stove burner. She’s screaming and crying and I’m screaming louder, and our screams mix together to create the most harmonious of caterwauls. I turn the burner on, and I’m holding, grabbing and pulling at that golden brown hair of hers, and dangling her head just above the burner. She’s screaming “Please, please stop,”, but she knows I won’t. She knows me, perhaps better than I know myself. She screams, “Please don’t,” but she knows quite well I will. We’re they’re for a few minutes, in poetic screaming, like some sort of sick twisted tragedy in a Shakespearean play. When she quiets down a little bit, and I know that I’ve beaten her in shouts, beaten the black stallion, beaten her so she would never see fields without fences again, I ask her: Do you know the story of the monster? Two Minutes. I’m walking down 4th Avenue in Baltimore, and it’s raining heavy. The droplets pound the sidewalk and the cars are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic all the way up 15th. There’s no moon, and the sky is black. I notice this just as I noticed her. I pull my jacket hood over my head because of the torrential rain pounding my already wet skull. The droplets of water roll down my brown hair, only to get caught in my eyelashes. I blink twice, nice and heavy to clear the water out., and I’m suddenly staring at the silhouette of a woman through the cloud of condensation consuming the street. The rain becomes static, falling in a constant type of free-fall, frozen in time. It becomes like the shadow of god, rushing towards a bewildered earth. It becomes my nightmare. She’s leaning into a car, her buttocks pointed outwards, and her head dipping into the passenger seat window. She puts her hand on top of the car, and I can see her long fingernails, a bright red light in the bleak. Perhaps that is all the color there is. I’m finding myself walking towards her. Now, it’s hard for me to explain why. God favors a man who can gain redemption it would seem. The car sees me approaching walking fast towards him, and pulls away swiftly, leaving wet skid marks in the road. I can see and feel my panting breath in the cold air, and my breath goes smoky through and through. I can see the woman clearly now. Her battered face is visible only in the streetlight’s glistening artificial glow. Her eyes are closed shut, and she seems to be looking at no one in particular. As she’s walking back and forth I notice she’s walking with a limp, and she’s holding a cane in her left hand. She’s wearing this skimpy little leopard colored skirt, and her legs stick out like candlesticks. She’s barely even wearing a top at all, just the remnants of what looked like a pretty black dress shredded down to just the spaghetti straps, and a sliver of cloth covering her breasts. Her face looks wicked, and her nose is crooked, and her eyes, she refuses to open them. She goes and leans on the lamplight she’s standing under, the green lamplight with fading rust, and she reaches down her skirt and pulls out a pack of cigarettes she had wrapped around her skirt waistband. I stand there watching her. She’s mesmerizing me, and I’m not sure why. Something about the way she moved, there was an aura about her. It reminded me of a three-legged dog, so pitiful and so sad, and yet, so wanting of affection and love. I walk over to her, and I see her up close. I’m right in front of her, but she doesn’t see me. Her eyes aren’t even there. There are only two empty sockets where her eyes once were, and her face looks almost melted right off. She’s carrying a cane and feeling around with it. She was a monster. And only a monster could make a monster. I looked at her face, a face that could have once been angelic and my heart sinks deep within the layers of my chest and I feel like running away as soon as you can. Then, right before I’m ready to turn away from her, her cane brushes and knocks into the toe of my shoe, and I see recognition cover her face. She stops leaning on the lamppost and looks towards where I’m standing. She inches her head closer to my face, and smells me. I can’t stop thinking about her golden hair, and how beautiful she once was. Oranges. I’m smelling oranges, growing on the Florida coast, and waves crashing against the smooth and sandy shore, and my wife, whom would always used to look up at me with those big and deep eyes. She opens her lips and says something and I can just hear it over the beeping of the car horns, the squealing tires, and the pounding rain. She asks, “You smell like a man. Are you a customer?” , and it’s her. I can tell. I can remember that sweet voice like the smell of cotton candy on a summer night at a ball-park. “What?” I ask her, startled by her question “Are you a customer? Would you like to pay for my services?,” she rephrases. “Oh god,” I say. “You’re a prostitute?” She looks at me blankly. I suppose she didn’t have to answer that. “The rates 50 an hour,” she says. She holds up her cigarette and puffs smoke right into my face, and I cough in the fog of tobacco. I stutter for a moment. I needed to talk to her. I needed to say I was sorry. I needed redemption, and salvation. “I--okay,” “you have a room around here,” she asks me. “I’m staying at the Belmont. It’s off of King Street, and 4th aven--,” “I know where it is,. Just because I‘m blind doesn‘t make me stupid” she says cutting me off. “C’mon, let’s make this quick,” She hurries off towards 4th avenue and I’m trying to keep up with her. She moved fast in high heels, and you can hear the clattering steps of the heels down the pavement. “I--I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” I say when I catch up to her. “My name’s Lucy,” It was my daughter. I had to talk to her. I had to apologize for making her a monster. The only way I could get the chance was by hiring her. One Minute My daughter’s in my hotel room and she starts to take her clothing off. She’s pulling the spaghetti straps down her shoulders and I tell her to stop. I say to her I just want to talk for a few minutes. She looks at me, or close to me at any rate and says: Fine. It’s your money, anyway. “Why are you turning tricks?” I ask her. “What’s it matter to you anyway? What the f*** are you, a cop?” she asks me getting hostile. “No-no-no, I’m a--I work in banking,” choosing my words wisely. “I just, I wanted to know. You seem like a smart enough girl. Why are you doing this to make money of all things. Why don‘t you do something straight and narrow?” She laughs at me briefly. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m a monster,” “I’m sorry,” I say. “For what?” “For everything,”….. The Last Minute Wake-Up. I’m running out the big glass doors of the Baltimore City Bank with two bags of bank bags, you know, the type they use to put money in, to carry it in armored vans when making a financial transfer. Well, those were in my hands, lumpy and heavy, and I’m running down the marble steps with Nr. Brown close to my left, right next to me, almost arm in arm. I look up at the sun and start shouting: Follow the yellow brick road, Follow the yellow brick road I feel the summer warmth beating down on my cold harrowed face. I want it to be fall. I want to see the leaves changing and the trees melting in oranges and brown’s. I want to see the vicariousness of love, and the sweetness of spring. I wanted to be more than what I am. I wished and wished and wished and wished. I tapped my ruby red slippers together three times fast, but nothing happened. I was still standing on the marble steps of a marble bank with marble pillars, where at the top--scrawled into the entrance was “A penny saved is a Penny earned” I’m thinking about Judy Garland and Poor Richard’s Almanac. Flying monkey’s and lightning rods. I’m thinking about yellow brick roads. Over-head I hear the sound of helicopters humming, and I can hear the sirens of police cars, like the grinding sound of a blender, music to my infirm ears. I’m waiting for them. Mr. Brown turns to me and says, “No going back now,” I tell him, “There never was any going back,” He smiles a little bit, but in a sad sort of inexpressible way, like the look of a panda, all sadness and warmth. I return his smile. I ask Mr. Brown, “What are you going to do with your halve?” “I’m thinking about going somewhere tropical. Caribbean maybe,” The driver, he’s parked around back, down an alley, and he’s waiting there impatiently. He looks nervous, like a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. We jog over to him, and the siren’s are blaring now. All I can hear are the deafening sounds and I’m beginning to see blue flashes out of my peripheral. I open the door for Mr. Brown. “Good-luck, and thank you,” I say He says, “Good-bye,” and I see a tear leak down his eye, and I almost feel like crying myself because the moment tended for it. I turned my away from him and such a door hard, and I can hear it’s slam ring. They speed off away form the cops, through the other side of the two way alley, and I see Mr. Brown waving goodbye with his hand from the passenger seat. They turn the corner and become a plume of smoke. Now, I’m surrounded by police cars. The noise is deafening. The sound of the helicopter becomes almost like white noise, and tears are pouring from my eyes. I hold the bank-bags over my shoulders and I run into plain sight, in front of the bank, where the police had surrounded with dozens of waiting cars. I’m sobbing. I stand there, in front of them, and they all point all of their guns at me and stare back. I feel like I’m on stage in some Shakespearean play--some great story of tragic proprieties. I drop the bank bags and they’re floating around my ankles. I put my hands up in the air for a moment and smile. The police just stand there with their guns pointed at me. If you didn’t tell me, I would have assumed they were cardboard. Then, when my hands were firmly in the air, I took my left hand and reached for invisible nothing behind my back. It was all part of the plan. Our plan. They thought I had a gun. The police grew tense, and started yelling Freeeze Freeze Holdit I turned my hand and shaped it like a pistol, and then pulled it towards them, to make it look as if I had a gun. I heard the sound of a fire, and then pain and then more fire, and more pain. My chest felt like it was erupting. I did freeze. I was becoming frozen, stuck in one place in time, forever--just like a beautiful photograph, never to leave the serenity of the moment. Suddenly, I’m thinking about pictures of fields without fences. Infamous Bank Robber Killed by Police Mental Patient and Infamous Serial Killer brought to Justice Richard Pryor, a notoriously infamous criminal, was killed by police gunfire Tuesday morning, at approximately seven, according to police sources. Pryor had eluded police and state officials for years before Tuesday’s crescendo. Pryor has led the Most Wanted list for years, and if he had been apprehended and faced a jury, Pryor would have been charged with over two dozen counts of first degree murder, as well as over forty-five counts of Robbery with a deadly weapon. Pryor had been apprehended once before, but pleaded insanity. He stayed a tenure of four years at the Simpson Hospital for the Criminally Insane before making a derring-do escape with an inmate, and since, long term partner, Isaac Wakowsky, who had been admitted into the hospital for par-taking in large rings of check and counterfeiting fraud. The duo, after their escape from institutionalization, began to rob banks around the country, targeting mainly city branches, with large conglomerations of money within it’s vaults, and security. While security had been raised to deal with these alarming, and professional thief’s, they always managed to elude police, and state troopers. On Tuesday, however, after robbing the Baltimore City Bank at gun-point, the duo seem to have split ways. The motives for this is unknown, but while the duo was seen by witnesses at the bank, only Pryor was found by the police. The locations and where-abouts of Wakowsky are still an unknown. Police are saying that he might have fled the scene after seeing the death of his partner. Police report that Pryor, surrounded by police, dropped the bags he was carrying, and raised his hands in the air, above his head. Then, as police began to close around him, he reached behind his back for what police assumed to be a firearm, and at that point they opened fire. After several moments, police circled the body of Pryor, to find that he had no firearm on his personage. More unusual, was that in the bags, there was no money. Police report that one of the bags was empty, and the other contained the body of a young women yet to be named or identified, as a result of the ongoing investigation. We can only guess at Pryor’s motives for this act.. CON. ON PG 4 Conclusion Lucy is at my funeral, in a tight bright ruby dress, wrapped around her waist, hugging her the way a child might wrap their lanky, knobby arms around a teddy bear. She doesn’t smile. Her lips are glossed in heavy red-lipstick, and her eyeliner was dark, and her cheeks were powdered white. She looks beautiful and horrible all at once, and I’m wondering why I couldn’t be with her and all the moments I missed. She’s walking to my tombstone, her cane clacking bitterly against the dying grass of early fall’s façade, and I’m just a small head-stone buried in rows of others much the same. I’ve become just another rock, just another decomposing body. One with the earth. Life begets death, melts into eternity. Suddenly I’m remembering that imposing tree, hanging so peacefully over the cliff outside Lucy’s great bay window, and I’m remembering it’s story, and I’m thinking, the tree and I, we’re just one and the same. My daughter is standing on top of my maggot-covered body, where I had just been dropped into the ground. There are only three one other person with her, Wakowsky is standing beside her, on her left, and he’s got his hand on her, trying to comfort her. “Your father and I knew each other very well,” he’s saying. “All the things we’ve done over the years, and I still think that man died with more dignity than most,” “Why?” she asked calmly. “Why did he do it? He didn’t need to. He--had all the money in the world. The newspapers said he robbed so many banks. He didn’t need to do this one. He didn’t need to,” “Why were you were turning tricks?” Isaac said. “I had too--Look at me, I’m a monster. I--cant do anything else. No one wants to hire me. No one even wants to look at me,” “Your father, he had to rob banks just as much as you had to turn tricks. He did it once out of necessity. We all did. We did it because we had to, but before we knew it , it was a drug, and we just had to keep taking it. It was our great escape. Everyone has one,” “You know, Isaac, my father--he never was a good man. He did this to me,” she said pointing to her scarred face. “I know, and I know exactly what he was. He was a loose cannon. Your father said something to me once that eternally stuck with me. He said ‘it takes a monster to make a monster, and the monster that creates is far worse than the monster that’s created’” Isaac says this to my daughter. “Everyone has monsters Lucy. Everyone has something deep and dark that’s brutal and horrible. Your father would have said it’s our job has human beings to control it,” “Did he?,” she asks. “Ever control his monsters,” “He gave it the old college try,” “And you think that’s good enough!” My daughter cries. “Trying?” “No, I don’t. But, I think it’s all he could do,” They were in silence for a moment. A rest of words where they both faced my tomb and I could see small tears dripping down Isaac’s eyes. “He’s the reason I’m here right now, you know,” Isaac says. My daughter replies in question and asks him what he means. “Before that last job, we had been being trailed for months. Police were catching up with us fast. Your father knew it was the end of the road--and then there was you. He wanted you to be taken care of, so he decided to pull one last job. He died to let me escape. Drew the heat’s attention off me,” “Why?” She asked, and in all it’s simplicity it was the question I hoped most she would ask. “We split the profits halfway. He asked me to make sure his cut made it’s way to you. It’s a little under half-million dollars. He wanted you to get on your feet, even if he couldn’t see it happen,” Isaac gave a briefcase full of money to my daughter, and pushed the handle into my daughter’s hand. Isaac hugged her, and said goodbye. My daughter, shocked, says “Where are you going?” “I’ve always wanted to see Israel,” he says smiling. “Do your father good, and pick yourself out of the ashes. Promise,”. A tear streaks down Isaac’s eye. Isaac walks away, through the gates of the cemetery, and I follow him until I can’t see his overweight, burly frame anymore from where I’m resting. My daughter faces me one last time, and whispers in cold hollow words, in words so dressed in happiness and shock, dressed in a change of life’s course, in the blowing sails of the endless sea, she whispers for just a moment with the angels. She speaks in tongues, and her words feel from god, and I see all the beauty behind the monstrosity. She whispers to me: I promise