ON THE ROAD

3WW

Heave; verb: [With object] lift or haul (a heavy thing) with great effort; [with object] produce (a sigh); [no object] rise and fall rhythmically or spasmodically; noun: An act of heaving, especially a strong pull.

Ponder; verb: Think about (something) carefully, esp. before making a decision or reaching a conclusion.

Valid; adjective: (Of an argument or point) having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent; legally binding due to having been executed in compliance with the law; legally or officially acceptable.

Note: I've been reading "Darkly Dreaming Dexter," by Jeff Lindsay   

and this is completly fiction.  

On the Road

As I drive home, I am pondering how people around me packaged life into how it should be.  There should be a white picket fence, a dog, etc.   Their illusion of “should be”. ..  is bull.  It never applied to me and it never will.  Every time I tried to fit into their idea of should be, it crumbled.  All the “should be’s” they told me over and over… hell, I wanted to believe them too.  It was like believing in fairy tales.  Believing there is a happily ever after.  I’m angry for the lies I was told and I’m angry that I even believed.  Life as it should be, never made me feel safe.  I am full of laughter for not believing; my memories are only funny to me.

One evening I stood across from a guy sitting in an overstuffed antique chair, wearing only his underwear, smoking a stinky cigar. He sat not saying anything until he finished his cigar. His fat fingers snuffed out the remaining fire on the tip of the cigar and it smoldered in the ashtray.  I must have been high from the smoke because I never looked away from the smoke when he began to talk. He had a thick Russian accent. He spoke and I heard words but I only understood the last few words, “You will do.”   I heard the door behind me opened, a woman in a tight dress and spike high heels passed me and gave me the once over with her eyes, then proceeded to spit at the man and walk into another room slamming the door behind her.  I felt his eyes evaluating my response.  He had no idea I was thinking I should have pulled out my gun and shot him and his girlfriend, and taken anything I wanted.  Maybe I was high, because I did not react. “Undress; Leave your clothes here and we will talk in the other room.”  The guy must have been a mind reader.  Later I learned he was not a mind reader at all, he was the devil.  Two hours later I walked out of the penthouse, fully dressed with what I came for and didn’t kill anyone.  I left them sleeping.  Should I have killed them?   No, I was not there for vengeance of sins, someone else would do it soon enough.  I was there to prove the sin.  It sucks knowing another person’s secrets, their dirty, messy, ugly secrets. 

I cannot tell you when it started.  I cannot pinpoint the first sin I ever witnessed.  I do know I was very young.  Maybe it was in the womb, where I drank my first bottle of vodka ingested by my mother.  Is drinking really a sin?  Was anything she did really a sin? No.  Nothing she did was a sin.  It just was not how life should be.  Someone else will validate her sins.  I decided when I was five, since I was none of her business; she was no concern to me either.  Sometimes now, when I see her, I still look at her with wonder, and cannot believe the person sitting in front of me was supposed to fit in some kind of package that was supposed to be a gift to me.  Nice gift.  She will return to the sender soon enough. 

I live life on the edge of things, a very thin edge.  My life is like a word that sits on the edge of your lips, but your mouth will not let you say the word and you cannot wrap your brain about it to make sense of it.  I know too much to get in deep.  The edge is fine with me.  I will not let the things I know consume me.  I guess that is why my life is in this, “should be” state.  I will never fit in as other people do and I know it.   My time alone is the only time I take to remember the past and know I am not other people’s ideal.  I am just like I should be. 

The last book I read was a cookbook.  I do not cook.  I throw things together in a pot that sound good to eat, put it in the oven for an hour and then there is food.  Cookbooks are entertaining.  I am drawn to the ones with stories inside, how the recipe was conceived and the holiday it is cooked, and how the food gives people roots; A place they come from.  I take the memories printed in the cookbooks and make them mine.  If I am out eating dinner, I have a pallet that allows me to separate spices and flavors.  Cookbooks are so descriptive, I take other people’s memories and say things like, “My grandmother once made this same pasta with the oregano and added cinnamon, which was a surprise once it hit your tongue, and woke up the dish a little more.”  I only saw my grandmothers when we vacationed and neither of them ever cooked for me, we always ate out. 

Now, you know my sin.  I am a liar.  I lie about everything.  No one is supposed to know the truth.  The truth is very upsetting.  Living on the edge makes the depth of me more than anyone else wants to know.  Like the Russian.  No one wants to know I stood naked in front of a man who bought and sold women into slavery.  No one wants to know about how a horse trainer in Florida strangles women and buries them with a backhoe on his land and tells everyone he had to put another horse down.  No one wants to know his callous hands once slipped around my throat, tightening slowly, as he stared into my eyes, while I struggled and heaved to inhale.  Some things are never forgotten.  I gave him a nice scar and once vengeance is delivered, the scar will testify that I was there.  I haunt him.  He never told anyone I escaped, neither did I. His mind will not let him believe I was still alive, knowing his secret.  Till his dying day he will wonder if I was a ghost that gave him a scar. He knows better than to leave his precious cemetery, if anyone else ever had to bury another dead thing, his victims would be discovered and he had too much invested to risk. If one bit of dirt is disturbed, his reputation of being one of the best horse trainers in the United States would change to murderer.  Trophies and ribbons, valid wins; not one bit of the room he strangled me in was not covered in photos of winning horses, trophies, and ribbons.  The plaques were strategically placed under track lighting so each illuminated his name and title. None of the trophies were for murder.  I notice the weirdest things when I am in stressful situations.

I live on the edge of death, not life.  Death follows me to collect what I leave behind.  No one knows that I am their last chance.  I enter.  I slice through other people’s lives like a knife in a chocolate cake, ruining perfection of the icing making it lovely and leave the dark inside exposed, making way for death to devour them, leaving nothing but the stale uneaten crumbs to rot.  The knife never comes out of a cake clean.  I suppose if the knife came out clean there would be nothing for death to eat, and we would move on to the next cake.  Like the knife, I remain unchanged.  Whatever I get into I come out the same.  Only I stay perfect. 

I feel tired.  I think I will stay in an expensive hotel and rest for awhile in a hot bubble bath.  Even knives need to be cleaned.