openthoughts
Member
since 01-16-2006
Posts 91
Where the child can be free
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0 posted 08-31-2009 01:33 AM
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Closing My Eyes
The food court was crowded and I struggled to find a table. Eventually, I noticed an empty one. Once seated, I began to arrange the components of my meal so that they would be easily accessible: bacon cheeseburger directly in front, garden salad to the left, oreo cake to the right, Coke to the top right.
I turned to Mike and asked him for salt. Mike wasn’t there. In his place sat a tall man dressed in ratty clothes and smelling of ash. He told me that he made the cake as he took a bite from the edge of the crust. I too took a bite so that I could compliment his fine baking. It tasted like blood. I told him it was delicious. He smiled and said it will be.
He walked away. I followed him, asking if he wanted to take his cake. It was, after all, his. He was gone.
I returned to the table. Mike told me that my cake tasted disgusting. Why would the man leave his cake? I was suspicious. Suspecting the true motive, I poked my index finger into the middle and touched a metallic surface.
I ran, but I could not turn around, so I ran backwards. Bullets flew through the air, so close to me I thought they were passing through. I felt no pain so they must not have been.
I reached the stairs. Mike’s head met a bullet the size of a champagne cork and burst. The cake stopped ticking and erupted into fire. I felt the heat and heard the screaming but I was safely up the stairs. I needed a means to defend myself. I needed to defend my friends. There was a firearms store on the third floor.
I found the proprietor. I asked him for guns. He said no. I told him people were dying. I asked him if he could hear it, though I couldn’t hear anything myself. He told me I needed to get a permit first. I said there was no time. He gave me a knife and said to do my best. I put it in his head for wasting time and allowing so many people to die. He said that wasn’t helping me.
I ran back downstairs, forwards now. The cake had finished exploding. There no people but there were bodies everywhere. The bullets still flew. I stood in the middle of them, searching for a familiar face. There was my father. He was dead, and the look on his face made me think he died from shock and not the metal that had burrowed into his brain.
I tried to walk around the bullet but it collided with my chest, splitting it down along my sternum. The two sides folded apart. I could see my ribs and beneath those, my inflating and deflating lungs. I put my hand into the cavity and searched and searched but I could not find my heart. Cleanly severed arteries and veins dangled where they should have been connected and pumping blood.
I looked up, surprised. The man in the ratty clothes smelling of ash held my heart tauntingly in his fingerless gloved hand. He said that he told me it would be delicious. Then he tossed my heart at my feet and left through the door of bullets that headed towards me.
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