I’m in a car and I’ve been shot. The car has a spongy suspension and a Scorpio air freshener that smells like Mexican hair products. Did I mention it’s in motion across a scabbed landscape headed for the sun. I feel every bump in my chest where bullet fragments sizzle in blood. Unless the pink cartoon hand of salvation plucks me from the back seat and drops me into last Tuesday before I took this job, I won’t be alive much longer. At least I saved the child this time; it felt personal; I knew the family. I dropped my bloody calling card into every countertop fishbowl when the girl was taken. I found the women who took her hostage and killed the man they called Baggage Handler. It might mean something else in Spanish. Without a handler, this bad man is driving me off the grid to where I’ll want to die. I have it coming. I drugged his partner and installed explosives inside him. He begged me for more time when I showed him the countdown, but he couldn’t describe what he’d do with it. I hope you didn’t come for answers. “How to Live and Why” was more of a question. Personally, I’ve lived enough. She’s back with her mother now, but it was costly. “We’re businessmen,” the kidnappers keep telling me. I don’t like thinking what the product is and whether I’m buying or selling. The girl was taken on my watch; I went into action. I got her back for zero in the end, but coming back alive was never my plan this time. Someone has cranked the color wheel on me. Cabbage purple mountains crouch below a sky as red as Santa. What am I clinging to? More of this? Good luck world.

Copyright © January 07, 2007