This is a short story that kept me awake one night. I will rewrite it here as a “trilogy”.

PART 1

Tonight I am coming up aces, The car screeches to a halt, firm, smooth, I push off the seat…Moving before the wheels finished their final revolution. 9mm in hand, I am fluid, dark, motionless in my actions, heading for the house. I see one ‘yute’, a soldier, he’s strapped, but unaware…I squeezed the trigger and the earth swallows him up, smooth…he dissappears as if he has never been. the sounds of my pistol are lost to my ears, swallowed up by the night whose blacknees it seems, caresses the muzzle to stifle the flashes and absorb the sounds.

The darkness is mine, the bright moon subdued by a single bank of heavy clouds, working in concert to serve me and my destiny….there is one light inside the small house, in the living room….even under the cover of the darkness that abets me, I can make out the thin woooden door divided by eight glazed glass panels. Set into the fading blue walls of the verandah…the eight milky panes feigning the horror of some bloated blind beast…whose eight eyes have been stabbed out.

PART 2

I am close now…I see an outstretched foot materialise out of the ground…Its dark but I see…I see everything…I hear everything…I feel everything….The breeze that should have been there in this dark country night, but is not…its gone. Refusing to witness my aces. Hopping the leg of the fallen youth I rolled unto the verandah…Like a fog of death….the light…TV blue from my viewpoint….wavered as if giving way to the darkness that walked with me.

The doors open as if by magic…spraying splintered wood and broken glass…I sweep the room, taking in the old man dozing on the raggedy plaid sofa…his face taking on the thousand faces of the tv that watches him sleep…he is horrified and welcoming, happy and sad at this nexus where my bullets sheperds the life from his body…he died dreaming…his final sigh almost a lament that he is gone before he can truly witness my beauty…

PART 3

I swept the house for all other threats, there are none…the others I eliminate as they are found…a woman…two young boys…I erased them all…swift and Godlike…I wiped away the stains on my life…the chains that arrested me and kept me from soaring as I was meant to soar…

I hear a blast…its harsh and real…an antithesis to the silenced sounds of my pistol…this sound is hard and real…a cold slap even…slowly I awoke…the harsh flourescents of the Esso service station in halfway tree cutting away the darkness…the morning is slow…nobody except another two or three sleeping taxis and the cashier chatting to the security guard…I fumbled the bottle of warm water from the cup holder, take a sip to rinse the sour taste of sleep from my mouth.

As I slowly drove into the still kingston night, windows down I feel the missing breeze caress my face and I thought briefly of my family in temple hall…father, brother, woman and two sons…I try to zero in on the next fare….already my dream is just a memory…the way only dreams can be…I still have a family to feed…I still need to find customers…Tonight I need to come up aces.