GOON

"Hands on the wall, now!" the officer demanded, the heel of his left hand burying the side of my face into the scathing red bricks of the alleyway. I slung my left elbow through the air about where I'd expected his ribcage to be. No go.

I was sixteen at the time but my baby face could have convinced you I hadn't sprouted a single hair below my eyelashes yet. By the time they got me into booking you couldn't even tell I had eyelashes. The glare on the finger printing screen cast the reflection of a monster where normally my irritatingly cherubic features would peer back. Made sense. I wasn't a cherub anymore. I was a monster. Bloody and swollen, cracked teeth with intermittent empty spaces. That's the way I should have looked. I smiled at my reflection, flattered to be such a creature, and an ogre grinned back.

-----

"You couldn'a paid four-hundred on the bond, Ma!" I screamed in the late night air after being released three months later, as I kicked at the locked back door to my mother's house. I banged and shouted over and over, spiting the neighboring houses that squeezed the privacy from my childhood home.

"Coulda!" she shrieked from her upstairs window. Her bedside lamplight was the only glimmer in the house. From its uninterrupted cast, I could tell she hadn't even gotten out of bed to respond. "I'm done wasting money on shitty investments, Carl. Get out of here before I send you back there!"

"Jesus Christ A’mighty, Ma!" I gave up my knocking, but shouted even louder. A chipped brown Hush Puppy pump careened from my shoulder. "The Hell!"

"Don't you do dat! Don't you take da Lowd's name in vain, y’understand me?" That got her off her ass. Nothing but a shadow stabbing from her window, a finger prodding toward me with every syllable she cast upon me, but I could feel her angry face--you'd know the one if you'd seen it--tearing me to shreds.

"Yeah, yeah. The Lord. Good ol' Lord. Be sure to thank Him next time you talk, Ma! We got so much to thank him for!"

"You get out of my yard!"

"You ain't got a yard, Ma!"

"I'm callin' the cops!"

"Call the fuckin' cops, I don't care."

"Why don't the both yous shut up before I call the cops, huh?" blasted some wannabe tough guy from one of the darkened windows staring down at me from the confines of their secret troubles.

"Why don't you come down here and I'll give ya’ reason, ya bitch?" I shouted toward the man, and anyone else. But I was already moving down the street, faster than my pride would admit.

-----

"The hell happened to ya' voice, Gary?" I asked, with an asinine smirk, lighting a cigarette in a living room where such was clearly not allowed.

My older brother Gary was every bit the diamond everyone had made him out to be, opening the door to his convict little brother at three o' clock that morning. He went to the window overlooking a convocation of garbage surrounding the cans where it should have been. He opened and jerked his head toward it, pulling me from my seat with his inherent authority. "Do that out the window, at least, you little good-for-nothing," he said without a tinge of disrespect.

"Out the window at least," I mimicked in the most highfalutin, proper tone I could muster.

"See, you too could learn to talk right if you tried," he teased with a smile I probably didn't deserve. "Why are you here anyway? Ma kick you out?"

"Na, didn't have to. She just wouldn't let me back in." I hocked a loogie into the street, loudly gathering it in my throat with a crescendo blast that echoed nastily.

"Mmhm," he said returning with a glass of water I hadn't requested, extending it toward me and insisting with a nod that I take it. I did. "Second chances aren't guaranteed, Carl. You shouldn't have expected to get a--what, fourth, fifth chance?"

"Yeah, yeah. I know. The first guy to ever fuck up, right?"

"You're a kid, Carl. You've got time to change." I turned to protest, but the sincerity and compassion in his eyes took me by such surprise, I went dumb. He cared. I could see it in his eyes, he actually cared. Holy shit, how long had it been since I'd seen that look? "You need to change."

-----

When the governor had instituted the "Supers" the scouts had gone after only the tip of the top. Trained officers with athletic background, such as Gary, were the ideal fit for the new outfit. For them, landing a college linebacker with a 3.8 GPA and a degree in criminal justice was like finding the Holy Grail.

Gary never had my sense of individuality, I think he would admit that, so finding himself in a position to become a valued, guided part of a greater whole was every bit as valuable a find for him as it was for the government. So he thought, at least. Guy like that would've been just fine any way he sliced it. The truth is, the only reason they started that program was because the governor was scared to death by the influx of costumed vigilantes running around thinking they were in a damned comic book. Worried people were going to cause more harm than good.

"I wanna see ya costume!" I garbled around a bite of cereal one morning that next summer. "What's it like? Ya wear the nut-huggers?" He glared at me from above his laptop, and tilted the screen even lower. He must've been working on some official business.

"You dooooo don'tcha?" I chuckled.

"Now as two words, please," he said with the patient irritation of a veteran grammar tutor.

"Don't you?" I reiterated with exaggerated enunciation and a hint of a British accent.

"Lovely," he glanced up with a pinched smile momentarily, then back down, "we'll make a lady out of you yet, Eliza." I had to work to not laugh at that, though I wanted to badly. Ever since I'd moved in, those moments when I could see him as a brother, not as some painfully righteous arm of the law, were so few. Even so, I wasn't going to laugh at a diss. He checked his watch, grunted, and closed up shop, crossing to the door in a flash. "

Time fo' ya--for your real life?" I taunted him once more for good measure.

"Mmhm. And you?" he asked, trying to resist the accusatory tone which belonged--and surfaced--in his voice.

"Gonna rob a bank or somethin' prob'ly."

He swung around and blasted me with his eyes. For a moment I feared my joking had gone too far, especially since I wasn't really joking entirely.

"Go-ing to rob a bank or some-thing pro-bab-ly," he said striking each consonant, especially the end "g"s, and stretching each vowel, for illustrative purposes only.

-----

"Villains" loved the fact that they got an official title too. The city was booming with them just as soon as the Department of Super Tactical Operatives formed. For every fresh crop of do-gooders itching to live out a little boy's fantasy, there were three times as many lifetime criminals with much broader delusions of grandeur and the lack of scruples necessary to stretch for that brass ring as long as they needed to, no matter how many convictions and masked crusaders tried to stop them.

"Last crime you committed was almost a year ago," the brute made the computer screen between him and me look the size of a saltine. He was the kind of guy you expected to have out in the mess, doing the work, not sitting here auditioning Goons.

"Yeah, but I took out a cop," I lied. He ticked his eyes up at me, reminding me not to bullshit a bullshitter.

"Not what it says here." He twisted his lips, flared his nostrils, grunted, and tilted to the side as if maybe... Then, he shook his head, lips tightened against his top gum line. "You just ain't right for this outfit, ok kid. Come back once you've done some shit, arright? Actually done some shit."

-----

I felt the baton whip the back of my knee cap and crashed to the ground, crumbling like the plasma screens I'd been carrying under each arm. I was almost as thrilled as I was in pain. Almost.

Finally, I thought, I'd have something to show on my résumé; some relevant, recent material for my résumé. I knew who to call for bail, Marty Hadlock. Couple of Goons I'd met told me that was the way to go: get locked up, call Marty, and he'd let you work off the bond, with interest of course.

"They give you your papers?" Marty asked, a stony face that moved slowly and monumentally as tectonic plates.

"Yes, they are all here." From his grimace, I saw that my brother's dialect coaching had already gotten the better of me and my thug-speak was deteriorating despite my efforts. He checked my file, breathed deeply through his nose as if he was already having serious doubts, then exhaled with his eyebrows bowing to inevitability.

"Well, two felonies, six total arrests since age thirteen... Hmmm... If they say you gotta be registered, you gotta be registered. Congratulations kiddo, you're almost a Goon. You know where the Office of Judicial Status Certification is?" he rambled off with unexpected clarity.

"Yes, I've been there." With my brother once, a few months earlier. Marty glared at me suspiciously, eyes that looked like they were capable of kicking my ass without the aid of the rest of his massive body. "I tried to cheat on my Goon Cert the first time," I explained with the best save I could conjure on short notice.

He laughed and slid the papers back to me. "Awesome. That's freakin' awesome!"

-----

Gang, Outlaw, and Offender National Registry. GOON. They didn't include the R. Not because they couldn't afford to make the stamp one character longer or because the R wasn't an important part of the equation, but because they wanted to make good and damn well positive that you knew who you were to them.

Through the window to the next room I spotted Captain Righteous and Lady Lightning--no shit, that's how they were legally referred to--waiting in line, smiling, laughing, with their florescent spandex uniforms glistening beneath the steady glowing bulbs.

The dim light above my line, not forty yards from the beloved masked defenders, flickered wildly in the grimy casing, as if weeping over its dead counterpart, the dust of which hinted a not-so-recent demise.

“Next!”

Captain Righteous had been gone for about an hour when I reached the head of my line, and some kid with blond hair--a sidekick I’m sure--was grinning his way to the front of theirs. The hag behind the counter on my end of the glass checked my paperwork, stamped my page without looking at my face, and shouted, “Next!”

GOON, the large red imprint reminded me, as if I could ever forget. But it's what I wanted. Right?

-----

I folded the paper into a tiny triangle and headed down the hall. The brightness shining through the windowed doors from the street felt daunting and cold. It wasn't for me. Not anymore, I knew.

"Well, I'll be damned!" I turned to find a grinning titan in an orange Lycra onesie and a yellow cowl that covered everything above his upper lip. This, I recognized after the initial shock, was Crime Crusher--I don't make these up, ok--from the news. He was the cream of the cream, the man for the job, let me tell you. If a big Villain had come down, he'd been “Crushed.” End of subject.

"Well, brother man, aren't you full of surprises!" Crusher said crushing me with a bear hug.

Holy...

"Gary?" I felt my face scrunching around my eyes in disbelief, as if the bridge of my nose had been sucking on a lemon. I still have no idea what he was saying as he, essentially, carried me into the next office, nor do I know how my hand wound its way to my mouth, pressing the triangle of judgment in for safe keeping, as I managed to submit a few mumbled "Mmhm"s of confirmation to whatever he was talking about.

There was a line in the room. I mean, there was a line, but Captain Crusher didn't know the meaning of lines. The girls at this desk were beautiful. Go weak at the knees, crash your car just to get a better look, fall to genuflect and propose as you pass them on the street kind of beautiful. Nevertheless, they crowded around to fawn over Captain Crusher, submission of facial features not necessary for a stud like him.

The garble of his voice finally cleared as he repeated to my awe-stricken ears for the third time, "Where's your paper?"

"Huh?" I felt my heart kick into a fury as if it was trying to pump up the evidence of my evil. "I don-- I don-- I do not have them," I said, my words and voice coming out like a Muppet, odd-sounding and teacher-approved.

"Who needs 'em, right, ladies?" he grinned a pair of alpine ranges. They laughed as if he was the lovechild of Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, and passed a page across to me, never tearing their eyes from him. I scribbled away, unsure of what else I might do. In a flurry of movements, the page was slid across, spun around, hammered with a stamp, and pushed back to me. No questions, no credentials, no need. For a Super like him, he could've brought in Al Capone and walked away with a Super Cert. I looked down.

"DSTO APPROVED" with the governor's signature below. I turned around--I don't know, to run, maybe?--and caught sight of my reflection in the pristine white floor below, clean enough you could wash with it.

That guy looking up to me didn't look like a two-time loser from the ghetto. He didn't look like a monster in the making. He looked like Carl. Gary's little brother, Donna and Eddie's little boy. The kid who won the science fair in fourth grade.

Who knew that all along he'd only been one stamp away?

To Remember the Truth

Curtis stopped typing, much to his own surprise. Every other set of fingers around him, cubicle by cubicle, proceeded in the cacophony of clicking, bounding noisily from key to key so that the song reverberated against the concrete walls like a heavy hailstorm as the letters and numbers dropped onto their screens, etched into an intangible slate, existing nowhere but in the lights before them.

He rubbed his fingers, moist enough to squeak softly, against the polyurethane coat of his narrow desk space, reminding himself of actuality. His tie felt tight around his collar and the room began to shrink around him as his chest grew with anxiety until he burst, ripped free; from his clothes, from the room, from the whole damn performance.

So, I always stop for a few when Curtis asks me for change, not just because his stories are interesting or because he manages a certain intelligibility atypical of underpass dwellers, but because every now and then when he whispers wildly about the Machine and the Trap and the System, backward as it may be, I start to feel a little less crazy.

Where You Lie

A breathy mumble came from her lips; a name. She tried again, after a few crackling inhales, “Where is… where’s…”

He looked all around, wreckage in each direction, then back at the stranger. “Fine… he’s… she's... they’re fine. Everybody’s fine,” he lied.

She smiled, and then was gone.

Originally posted at 6S

Delusion that Beauty is Goodness

I remember the shoddy little house with chipping white paint, its rear half hiding a dingy rainbow of embedded mud specks, a lighter ambiguously brown elemental congress, and grass stains from an unwieldy lawn which must have attempted a takeover some time before. Somewhere close by there was a cemetery, or at least a field with lots of concrete that my brother and cousin could convince five-year-old-me was a cemetery.

Between the two eerily equipped locales was a hiccup of forest; to my adult eyes it would most likely be a cluster of trees, which I could perhaps penetrate from both sides with my outstretched arms while standing at its center. The shadowy secret beneath the ever-brown canopy was a godforsaken, one-man boat, half digested by the soggy black earth.

Though he must have only visited us for a few days, I remember my cousin joining my brother and me for a lifetime of adventures in that dark realm. We snapped "clubs" from trees for safety when exploring the abandoned pirate ship and we prepared for battle with the vampires who had trapped my father in his own trunk, dragging him into the undead.

Well, we didn't see him go back in; what's your explanation? And, in case you're ever in the same predicament, here's how we made it out alive: we recited Grace--Bless us, oh Lord--over the stagnant pool in the hull of the ship, thus producing enough Holy Water for an army of darkness.

I also remember the gorgeous, big-ass a-frame with the lawn-care crew, pool guy, and fully stocked bar; respectively, where I got my cigarettes, where I bought my weed, and how at thirteen-years-old I made much older friends. By the time we fled that a-frame for a split-level in a bigger city, I could aspire for nothing greater than to break out and conquer my own shoddy wonderland, baptizing myself in its waters and shedding the iniquities of far too much beauty.

The Darkest of Our Flock

"Y'know what the difference is between us?" he asked me, blasted to the hilt but somehow wearing it expertly.

For one thing, at least eighteen beers by that point, and I'm no slouch. With such a broad category, I didn't know where to start, or more importantly where to stop my smart-ass parade. But he was in the midst of recounting his glory days of prison, how he got there, and why he would probably be going back before too long, so I wasn't really expected to answer.

He continued after a beer--not a sip... well it was a sip for him, but a whole beer, "If it came down to it, you probably don't have what it takes to lop off a man's fingers with a pair of gardening shears."

"I just can't really picture the scenario where that's my only option," I answered but I could see he was disappointed in my reply.

Natural Selection

Originally posted at my 6 Sentences account, a social network for writers.

"They kill the ducks," hissed the scrawny young woman, leaning into the garbage can behind me, so that at first I could only see the forest green bandanna hugging her sweaty, dirt-blond hair.

I faced her with my trademark inadvertently-indignant eyebrow scrunch, which I never intend to come off as malicious as it always does. She squeezed her eyelids to retaliate my superficial intensity, latching onto my eyes as she mechanically ripped open the rings of my freshly discarded six pack, staring me down like a fighter, pristine blue icebergs beaming within.

She smelled like really good weed or very bad body odor, perhaps both, which was perfect because she was that unwashed, save-the-world hippie type that really cranks my engine. Sure, they like to pretend they want all of us Suits gone from "their city," the hipness of which my people--and our evil, icky money--allegedly diminish tenfold. But I knew upon first contact with my little eco-heroine, hours before we took turns burrowing one another's perspiring backs into the muddying forest floor, that all she really wanted was to set me right; make me see the light.

Swing and a Miss

In my dream, it was someone cheering at a baseball game while I was trying to have a conversation with my cat (if you think that part’s weird, you should also know I fucking hate baseball).

My first thought, as I awoke to hear his final cries for mercy, was of the last thing he had said to me before leaving camp that night: “If there’s grass on the field, play ball.” Now, if there’s one thing I hate as much as a twenty-something pedophile who hides behind the anatomical similarities between an impressionable teenage girl and a grown woman, it’s a slob who takes sports metaphors in vain.

I wasn’t sure when his screams had ended as I was too focused on walking silently toward their fire. Around it, the raucous group--who were very clearly not, as she had said, a group of friends on spring break--lauded the girl’s performance in trapping their dinner, as they passed portions of my buddy from grubby hand to grubby hand.

For hours, until they were all asleep, I hung as soundly as moss to the bark of that tree watching them with dumb, cold reason; a two-hundred-pound man, I calculated, couldn't satisfy a dozen haggard mountainfolk and I’ve never really been a “dessert” kind of guy.

Hallowed be What's-His-Name

The Almighty sulked ascetically in his throne, while the angels and saints tried not to acknowledge such, even though he would instantly forgive them.

Michael, in all his haughty glory, voiced without fear, "Oh God, what's
you're problem?"

Omniscient and thereby patient, He tolerated the irreverence--He'd tamed a bit since the fall-out with Luci--and reminded Himself of the promise not to "bottle it up" anymore.

The cork flew and He bubbled quickly, stung by the reminder of His own words, "Why don't they say 'please' in any of their prayers? And when they improvise, it's always 'Lord we
just ask...'; 'We just wish...'; 'We just!'"

Then as any good father would, He laughed it off and soldiered on, grateful to be beloved enough to be taken for granted.

Originally posted at my 6 Sentences account, a social network for writers.

Athrogarr the Fool

Athrogarr is the central character in a book that I've been working on for a while now. I'm trying to exercise his character in some settings where I can't rely on the strength of his adventures and the cool characters I'm surrounding him with.

Athrogarr sipped his warm beer at the bar, his massive frame supported by an arrangement of three stools. His skin was covered in a thin layer of mud, a mixture of his sweat and the dust from the trail.

Finril stopped behind Athrogarr and sniffed the air exaggeratedly, his pointy blue nose digging through the air like a spade breaking up soil. The slender Nymph on his arm, her skin tone similar enough for them to be a socially accepted couple but a bit greener, laughed deliciously at his show.

He stopped and took one final deep whiff above Athrogarr and painted a look of disgust across his face.

“Oh!” he laughed, “It is you Athrogarr! I thought some fishermen might have left their day’s catch behind. “

Athrogarr poured the rest of his mug down his throat and slammed it down on the counter, banging for a refill. Melinor was swift to the rescue.

“Anything to do for you, Finril?” the stern old Hill Elf asked, as he poured Athrogarr a fresh cup.

“I’m just consulting the local vanguard, Elf. Thank you,” he said, shooing Melinor away with a dismissive backhand wave.

Melinor, who had other business to attend, did not move. He might have recognized tradition and obeyed reverently when called for, but he wasn’t listening to anyone--Nymph or otherwise--tell him what to do in his tavern. He simply leaned over the counter and glared.

“Athrogarr. Let me ask you this. I hired a guide--that is an actual guide; someone who knows their way around the mountain--to take my lovely here and myself on a little adventure some weekends ago. I think we paid thirty-five-hundred round for it.” He threw out the number as if he hadn’t complained about it for hours, at the time. “Tell me… You bodyguards, vanguards, whatever it is that we’re supposed to say… Do you make thirty-five-hundred round per trip?”

Athrogarr looked at Finril incredulously. “What would I do with thirty-five-hundred round?”

Finril laughed obnoxiously. “Anything you want, you brute!” He slapped the Barbarian on the shoulder and his hand bounced like it had smacked the head of a drum. “Go on a holiday! Buy some wine instead of that muddy grog you all seem to like wallowing in!”

“I like this beer,” Athrogarr reasoned.

Melinor smiled sarcastically at Finril, deflecting his insult.

Finril, guffawed again and started off with his woman in tow. “Alllll right,” he condescended.

As the two rode off on their self-satisfaction. Melinor and Athrogarr met eyes, a silent conversation swapped in mere moments. Their eyes and cheeks seemed to swell until they were both pouring raucous laughter across the bar.

“Can’t believe anyone would actually pay to go up in those mountains,” Athrogarr huffed, as soon as he caught his breath.

Not Pictured

Jocelyn had introduced four of the hottest artists in the country over the past two years. She was known, to put it mildly.

Not that an art promoter, even a highly-influential one, would be particularly “credible” in all circles, but she wasn’t a nut either. Still, she knew that artsy types were theoretically given to bouts of eccentricity; if she weren’t thought to be insane, then it would have been suspected that she had done some bad drugs, or gotten trapped in the spell of a dream or some other such nonsense.

She smiled at him. As she did, she recalled a guy she’d dumped because he vehemently believed in Bigfoot--she had told him “commitment issues,” but it was the Bigfoot thing. Now, she was having her umpteenth meeting with an alien.

His body was perhaps too long and slender but otherwise could pass as human, if not topped with a hammer-like, leathery black head.

They couldn’t talk, of course, but art can leap that hurdle. In their first encounter she was convinced it was a dream. She had slept in the gallery, not uncommon before a big show, and awoke to find Ernie (that’s as close as she could get to the sound he made when gesturing to himself) and a few others exploring the exhibits, examining each work with due appreciation.

Ernie was the only to return. He was an artist, it turned out. Once he felt safe enough to share, she was mesmerized by his skill. He expressed himself unlike any other painter she’d ever seen.

The visions, the emotions he conveyed…

If she were to show the world, to share these works, they would be relentless in their pursuit of the painter. She couldn’t do that. No way. The world wasn’t ready for this beauty.