The City

 I fucking hate the city. Perhaps this short (short) story will show you exactly how much I hate the fucking city:

He knows that one day he’s going to die because he’s going to try to merge onto the right lane and some asshole will think it’s funny to speed up right as he’s merging even though he’s had the blinker on for fifteen fucking seconds and they will collide at 70 miles an hour exploding into a fleshy multicolor paste all over the freeway. The 105 will be closed for hours with the mess he’s made and the victim’s parents will demand reparations, only to have their requests fall on deaf ears because all the police officers are too busy watching American Idol on their smartphones while breaking Tyrone’s back with the baton and maybe a flashlight, depends on whether it’s after 6. The cops in Watts must have it rough, having to evict bums off the streets and busting up crack deals at every street corner. Little do they know that the crack actually has shards of glass in it because it’ll fuck you up, and those sneaky bastards confiscate Tyrone’s pipe too. Officer Mendez goes first and immediately the glassy shrapnel proceeds to fuck up his day. Later on he will visit the doctor only to be told that his tuberculosis has been severely exacerbated by the bits of glass fucking his shit up. He coughs blood while Officer Jackson takes his hit, holding it in cause he isn’t a little bitch, and releases smoke and glass into his partner’s face. He grew up on this shit, you know; he’s used to things fucking up his day; to him it’s nothing new…

They toss Tyrone out on the corner of Century and 92^nd and drive through the wall of the McDonald’s, taking the poor cashier with them. Her name was Sandy and all she ever really wanted in life was to be a dog. To be whipped and chained and brought to her knees only to get a steaming pile of…in her face, all over her face. Now she is lying in bits and pieces all over the linoleum floor as women and children scream their lungs out at the carnage, women urging their children to finish playing in the playpen, come on that’s a good lad, come along now, be careful not to slip on the red paste it tastes real gnarly. He follows his mother’s hand, strong, vicelike grip, leading him towards the middle of the street, sink or swim, either you make it or not, playing chicken with the oncoming F-150, whoopsie daisy thought you were gonna get hit huh, well you live to play another day. Now run along now, back to the house, back to the fucked up fences and the barred up windows, back to the cell block where you don’t even get 3 square meals a day let alone a roof over your head…

A gunshot wakes him up in the middle of the night, and the air is filled with a ghastly chorus of alleycats meowing their inconsolable wails to cats just as miserable as them, hacking and hissing and spitting hairballs onto the street, onto the cardboard box where the crazy guy that hangs outside Walgreens lives; no one understands that he has schizophrenia and that his life is one continuous acid trip that was triggered during the night the Berlin Wall fell, and as the first Germans raced across the no man’s land that meant certain death for decades and decades, rushing to be reunited with families long since forgotten, or worse, dead, the man took a heavy dose, 500 micrograms, and within minutes his world dissolved into a deconstructed reality where he was free to assume any shape, and he truly believed he could fly, jumping over the balcony of his apartment fully believing he would remain in the air forever, and in fact he was in the air forever because the trip allowed it; in fact he’s still flying even though his legs were broken and the resulting mental instability led him to be kicked out to the streets where he has remained for more than 20 years, less than a shade, but still attached to the earth, roaming, unwilling to let it go. And while the cripple sleeps the cats piss on his box and fuck next to his face, the female slashing at the cripple and shrieking violently while the male pounds away, also shrieking violently. A little further down the street a prostitute gets forcibly ejected from a moving Cadillac, viscous seminal fluid all over her face and hair, skirt tattered and bleeding, eyes and nose free-flowing with a sickening mixture of saliva, tears, snot, and mascara. She lies on the curb face-down, ass up, and retching into gutter, vomits the night out, bright orange chunks of half-digested food mixed with tinges of crimson free-flowing within the clear fluid; she retches and clutches her stomach, her head overwhelming, threatening to black out, world dangerously spinning beneath her. She reaches into her bra, fingers shaking violently, and produces a wad of tightly wrapped bills, begins unfurling it and wails to the night when she finds that it’s filled entirely with singles…

The sun breaks over the buildings in the morning, and with it begins another day. Nameless, faceless creatures stagger upright from their slumber and set at once to ensure the machine keeps moving, keeps turning, demanding its sacrifices be brought to it in blood and sweat. The sun will rise, reach its zenith, and descend while the multitudes fester and swarm under the heat and oppression, breeding exponentially less like animals and more like bacteria…And the cycle continues, day in, day out, an unbroken cycle spinning more and more rapidly as the days progress and months turn to years, and the same story is played out night after night under fake names and faker disguises, persisting until the energy required to keep the wheel spinning runs out, but by this time the inertia of the wheel will ensure it keeps spinning until it’s loosened from its supports, and runs itself straight to the ground with all of us under its weight.