by James SPILLANE

1. It is cold out. You are bro­ken and I don’t like it.
2. I wake up at three thir­ty in the morn­ing af­ter a hor­ri­ble dream. I get up out of bed, walk in­to the liv­ing room, lean my­self over the stained couch and be­gin to pray.
3. There is a let­ter that I keep mean­ing to write, but as I get clos­er to the truth the pain that comes with it, stops me dead in my tracks.
4. My cell phone on­ly di­als six when free and un­locked with­in my pocket.
5. I try to clean up.
6. In an­oth­er dream, Gavin my son, is in the oth­er room. I think I robbed the crowned jew­els of Eng­land. I run to tell them all how sor­ry I am. An­drea, (my wife) takes me in­to the bed­room, leans over me and kiss­es me… I haven’t been caught yet, but am al­most cer­tain the British se­cret po­lice are af­ter me. Every­thing is stashed in the back seat of my car, un­der­neath all the dirty laun­dry. An easy find. I am wor­ried what every­one will think. Why did I do it? No rea­son at all I guess.
7. While at work, every thir­ty min­utes or so, I no­tice a faint odor of hu­man fe­ces. Re­peat­ed­ly I get up and head to the bath­room, pre­tend to take a shit, while ac­tu­al­ly lean­ing over and pulling the crotch of my un­der­wear up in­to my face try­ing to de­tect the smell.
8. I cry for the first time in ten years. Every thing comes out of me like a vol­cano, my eyes swell. Snot comes out of my ears un­til I am deaf. Every­thing tastes like sea salt. My neck hurts.
9. I call up my son on the tele­phone. I won­der if I call enough. Won­der if I call too much? Won­der what he got for Christmas.
10. I cut my thumb open on a piece of bam­boo af­ter slip­ping in the snow. I need to catch a ride to the hos­pi­tal, but I don’t have a car. The fol­low­ing af­ter­noon I bor­row a friend’s. There is a huge sign over the door that reads all pay­ments made up­on ser­vice. I tell the re­cep­tion­ist that I don’t have any in­sur­ance, but will pay with my Visa card. The doc­tor gives me 15 stitch­es and the bill comes to 500 bones. I give my card to the re­cep­tion­ist and it is de­clined. I then tell her to try 200, she does and it goes through. They will bill me the rest.
11. Call up my good friend Barth­leme, back from my Army days. We laugh. I laugh. It is war all the time.

Filed under Fiction on January 24th, 2004

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