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The young man fell to his knees
and I could hear his muffled sobs escape through the fingers covering his face.
Were his hands any lower, I would have imagined seeing a usually hopeful visage
flexed into aged lines of despair. He
sniffled. The kind of sniffle you hear when someone is trying to revive his
resolve and put on a mask of clarity and defiance.
“You’ve
seen clearly what I have brought to show you. What this will all be and what
they will all become. Because of you, John. Everything your life amounted to,
all the wonderful things you have tried to bring and all the people you have
touched – they will reject you and you will be a broken shell of a man.” I said
these, the last words he would ever hear, with a clearly defined sense of
wrongness. I didn’t want to be here, lying to this man. It was because he was supposed to die-no, had already died in this concrete jungle of a city, just a few
blocks away, that the vision he I showed him became a reality. Clearly, his resolve
faltered under the pressure of the last few minutes. It was only ten minutes
ago that John was walking briskly through these late evening New York streets
with determination and confidence. On the way to meet his lovely wife he stumbled while stepping off a curb and the arm of the body I wore caught
his flailing hand. Of course, that was intended. Through that contact he caught
a flash of this world’s future and what it looked like. He saw the war and
scandal that corrupted not just this land’s government, but that reached across
the vast ocean and corrupted that of his home country and every other other so-called civilized nation. He saw the everyday
squabbles of the people deteriorate into pettiness. Every hope he had ever had
for the future of a world in which he strived for peace was lost in that
instant. His body continued to the ground, curled into the infantile security
only a womb could provide.
“I
knew it,” he said, accepting the fate that this shattering future glimpse forced
upon him. Then he took the .38 special from my host’s extended hand and ended
his suffering. By the time the echoes of the screaming had faded and were
replaced by the sirens, I wasn’t even in the same state…
…Correction, I was
still in the Big Apple. Just not on the evening of Dec. 8, 1980. It was now a
brisk spring morning nearly a century later. But on 203rd floor of
the towering iron spire that reached into the sky it was a crisp thirty-eight
degrees Fahrenheit. I approached the woman sitting in the center of the room
with my true form apparent. It was the only way to surrender myself to her
complete control.
“It
is done,” I conveyed in my usual manner. I placed the words gently into her
auditory cortex, so as not to overwhelm the human female’s fragile
neural-cognitive system. She smiled, a wry, evil smile. A glint of light
reflected off her dark eyes from the single covered bulb in the vaulted
ceiling. I put the book on the table in the middle of the room, a nearly new
copy of Catcher in the Rye, as proof.
“I
have another target,” she said, ignoring entirely the evidence of my deed.
“That
wasn’t our arrangement,” I told her as calmly as I could, betraying the roiling
aggression beneath the surface.
“Our
arrangement has altered. Pray I don’t alter it further.” She steepled her
fingers in front of her face before leaning back in her chair and then standing
up. “You have the ability to give me a world that loves only me.” The gleam in
her eyes shimmered and the lines on her face creased as she entertained her
fantasy-come-to-life. “I have the one and only thing in this reality that you
need, and I hold its existence by a thread.” I cringed. She was right, of
course. Until I had fulfilled all of the desires of her madness, her complete
saturation of drunken power, I would not be allowed to return to my realm
whole. “You will go here,” the images in her mind swirled to a theater and a
bearded man wearing a tall hat, “and bring me the play bill for ‘Our American
Cousin’ as proof when you are done.”
If
I’d had teeth to bare and a brow to furrow, I would have done so. But I
relented, just as John had moments before. Just like John, I knew what the future held for
me if I did anything but relent to this woman, this paragon of corruption.
After all, the other half of my soul was helpless in her grasp.
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So, that's page one of a work tentatively titled 'Lennon.'
Comments? Critiques? Hold the mayo...
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