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"It' s not that Glyn… I' m a… I' m a convicted felon and I ca
After a short pause Glyn comes back on the phone," Good Lord girl! I knew you were a tough case and now you' re go
"Glyn, just don' t piss me off," says Debbie, also laughing."And please, get me a snub nose revolver or a small semiautomatic but not twenty-two' s. I got small hands and I can' t shoot a big gun, plus it has to fit in my purse or under my shirt."
"Jesus, you even know your weapons," says Glyn. "Iain' t messing with you again." His laugh is the last thing Debbie hears befores she hangs up.
Debbie puts the cell phone away in her purse and prays that she will never have to use the gun, that Billy will go away and never return, that her little life can be hers again. Still, now she will have to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon on her, into a bar. Fucking Billy, she is getting set up for trouble, she thinks, but she ain' tru
The Smell of Old Things
I got up that morning thinking that my so called life with Helen was the center of my universe and I went to bed that same day with my head filled with the idea that the woman serving drinks at the DTC party was Debbie, and Helen and her bullshit took a step back and sank into the darkness where things of no consequence rot into oblivion.
But all things are relative; I’ m sure that many people got up that same morning with their own problems and by bedtime they were dead. At that point their former problems were truly irrelevant. I wasn’ t dead so I can be thankful for that. This may seem like a extreme comparison but it is one that works for me and lets me handle what seems to be unsurmountable problems by realizing that to the next guy, they mean nothing, that to the world they mean squat, that only in my head do they amount to anything.
I took a good look at her; hell, I just stared at her in a way that could be considered rude. I know she caught up with my abnormal and unprovoked attention but she did a good job of ignoring me, busy as she was doing her job.
She had to be Debbie, I don’ t know why, but she had to be.
The moment that I linked the stranger to Debbie, my life ceased to be like it had been until then and I ca
Until that moment, I could have not told a sketch artist what Debbie looked like even if my life had been at stake, and the excuse that I haven’ t seen her in over twenty years would have been a reasonable one. But seeing her that night was like the smell of old things, that smell that shocks the brain into a explosion of memories fulls of images and textures that until then had been buried so deep in the archives of time that they may as well never existed.
Seeing her took me back in time over twenty years, and there I stood at that party, ski
Such a brief span of time, a blink of an eye, and like stepping out of a time machine, you are who you used to be. The consequences of such a short moment still linger in me like the aftershocks from an earthquake. I got jolted into remembering things that I had given for long dead and forgotten but which now are here, thrown into my lifelike unearthed corpses, and those corpses are disturbingly alive and fresh as if they had been kept fresh in another dimension and not buried under layers of time and forced forgetfulness.
I looked at her from different angles, from varying distances. Sometimes I stared at her and other times I looked at her askance. No matter how I did it, she was Debbie all right. Despite all my observations and the constant self assurances that she was Debbie, I didn’ t have the guts to approach her.
Why not? It beats me. I can’ t figure it out. Perhaps I was afraid of finding out that she was not Debbie. Perhaps I was afraid of confirming that she was indeed Debbie. Perhaps I was afraid of making a fool out of myself regardless of she being or not being Debbie. Had she been her, what could I have told her? Would she even remember me? Perhaps she remembers the john and the drug dealer who almost got whacked, who gave her money and then left her standing on a Dallas sidewalk, but she wouldn’ t remember me as Ken.
I toss alone at night. I find myself daydreaming during the day, always mulling in my head if she was or was not Debbie, thinking about what if’ s and what could have been and then I hate myself for being such a fool, a coward, a loser. I try to forget but her image, both her images, the old and the new, come to my mind and dislodge any common sense I had succeeded into getting crammed in there.
Sweet Home
Debbie comes from work and parks her Geo under the light next to the laundry room. It is a longer walk to her apartment but at least her car is not in the dark, and she can see what is around her. Before she leaves her car she takes the thirty-eight Special revolver out of her purse and puts it in the right pocket of her jacket.
A few days back Glyn and her had stepped out the back of the Night Owl where a rusted Dumpster stunk to high heavens. He stood in front of her, put one hand into each pocket of his over sized jacket and pulled them out at the same time. In one hand he had a small silver semiautomatic with wooden grips and in the other he had the blue snub nose with rubber grips.
“ Which one do you like better?” he asked.
Without much hesitation Debbie chose the revolver. Simplicity and reliability before anything else, she thought.
“ The lady knows her hardware, ” said Glyn with a smile.
“ Thank you. How much do I owe you, ” said Debbie.
“ Nothing. It’ s on me.”
“ Come on, this thing is not cheap.”
Glyn had refused to take any money from her, and had given her a half full box of shells.
Debbie walks through the parking lot with her hand in her pocket and her eyes sca
Her door is half open, and the lock is broken amid splinters.
She freezes in place and her hand closes its grip around the revolver. She wants to run downstairs but then what? Call the cops and wait. She is not ru
Once inside, she ca