Private Morlane. Rooster. Let the regiment sleep. Gun. Trigger. Regiment sleeps.
No, the blood stains in the carpet don't come out. Yes, I tried. Yes, I did my best. No, there's no lingering smell.
Press conference for killer. Talk shows, radio interviews, Good Morning America 3-minute-segments before commercial break. They don't throw hard question at you. They give you chance to explain yourself. They don't press further.
Smiles, genial smiles and well-trained laughs at cued moments. We get along in front of audience. He laugh at joke about face victim made before death. Well there you have it, he say to camera. Inside the mind of a true killer, he say....
Excerpt from personal diary, Saturday, Sept. 23, 2010:
Experiments designed to give self artificial sexual fetish involving lamps have thus far resulted in failure. First attempted to insert lamp into arbitrary orifice; however this failed due to how cumbersome the lamp in question was. Perhaps there is a non-penetrative alternative?
Excerpt from personal diary, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2010:
Attempted masturbation while entertaining thoughts of the lamp. So far unable to sexualize the object itself, and thus unable to complete experiment. Will try again with different parameters tomorrow.
Excerpt from personal diary, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2010:
The lamp wouldn't turn on....
In the beginning she thought he was an alright gentlemen. Until he began showing little bits and pieces of himself. Now it seemed ridiculous that she could have fallen in love with this boy-man, this immature piece of bones, flesh and nothing else. She laughed to herself, almost becoming hysterical at the thought that she could have been shackled to this man, that as a Catholic, she would have wrestled with leaving him and when she eventually did, she would have to wrestle with a feeling of guilt for the rest of her life.
Which brought her to God. Funny...
The darn woodchuck was bothering me. He was a smart woodchuck. He had a bucket of red paint, which he was using to paint the golf course. "Ha ha ha," laughed the woodchuck. "I am painting this blade of grass right now. Watch as my paintbrush, which is laden in red paint, strokes the blade. See? It is red now. Ahahahaha!!!!!"
I was having none of it. I do not like the golf courses to be red, especially the green, which is called a green for a reason. You don't call them red or blues or yellows, do you? No....
A life of dots was all she'd known. At first it was the small dots that appeared in the corners of her vision on sunny days. Then those dots went away as the days grew dimmer.
The next dots were the tablets the doctors gave her to "slow the loss of function."
And ever since then, dots touching fingertips, bringing meaning, sometimes memory.
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Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She was tired - her mother had been taking her from door to door all morning looking for ... what exactly? She wasn't sure, but she knew more than her mother thought she did. She watched the kids play who weren't her.
She was the product of two Peace Corps volunteers, and this adventure teaching English in China was the next step. AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, MercyCorps, and now the less valiantly named R4 English Tutoring. She should have been starting second grade this year, but she...
Now, supposedly, if I start out a hundred meters ahead of Achilles, and Achilles is travelling five times faster than me, when he has covered that hundred meters, I will nevertheless have travelled twenty. And when he travels twenty, I will have travelled four. And when he travels that four, I will have traveled .8 meters, and so on and so forth, such that Achilles will never reach me. I win.
But Zeno, the cur, says that, eventually, Achilles overlaps me. "We know it from experience," he tells us. God damn experience! I know that if Achilles is continually arriving...
Balanced on the line, he told her again, "Put it down!"
She couldn't move even if she had wanted to, the butt of the gun felt slippery in her clammy hands but she refused to reliquish her hold on it. The line was a mere streak in the dust, but the signifance of that line, oh the significance that it held. It held the entire future, hers and his, the future of nations.
"Put it down, and step toward me."
"Back off!" She shouted, readjusting her grip on the gun and aiming it squarely at his chest.
"Just step over...