Sam, this was written for you and today I finally managed the balls to give it to you 2nd may 2008 11 40 am
I
work in this butcher’s shack. He is
Muslim, somehow not an orthodox one so he never inquired about my
religion or anything. Initially the reality of the killing struck me as
bitter. Only to make a few
bucks, I grew into it.
Soon after my
parents died, I took over looking after my sister.
Struggling with reality, I get home every evening to see her studying under this lamp, her
innocence glowing. My
bloody shirt is the only proof of my morbid job. It wouldn’t matter had I been an
undertaker or crematory boy.
There is this thin line between
hallucination and
reality. I am trying to make it most hallucinatory for her. I don’t contemplate that I have woken to reality. But sometimes I get lost too. Lost in that fine breezy evening in college when I was sitting with my girlfriend, kissing her. My parents had left the other evening scheduled to reach home by sometime then.
“Oye dude, you’ve got a call”, “hey thanks man!” as I picked the receiver only to
freeze the moment, I should’ve never known what I was told. It was a fine evening; all of them strolled as I ran to take the first cab to the bus station.
It was three hours before I was in the hospital. My thinking rapid, my heart sinking and my sister sobbing. Agape I spoke to the cops,
bad dream or a
cocaine trip I couldn’t equate. It had been a
fatal accident on the highway, they died on the spot. I wouldn’t dare to see what the spot looked like; the
media would surround it by now anyway. It was my prerogative to see, my right to examine and I forfeited it. If only someone would give me a chance to see how it happened, if only I had a chance to stop it. It jitters me to think of how it was that day. My phone has the messages saved, the message they sent when they stopped for
coffee on the highway sometime before it occurred. Must be my last
connection, I really don’t know?
God is a butcher and we are all going to be slaughtered, I work for him now. I do not hate him; I just don’t like his rules. The
default mechanism stitches every
tissue in my
brain and it is only natural for me to think, "why me?”. I was a regular college boy,
sneakers and
blowjobs, and now I am a butcher’s boy.
One day I will know, perhaps.