FORTUNE TELLERS MAKE A KILLING THESE DAYS

“…The ‘KEEP OUT’ Sign was pushed aside, we went out and stared at the autumn leaves and danced like Gods among the stars…”
-Joe Fiction




My Canine teeth are sitting in an empty beer mug that’s now full of whole milk; I’m cleaning off the blood stains off of the wall with detergent, warm water and Colgate, the old fashioned kind. Though my right eye is swelled shut, and my glasses have been shattered and left deep cuts around my eyes and their brows, I’ve used Gorilla glue to patch up the gashes, I’ve got a magnifying glass held up in the crook of my elbow while I gently caress the mixture onto the spatter on the wall, I told my room mate Joseph we should just repaint the entire downstairs, not to mention re carpet it as well, he claims too many questions will be asked, too many bills will be raised and too many philosophies will be captivated, not to mention we will probably be publicly flogged and stoned in the cracked streets of the red white and blue Lennox Village, and that would mean bad press for our mothers, who will eventually have to come down off of their opium high to say to the press that they are sorry for the wretched souls their DNA has brought forth upon this earth. Public humiliation is far worse than being stoned to death- One still lives and limps on, with a target on his or her back, being ridiculed by a ten year old with a leash around his waist, and at the other end, an obese Barbie princess with blue hair and a Marlboro hanging out of her lips, rotted with cold sores. Fiendish howls by wolves in human skin, causing your heart to palpitate from shame. Yes, Death is far better than Humiliation.
As the glue pinching my wounds together locks together, Joseph is outside, in the backyard, bleaching the concrete and setting the rubble, trash and aftermath on fire, we’ve tossed in about a can and a half of incense, to mask the smell of bodies burnt, just in case there are any retirees around these parts, but the air is calm and quiet now, I think we’re actually in the clear, but a neighbor gets nosy, then, sadly enough, well, we’ll just have to take his or her head, fingertips, teeth and toes and bury them in an undisclosed location, Joseph, he’s in the construction business, so he knows where the best places are to bury problems. You just find out where cement and concrete are gonna be dumped two nights before, the second night, you dump the problem, cover it with lime and the next day, cement is delivered. Problem solved. If you forget the Lime, then God be with you, because once summer time arrives, it’s gonna smell like a mortuary without embalming fluid and potpourri. Joseph’s got it covered, the Bowie knife, the shovel, the lime and even the concrete, all I have to do is supply the jokes and beer just to keep things deflated.
Once the fire got roaring, he called me out there, he had two towels in his hands, the tossed me one and then we began to strip, we threw our clothes into the fire, and we even threw some more kerosene in, just for safe measures, then we rifled down a shot of Old Crow, and threw our sweat and blood covered towels into the rising flame as well. The cool night air grew stinky as we sighed and tossed our favorite shoes into the blaze; we took a few steps back and then took another shot. Joseph had to pull me away further because I didn’t notice I was standing in the smoky whirlwind, my nose was swollen and my eyes were rejecting vision altogether, I’d like to say that they were burrowing into my skull, but I got no keen introspection to back that up, I was just a smoked turkey with morbid sweats and blood under my nails. Joseph said I should probably slam my fingernails in the car door a few times so that they’d drop off, so I could eliminate the blood under them that has accumulated. I declined and rested my fingertips in a mixture of peroxide and iodine, and for every shot of Bowman’s vodka I take, another shot goes into the mix, just to help polish off the agony of another.
Now the cackle of the fire and the silhouette of the bodies Joseph describes taunt my ears as the soundtrack of White Zombie renders my imagination unstoppable, with my eyes sealed shut, I feel my ears are wide open, and even though I don’t hear any sirens, I feel like we should extinguish the fire, bag the ashes and empty it into the cloudy marsh of rainwater and sewage that are less than a block away from our scorched home. He says the bones, especially the heart(s) needs more time to break down, chemically, in the fire, and to be patient, in the mean time, he opens a beer for me and himself, lowering the paranoia level with his choice of playing “HANG ON TO YOUR EGO” by the Beach Boys.
I say, “they ran with ole’ Charlie Manson, The beach boys did…”
“Fuck, Aint that a coincidence, you want some more White Zombie, then?”
“No, this is cool.” I blindly state.
My knuckles are swollen and bruised; I hold the beer bottle to them more than I am nursing from it. Life is certainly funny; after White Zombie and the Beach Boys came a lonely ballad of Dan Reeder singing Damn, You should’ve wrote a Book in A cappella, it was slow and soothing, as my nerves released their grip, my eyelids felt soothed, I slumped down in the frozen chair in front of the blazing fire, I didn’t know what part of me need to be warmed, revitalized or what part of me needed to get under the nurturing influence of deterred cold denial and the ruthless drink. So my body relaxed and my frown eased itself into a flattened smile, I sighed and spit blood into the fire and put my broken canine tooth into an empty bottle and hid it in the trash. I figured having a broken smile was far better than a full fledged frown and anyone who is willing to accept that smile will be a veteran of spiritual warfare, a castaway of someone else’s dreams.
Their lives and souls are far too fragile and cryptic to judge, because everyone knows he who is riddled with sin he can not judge anyone more than he already judges himself. Sinners we are, and as Sinners we stick together, the tightest band of honest thieves you will ever meet, the reformed spiritual gangsters we are, we will never achieve perfection and we know that, we mope in reality and succeed in tragedy, trouble is our neighbor and sorrow is our friend, and we cant help but to be the red cross of those that trespass against us. Weep not for us brothers; our sins are there to help guide you through your own.