Fifteen

As I look upon what used to be Soupy Sales Fountain and was now a hideous metallic sculpture, I find myself musing about my time in the mediocre town of Huntington, WV, and those items that so affected my brief time here; my iPod, my Roomba, and, of course, my Wii.

The technology severed my connections with the real world, and when I at last returned to that world, I found it profoundly changed. 10 years makes a big difference. When we are away from a place for so long we tend to cement it in our memories; we freeze it in Kodachrome. How ego-centered we are that we believe the world, devoid of our influence, does not change.

When I killed that man just for snoring, I guess in a way I knew it was wrong. But he had it coming. The Law wouldn’t find me, not here. I looked too different, my identity was carefully crafted, and let’s face it: people in West Virginia weren’t the sharpest bulbs in the box. I moved among them like the proverbial fox in the hen house. My only problem was getting used to the goddam accent. It curdled my stomach.

I would lay low, planning my next move as carefully as an architect designing a cathedral. My next kill would be a work of art. Not one of these cow-faced nobodies. They would never appreciate the beauty of what I do. No, it would have to be someone special.

But who?

Fourteen

I was finally in a land of unicorns; a land of yellow horizons. Angels lovely as one could imagine at last looked down upon me and smiled, while dragons thorny and crusted as old barbed wire drew angry circles in the sky, waiting for tacit permission to swoop and burn.

Gone were the cubicles, the blue fluorescent bulbs humming their torturous 60-cycle tune, the insipid Nothing on the other end of the tumorous Blackberry, the smell of mold and chemicals blotting all else out. I may be nothing more than a meat packet, an organic support system for a brain now infected with lesions of wire and crystalline circuitry, but I was free. I was free.

Adelynn may never know what became of me. I hope she doesn’t.