Topic: Stanza

Gamble · Date: 2014-05-07 06:08 EST

(Final Segment of What Resolution Prevails )

The room was spinning. It spun for Anya, whirled with impossibility. In the moving darkness there were the inexplicable defiances to her surreality inshape of real man voices. Her surface mind recognized none but her deepself knew the two well. The young, hopping, excited voice against the straightline and violent other. One white, one black. Maybe gray, the first, but the second was allconsuming negligence. The words loitered and feuded in a frame complimentary to their familiarity. She heard a door whine and the shuttering, tangible metallic gliding awoke her suddenly then. Memory fell back on her but without solidarity, memories unconfirmed and seated lazily in her mind with the fragility of soaked, indiscriminate and ink-run parchment. She remembered the face of Clyde: tight and worried, alert by a profound personal constitution of worry, forged by the governing severity of his wolfish colleague, and she understood this in flash somehow, as she was maybe governed by Gamble's voice as well as her unconscious mind had accepted it while she was dazed in the backseat of the car. It was pleasant, she remembered, Clyde's face: she remembered the person she'd seen below the worried flesh: uneasy, cold and an abused emptiness exclusive to the unwanted, unsheltered and impoverished.

Anya opened her eyes and the spinning slowed as her weakly conscious mind put brakes to the whirling world her eyes struggled to render. Stoppage of the fast world went unnoticed as arrays of sharp, crackling distortions popped and pranced all over her innereyes as if she'd looked directly into a box of suns. Fluid normality did not return to her, only the surface reporting of an injured sensorium. It was a room, she knew. It was dark, she knew. It smelled of oil and mold and decayed metal, she knew; any factors beyond were as diminished as her ability to desire them. Like an infant her eyes turned, and with as much cognition; it was lucid in a way that hadn't yet discovered how to terrify her.

Her eyelids came down softly because her mind was bloated and suddenly exhausted. The loose muscles in her face liquified to rest, her head turned over to sleep and a hair of blood descended slowly from her right nostril.

Gamble · Date: 2014-05-07 06:10 EST

Craig Ames had been standing above her. He'd waited for Clyde and Gamble to exit before meandering out, hunched like an ancient, backpacked nomad. Craig was a large man, tall and portly, but solid of arm and chin; he could be secondhanded as ?fat' to those in conversation over him, but his arms were thick and supportively musclesound. But despite his physical prominence and domain over residence, Craig had waited diffidently for his raucous boarders to take their words outdoors before reappearing from his hot little corner room in back.

Craig's shy, untrained and overt mind was constantly hounded by an ubiquitousness drilled into him by forces of universal judgement, or so he thought, secretly and nervously in the hot, whirling dark at times. These thoughts pulverized him with the swiftness, with the unreal and inescapable ominousness of the gavel that had assigned him literal finalization and a lifetime association to aggravated sexual filth (that which he deserved and understood completely). Gamble knew, an old friend and nuisance, about Craig's hiccup and the thereafter jailtime—-and Craig knew that Gamble knew that that which a man was willing to suspend his freedom for, was that which he risk and malform his constitution for again.

Craig crouched by the girl and rested his hands on the edge of the cot, but away from Anya's body (his head was down as if he would pray). The blood caught his black and greasy eyes and took him to a precipice of concern. It was understated naturally: Anya Krist was nameless to Craig Ames, just as the world at large was but a buzzing tempest of the judgemental and the supreme and willing donors of patchwork and perfectly personal pontification. He could not literally define a what or when or just how, but she'd been there in the centrifuge of the buzz, calling on him, jurying him like all the rest. It was not revenge he sought, not on anything exterior; he fought only with himself and the urges that hiked to fight them. He waged war on the cells that waged war on his most blackest reaches. He'd already been shelved afterall, already been lowered like the badstock he was, in the courtroom pan and simmered on the block. And his big guilt and the literal transcription of it flowed from him in the court, he remembered, like running grease from the melting buttersquare.

Gamble · Date: 2014-05-07 06:13 EST

But he didn't care for the name of Anya or any existential definer outside the physical cage of her young, supple body. It was his to take, Gamble told him. We just need the men with the money to know she's gone, Gamble had said. We just needed the wreck, the dead boyfriend and the clean escape—-there ain't no black sedans outside your Garage, Craig, so I'll say we've done the dirtiest and done it well. You know how these things always are, Gamble had told him (Craig remembered Gamble's long, wolfish grin then, that was so clean and balanced it made Craig squint). Well, you know, Gamble had continued. They never get the girl back, Craig—-we already have them in a spot of faltering; someone will be barking in her daddy's ear now, "Don't!—-Don't pay them," they'll say. They'll say it but Mr. Krist will slam his fist and tell them they don't know what it's like. Even though everyone knows the girl never comes back, they always recall the decency of themselves; foolishly they lay down shoes in their own size with our dark faces filling them, our heads lowered sullenly, chastened by the retribution of a morality they'd invented for us. Isn't it all a f'cked up game" Gambled asked finally. He slapped the man on the shoulder then rolled his smile towards the room where the girl was. Just give us some time, he'd said. Clyde and I—-I, rather—-are going to get this sh't in gear and you won't hear nothing of it in just a few hours. There's more to it all than meets the eye, Craig—-it's a whole lot neater, a whole lot more. . . constructed than you can see. Alright"

Gamble · Date: 2014-05-18 07:16 EST

A gunshot rang aloud outside and rattled the thin aluminum roof like a bit of thunder. Craig, who was crouching, still in emptyminded penance above Anya, pushed himself up slowly and looked into the darkness where he knew the door to be. Gamble was an old annoyance, a man he'd known in the past as a darkeyed and terrifyingly sharpminded kid, but Craig knew virtually nothing about him, aside from his desire for the filthiest jobs and the big, old, ridiculous revolver he wore under his jacket. He'd witnessed him fire it only once five years ago at a signpost outside the city. Craig remembered the way the round split through the sign with ease, remembered that it bore only a slight little hole, but this tiny oval lasted only an instant before the virtues of the old, heavy caliber were instructed through impactful tutoring: the entire sign seemed to disintegrate in way that reminded him of old stock footage of houses being beaten by the sudden, lagging pulses of a hydrogen bomb.

The beast and his prize were in jeopardy. Gunshots were not terribly uncommon in this wracked, fetid puzzle piece corner of town, but the law was adamant and progressive and quick striking, even in these depths. Someone somewhere would call on them and soon; Craig became frantic. His prize was now an old prison ball manacled to his ankle; Gamble would not come to gather her and the other boy, the antsy one in the leather jacket, was most likely the recipient of the bullet, Craig thought. The warbling mass of a man sprinted into his backroom cabin and collected keys and a nine-millimeter pistol. Exiting through the front door, he sprinted to the shoddy white van parked on the curb, tipped his mass into the console and snapped the vehicle to a prosperous drone. He snuck back in, made a second visit to his room for a roll of old, moisturestruck duct tape, warbled over to Anya and twisted her ankles and wrists up in it, perioded it with a strip over her mouth. Before the escape he worked his blackball eyes around the seeable cityblock. Satiated (if only by the scratchings of haste) Craig retrieved his wrapped little prize and placed her in the wedging between the frontseat and the backseat bench, right on the floor to keep her from view. When he plopped into the driver's seat, the big, shoddy old van slouched.

Gamble · Date: 2014-05-18 07:19 EST

There wasn't a second to think on defense, but, in the sacred millenia awarded to life's evicted tenants, as Clyde's body was warning him he was to become, he found time to think about Lilly. It was a good thing, a good face, a good final thing. A very good and simple final thing. The hammer behind the fastidious cylinder fell a bit, lowered like a pointing finger towards the pin in the cylinder. Clyde's body had already forfeited but his had continued to draw on the pistol in his hip like the way a corpse convulses with firing-off nerve and electrified muscle. But the hammer behind Gamble's revolver was motioning, cruising like a mace through molasses. Lilly was there, between the hammer and cylinder and pin, between Clyde's body and the muzzle of Gamble's revolver. She didn't look happy, like she often didn't. She was a pretty girl on the bubble of perfection, shyly standing aside the pristine nucleus of contemporary and refined beauty, but she was better than that anyway. She didn't have the lines in her face that Gamble and Clyde wore, didn't have them because she didn't stand between the muzzle and the beyond. Gamble would say she'd never have the lines. Said that wearing the lines was badge or something overtly mystic and pretentious like that. Gamble was like that: flatly round. Clyde didn't think she'd ever wear the lines either, but it was because she was strong. Romanticism promotes the bullet and blood and the shadow and corpse, and romanticism then surveys the fleet of faces left scrambling when the romantic ones go to waste for the finales or what-mays. She could only be romantic if Clyde and Gamble never returned, but Clyde thought she was romantic all the time. When the men returned she could no longer be romantic because the finale was postponed, but Clyde didn't think so. Her finales were infinite.

The big, old revolver spoke and spat a round at Clyde's collar. Mincing the fabric first, then the flesh, the snappy lead drove into his clavicle and made powder of it, rumbled, changed course, but only minutely, inside his body, and finally punched out a circle of flesh and a knot of leather as it exited his back. And it continued on and ended up yards away in the grasses far beyond the chainlink that caged Craig's yard, and it dragged Clyde right down to the ground as if it had been on wire and had knotted up his bones, and when it went zooming into the far-beyond grasses it had power like the fisherman over the hooked trout.