Topic: What Resolution Prevails

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 02:34 EST
( Mature content warning; L—Language MV—-Mild Violence. Any probs, lemme' know. )







"That jacket is ridiculous."

Clyde grinned cunningly and hoisted his beleathered shoulders. "Couldn't resist it," he said, kicking himself off the wall. The long, ashy ember of his cigarette roiled relentlessly as he drew; like orange hairs; crawling, cutting and the wan tangerine warmed his nose, the bases framing his mouth, feet of cheek and the exhausted looking jars of layered brown flesh that hung heftily from either eye. Clyde bent over and examined the street. "We're gonna" sit here forever ain't we?" he said. "Just "cause you can't stand to ever be wrong." His partner smiled and lent him a pair of pale green eyes: emerald with a pasty opal glaze.

"Could be. Why not sit down and be quiet like a good boy."

"Why not suck my dick, Gamble?"

"I left my glasses at home."

Clyde laughed and turned his head from side-to-side. He touched the cigarette to his mouth a final time, hoisted his chin to blow the smoke away then snapped the butt into the street. An empty breeze fell down and touched his hair, excited the tips and threw them into his eyes. He squinted through them, still examining the street. Gamble stood, grinning, his hands pocketed in crisp gray slacks. He was older than Clyde; twenty-three to his eighteen; tall, pale faced with a profound blankness stayed on him: hubris. His hair was black and wispy like Clyde's, swinging fro with the air. He removed his left hand and eyed his wrist watch, calmly rescinded it to pocket again and grinned.

Inner city in September: gray and dry. The ashen sky thumbed the buildingtips, descended, jetted through the glass and steel, descended and bowled through the rigid tarmac streets as a titanic silver spirit, these swells a chilly and biting presage to winter. The avenue's lamps glowed dully in the pervading cloud, the yellow sphericals stepping down block-by-block until the immurement of fog swallowed them. Cars droned by with lassitude, buzzing their struggle, whirling around the blocks, through the lanes, appearing as grand complex diorama as if needles from axel pierced preset tracks, carrying them to pointless objectives.

"There." Gamble hopped up and directed his arm. "That's it. I told you, boy. C"mon." Gamble pressed out his pinstriped oxford and threw his keys at Clyde. The keyring rattled when it hit Clyde's chest. They rolled down his body until he brought his hands up to catch them and he squinted at them. "Since when do I get to drive the almighty Nova?"

Gamble smiled heartily. "Since never," he said, snatching back the keys with a wink. Clyde, frozen, stared at the empty palms that had cupped the keys.

Nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-nine Nova. Sloped and mighty with a black varnish finish; "SS" welded into the grill, and save a few knicks scored below the passenger door and wheelwell, the vehicle was pristine. Gamble threw his arms over the hood luxuriously and smiled at Clyde. He said, "Lemme" ask you something. And I'm being serious."

Clyde canted his head and grunted curiously.

"Am I crazy?"

The wind sped by, Clyde corralled his cracking hair. He chuckled uneasily and tossed his eyes down the street. "The hell you talkin" "bout," he said. Eyes return. "Of course you're crazy. You're nuts. You're about to drive your beloved Nova to a damn job. That's been botherin" me all damn day."

"That's it?" Gamble asked with a tall brow. "That's why I'm crazy' It's just a car. Once this is over I'll be able to buy a hundred Novas." Gamble stepped away to examine the pristinely aged muscle car. He crouches and slides the pad of his forefinger across the foot of the driver's door. As it squeaks his smile waxes. Gamble hops up and pulls his head back so that his eyes appear as crisp emerald threads aside his hoisted nose. "I don't think that makes me crazy, and either do you. So answer me."

Clyde's hand was on the doorlatch. "C"mon, let's just go. I'm gettin" twisted up. Yeah—you're crazy, okay?" Gamble lessened the tilt of his head. Clyde was stilled when the man's opalesque eyes cut into his. A nod from Gamble ceases the binding and he bends into the car. Clyde follows and Gamble turns the Nova over and it grumbles scathingly before firing into a crumbling, exploding roar: felt, heard and seen. Gamble smiles and pats the wheel. He says, "It wasn't even what I wanted. You know that' I didn't want a goddamned Nova."

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 03:01 EST
Clyde chortled and pulled the buckle across. He cut his arm at the elbow, stuck the elbow into the door and sat his cheek onto his fist. "Just go," he said. "This one's pretty f"ckin" nice, though, so stop complaining. Can't say classic cars are really my thing, though. Seem like alotta" work, really. Every fuckin" night you're workin" on this bitch." Gamble pops the car into gear and winds into the avenue. "Classic cars represent more than the sum of their parts, boy-o," Gamble said. "It's not even tradition, or style, or any of that dimestore shit. It's just a way of thinking. It's a "my car will fuck you up" kinda" thing. Intimidation. Sure: go "en get yourself some Italian sports car. Will she beat me in a race" Yeah, sure. But if you wanna" get personal—if you wanna" wager her in a vehicular boxing match, my car will make a million fiberglass splinters outta" your wop piece of sh"t." Gamble smiles and waves his eyes, shrinking, growing, at Clyde.

"I don't know what the hell yer" talkin" "bout," Clyde said. He made an attempt for the radio dial, but Gamble snatched his finger up, constricted it in his fist.

"I'm talking about exceeding the sum of your parts, Clyde," Gamble said. He threw Clyde's finger away and Clyde squinted back at him. "This car was not designed to outrun a modern supercar because at conception, this was a modern fucking supercar. But time dilutes the sum, boy-o. And now it's not so modern, not so super. Now it's something for the eyes. It's a rolling f"cking Monet; breaking no more ground, but an aesthetic wonder. At the bit, Clyde, this piece of sh"t will tear through a fuckin" wall. And there's the bare bones of my point."

"So the point of your story," Clyde said. "is that your Nova is better than a Lambo, because a Lambo can't plow through a brick wall. Gotcha"." Gamble detuned, strictly governing over the road. The hoarsely braying Nova glided between lanes, around motorized kin made meek in its presence.

"My piece in the back?" Gamble asked. Clyde didn't move.

" "The hell I know?" Clyde said. "If that's where you left it, then yes."

"Look."

Clyde turns. "Yep," he chirped cynically. "Right where you left it. Weird."

"Enough. Just shut your mouth."

Clyde turned in his seat slowly.

"I'm serious, Clyde, just shut up." Gamble grins at the road. He forks the throttle and the Nova hollars through the traffic rows. Clyde's head whipped at the window when the car jerked between lanes.

"F"ck man," Clyde weeps, rolling large yellow eyes around the cabin. "The hell—where are we goin?""

Gamble indicates a white car, with his chin, stopped at the light ahead. The Nova slowed to a roll and crept up. "There she is, boy," Gamble said, smiling brilliantly. "El Dorado. We may get our chance to make a stake, ya" know?" He wheels his bucked grin at the white target vehicle. "This goes beyond everything prior."

"Yeah?" Clyde asked, balancing himself in the seat. His eyes draw on Gamble virginally, puzzled. Gamble leered over the dash and locked onto the white coupe seated at the light. "Well?" Clyde said. "I'm lost over here. That's why you're all excited" A Mercedes" We gonna" flip it or somethin??" Gamble angled his mouth and it fell off the table, crooked and indecisive. The Nova croaked and rumbled. Clyde was inching over the cabin towards Gamble, stretching the belt until the slack gave and jerked him back. He squinted and chirped, "Gamble-Gamble." But Gamble was resiliently silent and his overflowing face showed a grand anticipation. His fingers splayed around the wheel excitedly, the other hand clenching the throttleknob, knuckles pale. "Be ready," Gamble said. "You loaded?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so." Clyde spun awkwardly in the seat and procured the pistol he had jammed in his belt. It was an old and scored forty-five automatic, the varnish eradicated to matte iron that zeroed around the insipid walnut grip. Clyde eased the eject switch and the magazine slid out with a hollow metallic rushing. He nods. "I'm good. You?"

"Check for me, please." Clyde turns around quickly and snags a bulky brown leather pistol belt from the tight backseat. The handle that arced from the holstermouth was antiquated rosewood. Clyde withdrew the weapon and examined it, carefully squinting. Colt Single Action Army: nickel and rosewood, polished and perfect without evident wearing. Clyde, alienated from the archaic mechanisms, turned it over and over and over in his hand, searching for some way to eject the cylinder. Gamble, lent over the wheel, wired his eyes to the boy and his dilemma. He snatches the weapon from Clyde's fingers but does not examine it, merely throws it up lightly, lets it fall down on his palm, throws it back up, repeats again as this was a weight-test.

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 03:14 EST
"It needs two rounds. There, in the belt. Yep. Here." Gamble hands the revolver over, thumbs the sloped ejector and the cylinder is freed. Clyde accepted the gun with dazzled eyes and an incomplete understanding. He would evacuate curiousness, turn the gun in his hand and press two glistening copper bullets into their respective slots. "Done." Gamble dropped the thundering Nova into gear and Clyde's head whacked the chair. He groaned, displeasure wedded with shock, adulted to bricky throbbing pain. The Nova only groaned now, casually a car behind its white target, the sleek panther concealed in African grass, though of steel and axle and rubber, drawn to its prey unobtrusively, gritting his maw of twisting belts and chrome heads while the lame prey putters, still and doomed. The light switches to green and the white car jets forward. Gamble pilots the Nova around the intermediate vehicle, seats it inside the row and rides the bumper of its prey: low to the ground, expensive and German. "CLK." Clyde flashed a smile that Gamble, enthralled with the tail procedure, ignored. "C"mon, man. Seriously," Clyde complained. "Tell me what?s goin" on here. Who's drivin" that car?"

"Anya Krist."

"Anya Krist. O.K. And who the f"ck is Anya Krist?"

Ineffably, Gamble squinted one eye down, popped one out, queerly examining Clyde. "You serious" "Krist". You don't know the name?" Clyde examined the sleek little car in an attempt to pick clues off its glimmering pearl exterior. His ignorance, blaring like a siren, waxes and waxes, eyes narrowing, narrowing and they were simple tawny strings. Gamble slamed his hands against the steering wheel. "Really, Clyde!" the voice pinging around the cabin as if physically manifested, like you could see it stuck in the upholstery as a stain. "Eric Krist is a senator. Husband to Marie Krist, father to Eric Jr., Brandon and Anya Krist."

Staring back emptily, Clyde's mouth fell apart, a poignant tell. "Jesus, Gamble," he said. "How did you even. . . why would we?" He climbed up in his chair and jutted his neck out to grab Gamble's eyes. "We'll get life for this shit, Gamble. We can't man. You can't be serious."

"I'm very serious, Clyde. Don't be so gloomy." Grinning with mirth, Gamble acknowledges Clyde's pervading face and shakes his head at the window, indicating the car. "Don't try an' turn me away. This is happening. We're already on the tracks. What resolution prevails is of no consequence to me. I have set in motion an act, a movement that is, in its current state, larger than I. If my life is the wager, Clyde, then immortality is the pay out. What a glorious machine."

The white car signals and turns right. Gamble noses into the intersection and pauses, giving slack between his vehicle and the target and the traffic behind the Nova grumbled horn, with charismatic lights and jostling jockeys. The Nova creeps to the right and Anya's car was a white oval at the end of the block. Gamble hooked the throttle, weighted the accelerator and the Nova leapt forward and Clyde melted into his chair. The engine croaked heavily and the vehicle ate up tarmac gluttonously, and the little German automobile grew and grew and Gamble tossed up the choke and the car slowed. His mouth slanted uneasily. Anya turned again and the Nova followed without modesty now. Anya's sporty car slowed nervously, indecisively and the Nova growled at it. Gamble grinned at the windshield. "Alright," Gamble said. "we rattled her; she's drivin" around in circles now. There, the stop sign. When she stops we'll do it. Gimme" my gun." Gamble takes it and lays the long holster across his lap. "Alright." Then again, silently. "Alright."

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 03:26 EST
Anya pulled up her sunglasses, turned and looked uneasily at the boy sitting in her passenger seat. "What should I do?" She said, partitioning her attention between the boy and the growling old car on her bumper.

The boy was thumbing through his phone without interest. He pulled down the shade and squinted at himself in the rectangular mirror there. "Stop being paranoid. If you're seriously this rattled, just pull over and call the cops or something." The boy twisted all the way around, clawed the shoulder of the seat and stared at the Nova. "Hmm. Yeah, I don't know, Ann. Just pull over, I'll call." The girl turned to the boy frantically, her eyes large and her mouth apart.

"Where" Are you sure?" She said.

The boy said, "Anywhere," and Anya immediately jerked the wheel. The slick coupe wound and writhed, nimbly siding to the curb just ahead of the stop sign. Her boy smiled supportively and began to slide through the menus in his phone. "Just calm—-"

The Nova hit at thirty-five. A paltry speed aside its maximum, but to the vehicle ceased on the curb it was a crushing blow. The wide chrome fender cut into the thin fiberglass of Anya's vehicle, immediately forked it and kept slicing straight though. The Nova finally stopped and at the feet of its grumbling wheels sat thousands of bits of the the white body, glass shards and various other metallic particles. Anya's car was completely horizontal, it's front wheels on the curb, twisted brokenly, its motor hopping and choking, white smoke sneaking out of the seams of the hood and the threads of the grill like wispy spirits. The Nova growled uncomfortably for a moment, the engine ticking and banging and kicking diseasedly before dying completely.

Gamble stepped out of the car, slammed the door and stumbled along the bumper. Clyde was groaning. His head fell over limply, his bottom lip bloodied, and he moaned, half-conscious, like from insipid sleep. He coughed and awoke some, coughed again and then Gamble was drumming on the window with his knuckles. "Out. Get out," Gamble mouthed. Clyde fumbled with the seatbelt latch and began this panicky thrashing, as if the cabin were chewing him alive. Finally grasping the perhaps too-simple procedure, Clyde burst out of the car and landed on his knees and elbows.

Gamble knelt beside Clyde and dusted off the boy's shoulder. "Oh, look," he said. "got all kinds of soot and shit in the leather." Gamble looked on crookedly and tried to snag the little fragments out of the material. Clyde swung at Gamble's hand and forced it away.

"What was that?" Clyde complained. "Really' The fuck, man." He fell down to the straights of his arms, his aft lifted, and continued to draw breath heavily. Gamble didn't wait around. He stood, very lightly shrugged then turned to Anya's battered vehicle; stepping over large sickles of peeled off fiberglass, over little knives of glass, over washers and shucked metal shards. He crouched and squinted into the interior of the Mercedes. The boy was moving; Anya was not.

"Oh," Gamble said. "a friend." Grinning, he tore open the driver's side door. He leaned over the unconscious Anya and unfastened her belt; her boy was writhing and groaning. "What a date, huh?" Gamble jabbed the boy's cheek; he moaned and squirmed but found not epiphany. "Oh, he's a rot. He's a rot, Anya!" Gamble scowled at the girl and puckered her face by pushing her cheeks together. "One day," Gamble said, his voice strained from activity, pulling her free of the belt. "you'll look back and thank me. Having a woman as a trophy is an accepted condition of wealth; a competent man's final brick. But you're young, little Anya—-why careen around the streets with a purple-shirted, spiky haired rot in your passenger seat?" Gamble folds the girl up like a package: arms tucked into her belly, her knees turned in, meeting the arms. Gamble scoops her clean out with care.

Clyde stood up, moaned again, leaned and spit a file of blood onto the tarmac. The sun was needling the grim little rowhouses that framed the street, sinking on their shabby slopes and then divided, punctured as if a balloon and its entrails and ropes of fire came curling onto the street, onto Clyde's face where he was now squinting. His vision was blurred and his belly was churning like a ribbon through a wheel; tightening, tightening. We're too far away, he thought. We're too far away from home, and the f"cking car is busted. "Gamble," Clyde spat. "what the f"ck are we gonna" do with that girl" I can't believe you're serious about this shit, man. This is f"ckin" nuts."

Gamble trucked right by Clyde with Anya balanced perfectly in his arms. He stands near the driver's side door and hoist his chin. "Here," he said, his chin jouncing and writhing. "Open the door, please, Clyde." Clyde snapped for the bow of the defeated Nova, squared his hips, facing the windshield, then slammed the elbows of his fists against the hood. "Gamble!" Clyde cried, crazed. The boy's face was ripe and wounded, a hot and florid ruination much like the discarded youth that glows from charred earth usurped by the blood of battle. "Please tell me you've got a plan here, man! Please, this is nuts." Clyde looks up the street, looks down, then back to Gamble emphatically. "Please. Please tell me you—-?

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 03:28 EST
"The plan is," Gamble said, closing his face. "you open the f"cking door, Clyde."

Clyde vociferated under his breath, his head twisting like a knob, left-right-left, cussing and spitting as he yanked the door ajar. The door was corked in the jamb slightly, a resultant twisting of the crash, and Clyde struggled to get it wide enough. The hinges cracked and hollered; the sound: a sonorous bubbling of warped bearings tugged loosely at the bit, growling and snapping, the entire door jolting with it, popping on the hinge. "Get "er in, damnit." Clyde sighed, ran a palm across his hair and sprinted to the passenger door. "This thing better start."

Gamble leaned on his knees, bent in and pulled the bucket seat up by the latch; its back breaks and affords Gamble space to set her in the tiny cushion in the aft of the Nova. After laying her, Gamble pops his head over the roof and smiles. "Don't be ordering The Nova "round," he said. He rapped his fingers upon the roof like fat raindrops, thundering the sheets. "She'll start if she wants. If she don't wanna, she won't. So why yell?"

"Gamble. Please," Clyde said. "Please, please, please get in the car and get it started."

Gamble tossed his head away, leaning it off his neck a bit and appeared to contemplate Clyde's request. He says, "Alright," through a smile and bends into the seat. Clyde dives in quickly after him and immediately turns over to stare at Anya. Young girl, Clyde thought. Pretty. Daddy'll pay. Then Daddy'll have us put down. Gamble forked the key and the Nova kind of sunk to the left, grumbled, popped back up then sunk again. "F"ck!" Clyde cried. He began smashing the dashbord with his palms.

Gamble leered at Clyde and his fingers dripped off the wheel. "Are you being serious right now?" Gamble said. "Really' You're beating up on my car?" Clyde pushed back so that the scant lining of the seat absorbed him, his head twisting around, a magnificent cut of frustration and the friction of the fear that sanded it. Gamble grinned and jumped out of the car. Before exiting the console, he pulled on the hood-ejection lever and it cracked brokenly. Gamble sauntered over, fingered the ribbing and jerked the hood open and a fat clod of hot, gray smoke jumped at him. He waved it off, coughing through a smile, and after it cleared, bent to examine the great engine block. "Clyde. Get into the driver's seat. Count to ninety, then turn "er over and stick a little throttle in."

Clyde sighed and struggled over the center console that divided the driver and passenger seats. Count to ninety, Clyde thought. What a strange and specific f"ckin? order. Clyde listened to Gamble's work, or to his lack of work. He heard nothing save the crisp steam running and a once-and-again knocking. Clyde squinted through a sliver that ran below the hood and atop the block: a moment ago, Gamble's struggling shadow was seen; now nothing but an orange shape of evening sun.

Clyde

Date: 2013-08-21 03:40 EST
Just after Clyde turned the key (and following a minute smirk because the engine limped to a groan), he jerked his head out of the cabin and hollered for Gamble. Hollering, reddening, stepping free of the console, Clyde crept to the bow of the car, to the exposed, moaning engine block, and squinted. Nothing; no one. He brims his eyes with his palm and leans into a strong look at Anya's car where there was great movement. From the horizon of the Mercedes" roof, Clyde picked out the slithery ends of Gamble's hair: it was moving, dipping and appearing over and over.

Clyde fastened his left hand to his throbbing thigh and began hobbling to the white car. Squinting, the jouncing of Gamble's hair diminished, Clyde pinned the side of his hand to his forehead, swatted fangs of hair away, then peered from the cover of the brim again. A sharp pain sounds from the other side of the car, where he had seen Gamble. It was a wounded howl, cresting, plummeting with vital terror. Clyde squints harder, seeing movement through the driverside window. Arriving, the gait mild with practice, Clyde throws his hands against the trunk of Anya's car and peers in. He peckers around, his neck ribbing and leaping off the joint excitedly, saying "Gamble." Clyde limped to the right end of the of the trunk and saw him pulling the croaking young boy out of the car. He hollared again, "Gamble—-Gamble!", woundedly cocking his head, glowering, firing spines into Gamble. The boy was on the street, eighteen, nineteen maybe, his face thick with fear and dissociation, something likening the power of birth laid instantaneously upon a fully cognitive mind, accepting the blade of life. Gamble was over him, Clyde could see, his hands sunk into his pockets, looming. " You gonna" answer me, boy-o," Gamble said. "Or are you just gonna" cry and squirm and whistle out of your shattered f'cking nose." The boy tried to push himself up, like a backwards push-up, to a seated position. Gamble popped him in the shoulder with a little kick and sent him back hard, although he had not made much progress anyway. When the back of his head bounced off the tarmac he cringed, writhed weakly and started bellering, thin tearbolts cracking down his face. "This is shameful," Gamble said. Placing the toe of his boot into the plate of the boy's shoulder, he pushed down and the boy cried out with a red, sweat-filled face. "C"mon. This is what pampering bought you? Look at you. An entire life of f"cking cute little tramps and hanging off your daddy's nuts, and you never even took the time to toughen up" Well what did it getcha?" Gotcha" a separated shoulder and a broken f"cking face."

Clyde was inching around the frontend when Gamble caught him. "Back to the car," Gamble said to him and Clyde froze, eyes wide. Gamble reverted to the downed boy. Wriggling the toe of his boot in his shoulder, the boy howled again.

"Gamble!" Clyde howled. His squint had abandoned qualities of reconnaissance; now it was an unpleased scowl, hot and piercing. "Come the hell on!" Gamble adjusted the hem of his shirt, pulled his lips to the side of his mouth and tipped back to examine the sky; the greyness had fallen closer like a blanket settling over the sheets. He gripped his chin and appeared to gnaw. "Have it your way," he said. Stepping over the boy, Gamble hoisted his eyebrows and smirked at Clyde on his approach. Clyde, still hunched over the hood, let some of the fury go from his face. When Clyde nods Gamble freezes like he had stepped out of time, like whatever spark that promotes movement of joint had leapt from the sleeves of flesh and bone. The spark returns and Gamble's pallid green eyes dart back, and as if the momentum of these eyes coerced it with inertia, his entire head reverts to the boy (again pushing himself up by the points of his elbows).

Curled in the rear of the Nova, Anya stirred when a bolting sound crushed the soundlessness of a the desolate city block. Her mouth separated like an opening treasure, for the dried blood that crusted over her lips likened a rusted latch. Next Clyde came rushing to the car, his knee crashing into the door while he struggled hurriedly, a fervor to pop it out of the jamb. Clicking, the separation of latch from its obviously pinched or broken housing, the passenger side swings open and Clyde collapses into the bucket. Glimpses of consciousness came to her like weak light through fast cloud: unpowered, wan and inconsistent. She groaned when Gamble entered, her eyelids scudding apart, waterlogged and wild eyes cruising around the stuffy cabin at high speed noncognitively. Snippits arrived, but she was not committing. The younger voice was wild with vociferation, accusing, rocking, the entire vehicle seemed to jounce with his crazed cries. She shifted a bit and heard the calmness of reply, dark and derisive, spitting his defense with rhythm but without much power or care on his words. Stacy groaned when the car jerked to a stop. A pocket of words were committed on the way; the priorities being "boy, why, dead, shoot (shot) and f"ck?.

Clyde

Date: 2013-10-20 00:48 EST
( Part 2. Again, if the language or content is deemed excessive, I'll understand if it's removed. Thanks!)



At half-past six, the tocking Nova curled into an alleyway striped with sharp, boxy shadows thrown off the faces of sharp, boxy tenements. The vehicle drones under the stripes, and with passage into the sun-band intercises, large belts of smoke become illuminated. The car was ticking sharply now and Clyde, curled into the passenger door, his face cruel and receded, could see the effort Gamble employed with every jerk of the wheel. "She's gonna" stall," Clyde said. "Then what? Just gonna" sit here, stoic like you are" Proud—accepting your loss" No. No: you won't. You'll run away." A smirk slid onto Gamble's face. He leaned completely over the wheel and smacked the car into a rough braking procedure and both mens" heads shot forward when it collapsed to a standstill. "If that's whatcha" think, we'll just say she stalled, yeah' Pass me a cigarette." Clyde did not move. Scrunching his face sourly, the boy did what he could to dissect Gamble. He realized nothing, lost, maybe, in the detriment of his own understanding, to the involution Gamble seemed to permeate, to the fear manacled to his constitution, dragging it down like a concrete sneaker. Reaching for the cigarettes slowly, Clyde said "O.K." then handed the cigarette over. "Just go, man." Gamble pressed in the car's lighter, twisted the keys and managed to get the Nova started on his first attempt. After the lighter popped, Gamble tugged it out and lit the cigarette. "I'm confused, Clyde." A blurb of fresh, light smoke trickled out of Gamble's nose and mouth atop a languid tray of sigh." "Eh' Lilly, ain't it' She tryin" to 'domesticate" you again, boy-o?" "Don't," Clyde said. "now's not the time. I'll be calm, O.K." Please just—-" He flings his chin at the windshield. "—-just go, O.K?"

"Alrighty," Gamble said around the cigarette stuffed in his mouth.

Clyde

Date: 2013-10-20 01:09 EST
After navigating the secret alleyways with the cackling Nova, Gamble finally dared to jerk the car into traffic. He appeared uneasy briefly. He knocked on Clyde's shoulder and requested another cigarette. Once in traffic the car ticked louder. Gamble tested the gas and smoke gusted from the grill. It bowled over the windshield and both men vociferated in whisper. "Get it off, get it off," Clyde ordered, gripping the dash. Gamble yanked the cigarette out of his mouth and scanned the street. "Alright," Gamble said. "I have an idea." Following several erratic lane changes amidst a throng of protuberant cawing horns and flashing lights, the querulous vehicle snapped leftward and slipped into another skinny alleyway. It was dim and crowded. A collective of happily desperate children; skinny and placid; were stuffed into the throat-like road. At once, seized by the smoldering old car, they ceased action and stood geniously still with wide eyes glowing in their brown, poor bodies. One tall boy was holding a stick, another was bent over, retrieving a ball, and the community behind, in unison, stared on with mystic scrutiny. Gamble smiled and leaned on the horn. At once the youthen statuary leapt from their embossment and scattered backwards, waving their arms and laughing, turning this, their little strange moment, into a game.

Clyde threw his arms up. "Well!" he cried. "Where is it now" Where the f'ck is this going to end?"

"At Craig Ames" garage. It's only blocks away. Remember who I'm talkin" about?"

Clyde did, so he nods. It felt good to have structure now. A slight and esoteric something always beats a flush of nothings. "Alright. Alright—-good. So we're taking her there. What will Craig say?"

Gamble shrugged his bottom lip and left shoulder. "Don't really matter," he said. "Craig is spineless and lonely. How long's it been since you've seen "em?"

"I 'dunno. Couple years?"

"Know why?"

"Heard he was in jail," Clyde said, nodding.

"You got it—-know what for?"

"Dude, I 'dunno. Just go."

"Guess."

"Cheating on his taxes, Gamble; I don't f'ckin" know, man."

Gamble gripped the shifter and twisted his body around. For Anya, whom appeared quite still and calm, Gamble crossed a smile. "Our good old friend Craig Ames is a registered sex offender. How wonderful for us. Once he gets a look at little Anya he's gonna" sh't."

Clyde

Date: 2013-10-20 01:22 EST
It was seven when the Nova arrived at a tan-stained, perfectly square building that bore one single, huge blue sliding door. It looked like a massive storage locker. Clyde was squinting, asking Gamble for confirmation and, of course, Gamble was completely positive. It's the same place, he said as the exhausted car ticked into the lot beside the building. The tires popped as they bowled over the stones laying below spindly, yellow headed grass. Gamble piloted it around the building, cursing and cracking on the rocks, hissing and bellering from the grill. The backlot was fenced in chainlink. A grand chainlink square of blonde grass.

Gamble killed the engine, leaned out of the car and slammed the door with gleeful ceremony. Seeing as August had only just stepped off, this was false night. It was a purple, orange and argumentative night. Ranges of cloud were smudged along this expanse like thumb-drags of dirty brown oil. Crude they were as unrealistically shaped incarnations whipped around on the flat-pallet rust colored sky as unfurled smokey petals.

Clyde didn't leave the car. Anya's eyes were open. Clyde had known, had seen them roaming during their reckless spin through the city. Gamble couldn't know. Clyde had caught her now, live, and now their eyes were locked. His face told her to stay still—a calming agent that, to the dampened girl, proved effective. She didn't have to nod. They shared an ugly relationship. Gamble knocked on the driver's window and Clyde got out.

"I just saw the rat's face," Gamble said. "I know he's in there. He's probaby f'ckin" sh'tting. I'm gonna" talk to him."

Clyde gave a scarce nod. His alert eyes made Gamble alert.

"What's your problem?"

"Nothing," Clyde said. "You want me to get the girl folded up" And bring her in?"

"Yeah. Yeah, alright," Gamble said blandly as he lumbered to the backdoor lit by the cone of a flickering yellow light. "I'll be right back."

Clyde watched Gamble disappear into the building. Just after, he scrambled to the driver's side door and jerked it off the jamb. Anya, caged, skittered back like an anxious cat and curled her gaunt body up into the corner of the back seat, away from Clyde. "It's alright!" Clyde whispered sharply. "I'm gonna" figure something out, alright' I'm no good. But I'm better than him. Please—-just be calm, alright' This isn't gonna" work if you're all heated and thrashing. You have to pretend to be knocked out like you were before."

Anya was sobbing. Her face: a collective spread of brown bruises with one rectangular latch of dried blood that fell off her nose, ran over full lips and split up like lighting-tails over her chin; jounced morbidly, powered by the force of her sobs.

"Clean it the f'ck up," Clyde said. "You've got everything to lose here." Anya did not nod or congratulate Clyde's order, but she became still as stone and placid of expression and Clyde saw this as agreement. He pushed out his arms as-to gather her. "Close your eyes. Just be unconscious again.?

Anya closed her eyes. Clyde corralled her then carefully scooped her out of the Nova's backseat. She was light like an inflated instance of herself because she had become skinny with worry; the weight of her thoughts were miles away, seated on a corpse with a missing head. Clyde tucked her in safely and crunched over the plastic grass to the tiny warehouse's amber-lit door. He waited only a moment before caving through the door by knocking it out with his shoulder. Voices were in feud somewhere unseen in the back of the garage-turned-apartment. Gamble's was identified easily; bleak, empty with those skyline wonton cheers. Its opponent was tired and old, rife with blunting lassitude.

The shop was dingy and closed with clutter. Shadows played in the lit boxroom in the corner where the voices jousted. A tiny green cot was hung from the wall by chain. Clyde whispered something calm to Anya and set her down, then jogged back to the backdoor and fit the lock.

Clyde

Date: 2013-10-20 01:50 EST
Craig Ames was a stubby man with shiny brown skin. His face was round with a long, frowned mouth cut below a choppy black mustache with silver frosting. His head was shaved down neatly, his hairline cowering-in on his forehead from a recession of fifty years. Craig's eyes were tiny and black and shone dully like marbles sprayed over in acrylic. He jabbed the air at Gamble and told him, "I don't owe you anything. So," a passe wave sailing slumberly to the doorway, "just leave, please. I'm in the process of building."

"Building what, boy-o?" Gamble said. Sneaking his head through the doorframe separating the rooms, he spotted Clyde and smiled. then reverted to Craig. "Mm' I think you need to just hear me out."

Craig was impervious. His rotund body barely cleared the frame without incident, and once in the room he trucked to the couch where Anya laid and flung the toe of his boot up from below, pushing the girl and the mattress up. Anya, impressively, remained convincingly unconscious during her trip through the air. "Up," he said to her. Then to Clyde: "Up—-Get. Her. Up."

Out of place, Clyde snuck back and failed eye contact. "C"mon man," he said. "We need this. Just let us lay here for a while."

"Out of the question," Craig said. He lumbered away to the stained refrigerator in the back corner of the room and retrieved a bottle of beer. He flipped right around and grunted. He smacked his boot against the fridge and snapped off the cap. When he drank, he shook his head. "No. No; fuck you. Fuck both of you." With bright anger Craig pushed off the appliance and its rust-blanketed drawers rattled when it hit the wall. "I just spent four f'ckin" years in federal f'ckin" jail. Then this," he said, panning with his palm, serving Clyde and Gamble, then finally Anya, upon it. "I don't care. There's nothing that'll change my mind. So how about you take this battered bitch out of my little sh'thole before I call the cops. I can't risk this."

Gamble crossed the room and smacked Clyde's shoulder. Clyde zapped back and took the breeches of his jacket between his fingers. "Cigarette,? Gamble said. Clyde gave him one and took one for himself. They passed a lighter around, the fulgent orange globular of flame smacking their faces, creating steep black lines about their mouths, drawn like nightfangs. The blackness of the space now contained two orange dots, a flat plane of blued light carpeted from the backroom's lamp and the resonating square of sundown orange that haloed the unfit frame of the front door.

Clyde

Date: 2014-03-31 03:14 EST
Gamble pulled Craig into the small room in back and their quiet, indistinguishable voice winded around for several minutes. When the obese old convict emerged, his face was lightened with a secret joy. "Just keep her quiet," he remarked.

Gamble, relighting the little nub of the cigarette he'd saved, nodded and Craig disappeared into his back room and pulled the door closed. Gamble strode confidently past Clyde and his eyes, smiling with victory, leered forward through the darkness without objective. Finally, the cigarette in his teeth, the man bends over and in Clyde's face whispers, "Yahtzee."

"What?" Clyde asked. "What did you say to him?"

Gamble shrugs, plucks the cigarette out and drops it under his foot. "Just promised him a slice," he said. "Every man has weakness, Clyde, you know that. Look at this place; what in the world wouldn't he do to be free of this shack?"

Clyde listened with eyes lowered on Anya. Her slumber appeared genuine now, and this eased his belly. "Alright," he nodded. "Good. Finally a break, "eh' This shit's been too much for me, I swear a roll of ulcers have opened up on my belly. Ever since the crash. You could've f'ckin" warned me ya" know. You could give your "partner" that much warning since you didn't even trust him enough to inform him of the plan."

"Please," Gamble said. "—-that's what you think?" Curling up an eyebrow, he reversed across the room and took lean into an old wooden workbench littered with a rusted village of hardware. "Is that what you think" That there was a trust issue" I swear you choose to be this stupid, it can't be natural."

"Well?" Clyde asked. "What other reason is there?"

"How about your freak out in the car" I decided that dealing with it once for only ten minutes was superior to thirty times throughout the course of a week. So that was the reason, brother Clyde. I think you're a whiner, not a snitch."

Clyde

Date: 2014-03-31 03:18 EST
Pushing himself up, Clyde stretched casually then moved towards Gamble, his eyes stuck on the slumbering girl on the suspended cot. When Gamble opened his eyes at the boy, Clyde fished his thumb towards the door and started towards it. Gamble, playfully unwilling, asked, "Something the matter?" Clyde grimaced. He tossed his head towards the door and mouthed, "c"mon", but Gamble, his face a festering show of cruelty and rambunctious humor, would not move. Clyde stomped over and leaned over so far he nearly stuck his nose into Gamble's mouth. "We have something to discuss," he whispered sharply

"Mm' Then discuss."

"Not here man, c"mon. Please." Clyde takes several steps back and expands his eyes. "Please."

Gamble peels away from the bench and takes the lead through the door to the outside. Clyde catches the door and jets out after, nervously slashing at his hairline with the edge of hand. Throwing both arms away from his body and letting them limply flail around, Clyde sighs and works a few circles in the gravel. Gamble zipped right for the old car and peeled the driver door open, leaned in and ejected the trunk. Crossing back around, he asked, "Well?" then moved to lift the trunk latch up.

"Alright, Gamble. I'm going to say a bunch of sh't here, and you just need to listen."

Bent entirely into the trunkspace, Gamble pulled one arm out and waved it around servilely to perpetuate his partner's qualm. Clyde didn't believe the man was at his most attentive, but with the criteria on hold, he figured this for the better. "This whole thing," Clyde began. "It's rotten. It's not the kind of sh't we do, Gamble, you know that. We're thieves, we're thugs. We do that sh't well, we've been doin" it forever and been doin" it well. I know better than to climb in your shoes and take a ride, and in all honesty I can see the gains here, but the percentages just aren't there, man, they're not. They're not and you know it, so I want the truth. You call me a f'ckin" half wit, that's probably true, and I can accept it because you're a sharp guy. So there's more to this, right' There's somethin" I'm not seeing" Other plans?"

Removing a large bag and a wide black case from the trunk, Gamble snaps open his eyes with sardonicism and ruffles the flesh of his brow. "No," he draws idly, turning to set down both the bag and case. He unsnaps the bindings of the long case. "Pretty black and white—-now, didn't I mention this earlier" Didn't I purposely keep you in the dark as to avoid this stuff from you, Clyde" I'm not asking you to stay." Gamble, over his shoulder, eyes skinny, butted up his chin. "I mean it—-go. It was unfair of me," returning attention to the unclasped case, "I'm not going to shoot you in the back were you to turn-tail. This is too big for you.?

Clyde

Date: 2014-03-31 03:22 EST
"That won't work," Clyde said. "I'm interested, I just don't think you've thought this one through. The money should be good "n all."

"Clyde," Gamble said tiredly. "I take back what I just said. About shooting you in the back I mean." Secretly he smiled as he pulled the lid of the case up. Inside was a segmented rifle; long barreled, scoped and of large caliber. Certain that the contents were complete, Gamble resealed the case and took to his feet. "You're honestly driving me mad, so decide and do so quickly."

Clyde flaps his arms as defeat and shakes his head. "Just tell me what the next step is," he said. "That's all I wanted to know, just what was next because I know you're not going to simply sit around in this dirty garage waiting for goddamn phone call. How do you plan on getting ahold of anyone here?"

"At first," Gamble replied windedly, "I figured that the news would be dishing out details, phone numbers and all that, but I'm convinced that our good Senator Krist is keeping this in house."

"Why?"

"Because he could bypass the law, Clyde. He could send his own men in to do their own thing and take care of things their own way." Gamble shrugs. "That's what I would do, so now I have to go in and talk to Anya."

"Wait," from Clyde quickly. Clyde telling his share, Gamble paused, his hand on door, and squinted through him. Transparency was Clyde's affliction, Gamble understood and frowned his subterfuge.

"For?" Gamble asked.

"Let me do it' I think she knows you shot her boyfriend."

Gamble laughed, shook his head and amusedly asked, "And how would she know that' Has she been speaking with you? While she's been unconscious on the bed have you been reading her thoughts, decoding the wrinkles" I'm tired Clyde, damn tired and I've been fighting to retain a clear head. You're not helping whatsoever and I've grown short. No—-I'm not as certain as I seem about all this, so I really need you to stop acting like a f'cking child, so can we now cease the cryptic sh't' You can't keep a secret, you can't even keep a thought." Stewing on his own proclamations, doing war with the the urge to preen and flex a smile in celebration of his articulate disassembly of his partner, Gamble retained his composure and fired, "Speak.?

Clyde

Date: 2014-03-31 03:25 EST
"I just heard some things in her sleep," Clyde said distantly. Gamble tracked the boy as he reversed and attained a purposefully deflective posture, face and distance. "I just—-it was something about your eyes, "the guy with green eyes". It could mean anything, I just think she might get frightened."

"I see. Sounds like a stretch, Clyde."

"Right," Clyde said with a shrug. "I know, but why not be cautious" What do you want me to ask her?"

Gamble took up posting against the door. A slanted mouth and lowered eyes considered Clyde's offer, his tongue slithered out over his lip and wiggled and toyed. He grins. "Guess what?"

Stolen by Gamble's frightening coyness, Clyde's answer was a stare.

"I didn't promise Craig any money," Gamble said. The man's handsomely slender eyes zip to his once mighty vehicle, lean over its now-dented edges and end up tangled in the vine-and-grass-ensnared chain link fence that cordoned off Craig's infinitesimal backyard from the several other junked and overgrown spaces along the shoddy row, along the shoddy block. A tall tenement loomed up like a broken obelisk of lighted yellow squares directly behind the chain fence and in the day Gamble figured that it would lean its fat, boring shadow all over Craig's lawn. The man picked a window with a women in it and portioned out all of his attention to her curled form. Distance was the disservice to articulation; she was about four stories up and leaned into the sill with her back to Gamble. He could see a phone cord slung from the wall and the steep bounds of the wire made him think it was coiled around her arm as she spoke into the receiver. "No," Gamble dragged on coolly. "Money wasn't his "thing". Weird huh?" Gamble pulled his eyes down and ran them into Clyde. Clyde had slipped into a systemic stupor. It begins with skinny, punching eyes and pinched lips. Then false knowing: nods, chin scratching, picks at ear, slashes at his bangs. Gamble throws the line out, throws the suspension of wording right above Clyde's nose and watches as the boy's face crushes in with speculation.

"Say what you're gonna" say," finally broken in by Clyde.

"Craig wasn't going to let us keep her here," Gamble said. He hooked his thumb over his shoulder, square at the door. "He didn't want a cut, didn't want to help, didn't want to be a part of something big like this. All he wanted was for us to get that chick out of his house. And so I got to thinking, got to thinking that if we were going to get out of this that he was the way."

"Are you asking me for permission?" Clyde said. "You're having second thoughts?"

"I'm having twentieth thoughts, Clyde, don't be idiotic, you know that. It was hasty of me to destroy my car, and I won't stand to be immobile. So I offered Craig a few hours with the girl. And when he says "when" we're going to give him some privacy, and then we're going to leave her to him."

Clyde's face jumps out as he howls, "What! You're gonna" let that f'ckin" pedophile just have her" When?"

Gamble turned his eyes around, looked at the sealed door and shrugged. "I told him soon," he said. "But it'll be fine.?

Clyde

Date: 2014-03-31 03:33 EST
Clyde backed up slowly and the gravel got turned up under the rubber pads of his sneakers and popped. He reversed further and spun away, hooked in his hands and pushed the breeches of his leather jacket away so that he could grip the belt around his waist. "You're rotten," Clyde said emptily. "You just wanna" let "em roll all over "er, then go. Then I'm thinkin", "Well, she could probably identify us". So now I'm thinkin" that you're figurin" that Craig's gonna" panic after we leave and kill "er or somethin". That's what you're betting on, ain't it?"

Clyde spins steps around to face Gamble but keeps his eyes low, his vision in the black fissures in the stone. Gamble was bright with mirth. His smile was so very long, his eyes were nimble and corsucating brilliantly in emerald, like two green seas with stars beneath. "And now you see why I've made this decision," he said. "Splayed it all out for me."

Clyde looked up, squinted and his hands carefully fell off his belt. "What do you mean?"

"You, you f'cking fool!" Gamble furiously howled. "You f'cking talked to that girl, you're f'cking looking after her. I'm doing this sh't for you, goddamnit. She doesn't know me, Clyde, she knows -you-. She knows you and your idiot face and your f'cking jacket and hollow yellow eyes." Clyde turned away, but Gamble saw that he had torn him down. Stepping away from the wall and dropping his bags, the assail continued when Gamble's voice jumped out, "Clyde!" magnetically, servilely. "Don't misunderstand this. It's a sh'tty thing and I'm sorry. But Craig's a piece of sh't, and we're pieces of sh't, and Anya's a rich piece of sh't. But Craig's the biggest piece, so let him go down. When he starts, we'll come out and light the car up, just burn it down, it's registered to an alias; I just want the prints and fibers and all tha—-"

"What's in your bag?" Clyde cut in.

"You didn't see?"

"Yeah, I seen."

Crunching stones as Gamble backs up; Clyde reemerges with eye contact. "You bring that along for any particular reason?" Clyde asked.

"Nope—-just had it in the trunk and I want it. It's Military, an M40. It was expensive."

Lines steepen in Clyde's face; they run down to the bone, dig out fingers of freshets below both his eyes, run dark scythes out from the membrane nodes near his nose that drag all the way out to his roof lip. "I don't want to kill her," he says. "I don't think it's fair that she should get f'ckin" raped and killed by some sick ball of grease because you're afraid of getting caught."

Clyde

Date: 2014-04-29 02:12 EST
Gamble's fingers stretched and the tips curled up and made each long digit unnaturally concave. Several warm cracks snapped free of flesh before the man toed-in his fingertips and made each hand a fist. Clyde was no stranger to his partner's agitations; familiar with both the causes and tells; but appeared strangely resilient in the face of Gamble's stirring rage. Clyde didn't take his eyes from Gamble's, and Gamble's too did not retreat. Only did Clyde move his hands, taking them up and into the breeches of his coat to again amass at his hips. "I think I'm through," Gamble said. "Just about through, yeah, with you, Clyde Morris. I think that it's best that you runalong." Clyde, a tall and fierce petrification, edifice of an uncertain and ambiguous victory, a genesis of pretentious unfaltering, looked back at Gamble and did not speak. His mouth stayed straight, his yellowy eyes, quiet and small, were straight. When he moved it was only his fingers, those of his right hand, and they crawled, slow and misstepped and impulsively and as wretchedly metered as spiderlegs, towards the pommel of the .45 buried in his beltline. "Haw!" Gamble hollered in excitement. He'd seen the motion, seen those little spiderfingers crawl. He sided his body with a quick turn, a quick step, swung it so that his broad torso no longer faced Clyde and that his skinny hips, less the target, did instead. In rear, tucked into his belt was the curly old trunk of that antique six-cylinder revolver. It's pommel was rightfaced, acceptable by the right hand in this sided posture.

And Clyde hadn't made for his gun, but Gamble's hurry made a hurry of him. Clyde's eyes crack, separate from the comfortable mysticism silence, a gruff, stringent mouth and a gun award, and panic; they crack. Nostrils flare, his bottom lip leans down as if to release a holler in pain from the ghost of a bullet presaged by Gamble's gunstance. He's tricked by his friend's stance and thrown into defense before the introduction of an honest, tangible offense: fooled by the noise Gamble had cheered, fooled by his siding, and, ultimately and completely, fooled by the varnish on the trunk of his revolver.

Clyde

Date: 2014-04-29 02:15 EST
It was just after six in the morning when Anya first awoke in her bed. Her room was large and sported the affinities of a woman not yet a woman. It did not harbor fleets of stuffed animal or depictions of flowers stenciled into the wall: instead it was run around with flat, perfect, glossy posters pristine by way of her appreciation for them. Just inside the door to the left was a large, whitewood, multitierd, multislotted entertainment center bludgeoned and filled to capacity with devices. The television was large, but bulky and archaic which, with showings of wealth: the size of the room, the royal stating and shape and design of the long, intricately framed windows overlooking a rich and royally colored lawn; was an evidence of rare usage.

The girl slipped out of bed and worked out the sleep in her body. She was thin and moderately lengthed at half-past five-foot, blonde and eyed blue. Her face was triangularchinned and pretty and well conditioned when made up: at nineteen she had yet to shed the the reddened coats of pimplebed splashed out atop her tenderly boned cheeks: conditioned when made-up.

On her nightstand was a cellular tethered to the outlet behind her bed by a long, slender white cord. She clicked the screen to life, fingered through the messages, updates, statuses, through the fingertipslashing grandeur of the appreciation for her life through keystrokes, fingerstrokes, likes: the pallid and lonely majesty of squatting above a kingdom laid out upon stones of shallow photos and chivalries conducive to the reply of sister kingdoms: the necessity of a flourishing kingdom—-the acknowledgement of another.

Anya scooped up the phone and took it with her into the bathroom behind the door on the rightward wall in her own room. She scrubbed, layered, prepared, emptied and finally showered. She emerged from the room with a towel whirled around her head and in clean black sweatpants and a white tank that was thin enough to allow the lime green bra she wore beneath to squeak through the translucent fabric. She snapped on the television to fill the room with sound as she laid, bellydown, legs curled back and kicking idly, with all of her attentions paid to the little rectangle touchscreen laid out on the bedspread like the little transuniversal window it was, sewn straight into the comforter. Thirty minutes burned away; Anya checked her hair, then, content with the soft and workable moisture lightly dampening, slid off the bed and crossed into the hall.

Clyde

Date: 2014-04-29 02:18 EST
The upstairs area of the Krist home was grand and royal and egregiously spacious. When outside Anya's door, one is sat right onto the cool, smooth rosewood runnings of the floorboards in the hall, which was wide and tall. The walls were brown and hearty and smooth of upstraight planks, perfect and ascending with almost-symmetry throughout the corridor. The walls were adorned meagerly. Directly right of Anya's room the hall lead ten yards then splitoff into a T. Directly in the centerwall between the splitting halls hung an ornately-framed portrait of a square-and-hardfaced man in a grey suit. His hair was slicked back, his eyes were small and profound and blue, his nose long and triangular like a sail, his mouth tiny and unemotive.

Anya turned left towards the stairs. The banister, downwardmoving, was shiny and curled down like an unslacked pigstail of rosewood. The downstairs hall was circular, wide, grandiose. It was an ornamental space and entrance both: luxuriously rugged and outlayed completely in royal burgundy (as to match the doorrunner and the downstepping, tonguelike runner rolled down the stairs). The entrance hall was plain, but classic with two lushly varnished end tables stood at odds in the concaving longwalls of the semicircle staircase that wrapped-up the downstairs room like a big white slumbering cobra.

The girl slowly descended the case, turned left in the grand circular room, her head still downcast and stolen by the screen of her phone. A high archway separated the entrance hall from the luxurious living space. The theme was white and modern; right of the room were couches and a row of long windows, left stood a black lacquered crescent shaped bar laid ahead of a longrow library of alcohol. The man in the painting, the slickhaired, sharpeyed, foxlike man, was there, leaning over the barcounter on his elbow with a drink in his hand, his small eyes thrown across the room where the television flickered.

Clyde

Date: 2014-04-29 02:20 EST
"Morning," Mr. Krist said in a dry and intelligent voice. Anya continued away, eyes listing the phonescreen. "Hello"—-Daughter, dear Daughter—-should I text you?"

Anya kind of leaned her head back quickly as if she were electrified by his words. "Oh," she said sweetly. She smiled and turned his way, the phone swallowed inside her tiny hands. "Sorry, you know I'm not much for mornings."

Mr. Krist had returned his eyes to the television. After she spoke he nodded and absently tested his bourbon with a slight tip of the glass. Lips, lickmoistened, curved into a glistening smile then said, "Sure, sure. Go out and find me one of these morning people." Mr. Krist's eyes flicked over her. "Who're you texting at seven A.M." Your mother?"

Anya's arms lifted off her hips then fell back to them in some small, awkward, defensive half-flap. "You told me not to let this whole thing ruin our relationship," she said, her voice leaned towards annoyance. "You said—-you said it."

The bourbon was set down, his lips relicked, recurved. "And did I say it with animosity?" he asked "I was curious, that's all. I would never tell you to stop talking to her." He took up his glass and drank deeply until only several bronze cubes and coil of brown syrup were left within. The glass was pushed aside; Mr Krist grinned harshly and pressed on his daughter with his old, little eyes. "Despite how happy it would make me, Daughter-O-My-Daughter."

Clyde

Date: 2014-04-29 02:23 EST
Anya opened her hand and peered into the screen of her phone. She had a message half-typed to "Mom": "Ill call u later, hes up". She locked the screen, smiled servilely and pulled both her arms behind her back. "Very funny," Anya said. She sat down on one of the stools on the bar's outer curve, laid her arms atop the nice, smooth counter and smiled up at her father. She closed her left eye and continued to look squintedly and with a flimsy grin out of the left end of her mouth, wrinkling that unfortunate already-crushed cheek under the slipeye. "Is that what a good father should say, Daddy' Telling me not to text mom with a drink in your hand and—-what time is it?"

She tried for her phone, tried to thumb the button but Mr. Krist verbally extinguished her bounds, her lazy recovery with, "7:23—-" He leaned further over the counter and it looked, to Anya, as if he might jump completely over it. He did not; he was trying to catch more of the television screen with his old, cloudy eyes. "—-23 or 73." Grinning, Mr. Krist disarmed the leaping pose and took to again a leisurely, napping lean into the barcounter.

Anya turned around and nodded. "—yeah. 7:73—you're right, how weird. What does that mean?" When she turned her grin to her father she found that his grin was longer and sharper.

The smile unspooled to let in the rim of the glass that had no bronze to give; the icecubes ran into his teeth and knocked some pain into his eyes. Extinguishing, he again smiled and reached out for his bourbon bottle. "It means the end is nigh obviously, Anya. Probably best that you cancel all appoints, lock all doors and hide out in the basement." Mr. Krists eyebrows stepped up and all the curvy waves in his forehead jolted up with them.