Who killed who?

This is a little short I wrote, at the time I was contemplating a Iraq or Afghan vet who accidentally kills his parents during a blackout caused by a careless fire cracker.

***

Sam called at seven in the evening as he had said on the note Lionel found under his windshield wiper. Sam asked him to bring Danny and meet him under “the overpass”, a worn out and rarely used bridge the three had played under and later used as a refuge from their perspective world. Lionel agreed and hung up, he opened a drawer next to his bed and removed a 9mm pistol and tucked into the rear of his pants. He called for Danny and told him of the situation. They both headed to Lionel's car and headed off, driving almost ten miles before Lionel broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Do you think we’ll be able to convince him to turn himself in?” Lionel asked
“If not then we just call the cops but it will look better if he turns himself in.” Danny replied
“There is no way he did it. Sam just isn’t a killer. He loved his parents.”Lionel said shaking his head as if trying to magically understand the insanity of the afternoon.
“I know but the neighbors heard gunshots and saw him tear off in his car. It’s doesn’t look good. There has to be an explanation, His parents were great to him, he had a perfect model of the perfect family. Sam would never hurt them, or anyone for that matter.” Danny replied, as if he were still clinging to the hope that Sam was innocent even though in his heart he knew his old friend had changed.
Lionel turned onto the isolated road leading back to seemingly nothing but an old bridge from a road no longer used. They saw nothing on the slow mile or so trip back to the bridge. As they pulled up Lionel pulled out his pistol and chambered a round before ensuring the safety was on and tucking it back into his belt line.
“Jesus Lionel, what the fuck is that for?” Danny asked with a look of disbelief on his face.
Lionel placed his hands hon the steering wheel, let his eyes close and head bow before releasing a deep breath that seemed to go on for minutes.
“Listen Danny, Sam has changed, something happened to him over there, I just want to ba careful dealing with him. I don't want to believe he did it any more than you do but still have consider the possability that he did it.” Lionel said without moving or altering himself.
“You really think he would hurt us?” Danny said with mick contempt, not really needing a response.
“I am only saying that if he killed his parents then what is to stop him from trying to hurt us if he doesn't like what we have to say? We have to consider that.”
“I know.” was Danny's simple reply. He did know.
Sam was in a state of remorseful panic“Danny I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me? I didn’t mean to. It just happened.”
Danny “You mean you did it?!?!?”.Danny yelled in a mix of disappointment and confirmation.
“I couldn’t help it Danny, Fluffy started sniffing my nuts and one thing led to another after that and…Oh God Danny I didn’t mean to. I am so sorry.”
“What?” Danny replied, confused.
“Why Sam. Why’d you do it?” asked Lionel, his voice breaking, his eyes tearing up.
“I don't know, one moment Dad was telling me about how he lined a job up in the shop for me, then I heard a bang and blacked out, when I came to they were dead. Oh my god guys, my mom and dad, I love them so much....” Sam became unintelligible as he drifted off into sobs.

The Mob Goes Green

I wrote this in a moment of humor fueled creativity. It is meant as a sketch not a written story but never the less I hope you find it enjoyable.

***

Open in a small butcher shop or grocery store or other small mom and pop owned business. The man behind the counter is cleaning up and getting ready to close for the day. Two large Mafioso walk into the store and the man closing the store looks surprised.
Owner “Gentleman. What brings you back to my store?”
Mafioso 1 “We’re here to collect your monthly protection dues.”
Owner Instantly annoyed “But I just paid you guys three hours ago.”
Mafioso 2 “Yeah unfortunantly the price went up. Nothin personal you understand, it’s just business.”
Owner “You gotta be fuckin kidding me?!? Business isn’t the greatest for me right now. You guys know that, I was barely able to pay three hours ago!”
Mafioso 1 “We understand that Charlie but you have see things from our position. With the economic downturn of the last 7 years many small business owners are really taking a hit. Many of our clients have been unable to pay their insurance premiums.”
Mafioso 2 “Yeah Charlie, many of our clients have even been forced to close down even further restricting the amount of money flowing into our community centered organization. This forces us to not only raise the premiums but to also collect premiums more aggressively for our services. ”
Mafioso 1 “Yeah Charlie we provide a public service. We’re here for people like you Charlie.”
Mafioso 2 “An economic downturn like this sends ripple effects felt all throughout the small business world. If we could just protect one of those corporations, now there’s some motherfuckers who always have cash.”
Charlie “Look guys, I sympathize but it doesn’t change the fact that I just don’t have the money to pay you guys again. My wife just lost her job, my boy needs a good kick in the face but I can’t afford decent boots, and I’m afraid I may have to close down too if things don’t improve, and don’t improve fast.”
Mafioso 1 “Charlie we know and we’re sorry but business is business.”
Charlie “But I don’t have enough to pay you again.”
Mafioso 2 “Gee Charlie, it’s really too bad to hear you say that.”
At this point the mob guys drag Charlie over the counter and begin tying him to a chair while the other mobster shuts the blinds and locks the door.
Charlie “Beating me won’t change the fact that I don’t have the money to pay you.”
Mafioso 2 “We know, besides Eddy here has already chipped two of his knuckles on deadbeats faces over the last few months and we lost our health coverage and workmans comp in the form of benefit take backs and cuts as a result of the downturn.”
Eddy (formerly Mafioso 1) “So lucky for you we’ve been forced to scrap beating you mercilessly until you pay up. It hasn’t been working anyway.”
Mafioso 2 “Yeah so all we’ve ended up with for our trouble lately is medical bills we can’t afford to pay.”
Mafioso 2 begins dumping gasoline around the store much to the shopkeepers horror.
Eddy “So you see Charlie, the rotten economy has forced us to become much, much more aggressive in our attempts to get the money we need to sustain our standard of living.”
Charlie (Beginning to scream hysterically)“How the hell is burning my store down going to bring you more money?!? I’ll be out of business and you will have reduced a negative cash flow position into a non-existent cash flow position.”
Eddy pulling his gun “Don’t get feisty on me now.”
Mafioso 2 moving onto his second gas can “It’s the insurance money. The combination of your small business insurance and your life insurance will provide us with enough money to make it through for a while and faster than if we waited around for your business to pick back up. Of course we’ll have to extort the insurance money out of your grieving widow.”
Charlie “You’re going to kill me?!?!?! Oh god no! Please don’t. I want to live, I’ve always paid you guys and have NEVER been late. Please, please, please don’t shoot me.”
Eddy “Relax we’re not going to shoot you.”
Charlie “Oh thank god.”
Mafioso 2 “You see Charlie, with times bein so rough we have to continually find ways to curtail expenditures. We have wasted thousands of dollars over the years in pointless execution style murders when we was already taking the time to burn down the joint anyway. It’s more efficient to just let you burn with the place.”
Charlie “WHAT!?!?!”
Eddy “Yeah, and that way it will look like an accident too, and we don’t have to waste even more gas driving out into the woods to bury you. That’s a plus for the environment too.”
Mafioso 2 Finishing the last gas can “That’s important Charlie, we have to start worrying about the kind of planet we are going to leave our children. Find more ways of using green energy and being responsible with the resources we do have. Like Gas. Driving 60 miles into the wilderness to get rid of your corpse wouldn’t be very green of us.”
Charlie “Well burning down my shop isn’t very green either.”
Eddy “Yeah but it is an investment. You see with the money we make off of burning down your shop and your life insurance award we can then re-invest that in research toward finding a greener source of arson.”
Mafioso 2 and Eddy move toward the door and Eddy pulls out a matchbook.
Eddy “Well it’s been nice serving you Charlie, I mean that. I’ve always enjoyed collecting from you.”
Mafioso 2 “Same for me Charlie. Your good people.”
Eddy lights the match and the store erupts into flames and Charlie screams.
Charlie (now out of frame) “Oh god I am on fire!!! Please shoot me in the face guys! Please!?!? This is so painful! OH GOD MY DICK IS ON FIRE!!!!!!”
Eddy “Can you believe this guy Tony? Now he wants us to shoot him. Un fucking believable.”
Tony (Formerly Mafioso 2) “This is exactly why I will be so glad when I finally promote out of collections. People are so ungrateful and hypocritical.

End

David

“Fucking deer.” David muttered to himself. For as long as he could remember there had been a small group of deer bedding down somewhere in northern forty of his land. Quite handy come black powder season but every couple of years one of them would die on his property for whatever reason. This one had died somewhere to the southwest of his house, probably in the grove, enabling the southeasterly winds to carry the stench of decay right into the open window of his bedroom. David hastily dressed and headed out to find the corpse, stopping to grab a gas can from his shed. David opened the door to his house again and called for Buck, Buck's nose would lead him to the deer more quickly than his own woefully less sensitive human nose. Not that he needed Buck, the stench only became stronger the further into his small chunk of woodland David walked. The Maples were still the green of late summer and their strong scent was normally intoxicating. The smell of decay was overpowering the maples this morning though, at least until David could find that damn deer and begin it's cremation. He was close now, the smell was so strong he could almost taste the decay and it was making vomit seem reasonable. Buck let out a bark and a David shifted toward his Springer companion. It became,e obvious that the stench emanated from something other than a deer as soon as David saw the tattered old overalls peeking through the shallow undergrowth. It was Marvin, surrounded by a few empty Schlitz cans. He had come to the grove to sit and drink away from his wife as he sometimes did. Dave never cared as long as he cleaned up after himself.. “Must've been a heart attack or stroke.” David uttered to himself as Buck sniffed cautiously around the body. Then David wondered why Marvin's wife never reported him missing.

More Dominick

This is a very rough set which means everything you are about to read is stream of conscious rough. I found myself thinking about a 500 plus Healer sitting around watching television and the reactions he might have to our culture as opposed to other cultures and fads etc. he had experienced in his life and how they compared. Comments welcome.

***


Dominick sprawled out on his decayed purple couch and turned on the television. The channel 5 morning show was in mid swing and the host was a pleasant looking woman with a warm and fluid voice that reminded Dominick of a Nun he had known in the late nineteenth century. This woman however suffered from vanity, which he noticed was much more than mere affliction in this era, it was a rampant and aggressive plague. Dominick understood wanting to look nice, but he found the pains both sexes went to in order to appear attractive not just to the other sex, but all who lay eyes on them deplorable. Dominick had lived long enough to see that people have suffered from vanity through every era he has lived, but in the past eras it was confined more or less to the upper classes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sexes had their painted faces and powdered wigs, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the wigs and paint gave way to corsets, conservative dresses, and blush along with the suits of democratic rule which men wore in their congresses and parliaments. In the twentieth Century was born mass media through movies, television programs and commercials as well as mass produced magazines such as GQ, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire which brought the obsession with appearance down from the upper classes and into the worlds of the middle and lower classes. Dominick saw the effects of such superficial obsessions and the importance placed upon them in this era’s society. Girls in the various hospitals he has visited over the past fifty years in particular, suffering from such needless diseases such as bulimia and anorexia. Men in the hospital for various injuries to their bodies from the exercises performed incorrectly and religiously in the never ending quest for the body of Zues. Women implanting bags of salt water or silicone into their chests regardless of how unnaturally erect they made their bosom, just as long as those unnaturally erect breasts appear attractive through a shirt. Men who would have the same bags of substances never meant to exist in the human body implanted into them to look muscular because even though these men felt the pressure of needing to be fit and look good, they lacked the will to actively change their lifestyles to achieve these ends. Most of all Dominick was disgusted by the ever growing number of people having their stomachs stapled shut or a rubber band secured around their stomachs because the gluttonous fools cannot control themselves around the ever present temptation of horrible food.
This era and her temptations placed perhaps the strongest test upon Dominick’s faith, the technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had pushed humanity further away from their Father. More and more scholars wrote of the illogical belief in a God who, if he did exist, turned his back on his children long ago, most cosmologists were quick to promote the theory of the big bang but expressing belief in a God creating the universe was considered crazy. Dominick believed in Darwinism actually, he believed it was the way in which God chose to work on this world, to weed out the unworthy. Scientists called this process natural selection. However the educated elite, for the most part, refused to even consider a universe governed by His hand, to consider his role in all things. Quite the contrary, the idea of an “intelligent design” was quite offensive to most of the educated elite of this era, they used their mathematical formulas invented by man and theories based on those inventions of man in an attempt to deny God. As far as Dominick was concerned, knowing or having an idea of how some of His creations worked did not negate the fact that they were still His creations. Despite these feelings Dominick also felt the pull of doubt, not because of physics or the work of any human scholar, but because of the cruelty and injustice humanity brings to His world. He felt the pull of doubt when he read (and witnessed) the cruelty of humanity toward one another. The hardest on him was by far the cruelty inflicted on His chosen by the Nazi regime, the fact that these cruelties were known to the mortal leaders of the Vatican at the time and their silent consent in trade for their continued existence. Dominick never agreed with the council’s standpoint that God condoned their actions and the survival of the Vatican as well as their continued existence was proof of his approval. As familiar as Dominick is with his bible he could not bring himself to believe that God would or could be so cruel, this had actually always been a point of disagreement for Dominick. Humanity has always mistreated itself, the mass killings of war and the unpunished murders committed by the wealthy when the peasants would not fall in line. Most appalling for Dominick were the murders committed by those supposedly chosen by Him to rule and ‘protect’ His people, all out of fear of losing their earthly power or simply for the perverse pleasure of taking human life. Many of the kings and queen Dominick suffered in his lifetime were anything but Godly. The Nazi holocaust changed something fundamental in his faith he realized, for the first time in his existence Dominick truly struggled with doubt. He has fought it every day since he recognized it was there but it is an everyday struggle for him. What made the holocaust so different and powerful for him was a combination of different factors. At the forefront was that fact that these were supposed to be God’s chosen people, regardless of their acceptance of Christ. They would be made to see Christ was their savior during the tribulation and would thus be saved. Why would God allow them to suffer like this again after they had already suffered slavery, still suffered prejudice, and still remained faithful to him. It seemed to Dominick that if ever there were a more faithful people it was the Israelites. Yet God seemed unaffected by their suffering, Dominick tried to tell himself at first that God had no control over the free will of His children, even those behind such destruction and death, but couldn’t He intervene? Still, to this day the Jews honor and love God with a love, passion, and peaceful devotion that few faiths, even Christianity can claim. No matter what cruel fate God allowed to pass upon them they will never gave up on Him, now that is picture perfect devotion and love. There was also the inaction, in fact the silent condolence of the Nazi holocaust in return for their independence from the fascist war machines was, at least to Dominick, a betrayal of everything Jesus had stood for. The Vatican could claim ignorance all they wished however Dominick knew there were healers in the area who had discovered the camps and reported they’re existence to both the council and (find out popes name during WWII) only to have them told to be quiet about their discovery and put their faith in His will. Were they not a representative of His will? Seven healers could have liberated every camp with minimal loss of life yet this was not done. The importance of the physical church was placed above the lives of His chosen. How could this have possibly been His will? Thus the seeds of doubt were sewn and more and more as the years and centuries dragged on did humanity drift farther and farther away from God, the longer Dominick lived the more distant, faded, and empty did the words of Jesus seem to be to his Children. How faded at times they now seemed to him.