.A Hero Story.

.biieruesu.

They say it started with him picking up the gun and squishing through the blood under his feet, his small, adolescent muscles twitching in anger as tears burned down his face. He knew better. The woman with the snake wrapped around her neck glanced over her shoulder and spoke soft words.

“You’ll probably hunt me down for revenge. You’ll remember this moment forever and hate me and yourself for it. I don’t blame ya, kid” She took a drag on her cigarette, “I’d hate a person like me, too.”

He knew this bad blood started years before him and like all new generations, he was the one to pay. His small fingers crushed around the gun and he bit down hard as the tears kept coming. He stood there for seconds, minutes, hours, days, years and when the house behind him was a rubble of smoking, smoldering ashes, he braved the world and stepped forward.

It’s the quiet night that breaks him. There’s no place for a kid without a home, shattered pasts like shattered windows, glass and memories trail the ground behind him. The lamplight catches him in silence and while the world turns he grows into a man, with a gun and nothing left to lose and he realizes the only thing he has to do is die and what he really wants to do is kill the woman with the snake on her neck because there’s nothing left for him. Years under the pale, fluorescent light has left his hands covered in blood and his soul upon the wall of self guilt. He wants to be sorry, because he knows the men and women have homes that lay broken and those with families, he’s empathetic, but he doesn’t wash his hands of it just yet. There’s too much to be done but his to-do list is empty.

When the lamp light flickers out he steps forward again. People challenge him. Young, old, and in between; he fights them and without guilt he makes them pay. They haven’t seen what he’s seen; they don’t know what he knows. He’s above them. He pictures this in the old watercolors in museums. He’s the avenger with a background of grief. He moves forward, but his list is always empty.

He finds her at a bar, the snake floating, hissing, up by her ear. She’s grown older, he can tell, and by the way her eyes have dulled, he can tell that she’s seen the same things as he and he doesn’t know how that makes him feel.

You think you can kill me? She’s taking a drag on a fresh cigarette and the smoke slithers up like a deadly viper.

He doesn’t answer but he raises his gun. She raises her gun. Bullets are whistling. He’s injured. She’s aching. The bystanders have all gone. They are alone, like they’ve always been. He’s seen many things: Death has stared him in the face, a massacre of a whole town, a child left to suffer. He’s not sympathetic, nor does he waver. He kills.

And she kills back.