RIP

This micro fiction piece was written as a story companion to the day 23 drawing prompt RIP from the 2020 Inktober prompt list. Click here to see the drawing.

It’s easier to feel nothing, so he tries that.

He fails.

He wanders the Bronx in the dark, face lit up sporadically by the cigarette hanging from his lips. How many is that now? He feels in his pockets. One pack empty, two to go. His throat burns and his stomach is churning. Waffle House, he could go to the Waffle House. He keeps walking.

His feet carry him through streets he once walked through smiling, stopping to step on a butt here and there. All the windows he passes reflect his broken face and it’s barely recognizable, sad and aching, like a kicked puppy. Which he realizes he is, that’s exactly what he is.

He stops by their headquarters—the basement of a landlord-burnt tenement on Charlotte Street—to check on the plan. There’s nothing else left but the plan now, and it’s easier when he narrows things down to that.

The thought of Melissa’s head, night-stick cracked on the pavement, bleeding out slowly, makes his stomach hurt more. The senselessness of walking home with an armful of groceries as a cause of death can’t fit inside his head most days.

He tried to meet her on the other side of the park, to tell her to go around the rioting crowd and the police gathered outside their building. Got there just in time to watch her trip over the curb and stumble into an over-eager officer who whipped around and hit her, full force, between the eyes. He knew she was dead before she hit the pavement, the recognition in her eyes at his face the moment before being replaced by utter blankness.

In his nightmares, she falls in slow motion, apples, lettuce, and bread slices cascading around her like confetti, like shrapnel. The sound of her head making contact with the pavement cracks like a bolt of lightning. In reality, the rumble of the crowd made it impossible to hear anything, and the bag of groceries was barely disturbed. After the ambulance took her body away, he carried it home. Ate the bread and cheese at 4 a.m. when his stomach begged him to. The last thing Melissa would ever give him.

It has to stop. Someone has to do something, anything. Someone’s going to pay for what happened to his aunt, to this neighborhood, to this town.

Down in the basement of the headquarters, he approaches the man he hired to help him start a revolution.

“How’s it coming, Joe?”

Joe looks up from where he’s crouched over a rickety card table, soldering wires together.

“Bomb’s almost ready, Carl.”