Young Writers Society

This is the first chapter of a story I am writing. I have the next two chapters already complete as well, which I'll post later. It's a modern day crime novel with a neo-noir vibe, and it's also pretty stylized. I've also kind of experimented with polysyndeton, which I think gives it a unique (if unconventional) flow. The main character is an early thirties ex-con (and somewhat of a sociopath) living off of his monthly army veteran's cheques.

Just as a warning, there is cursing and dark subject matter, and in later chapters there is drug use and sexuality, and eventually violence. It is a crime drama, after all.

Hope you enjoy it.

BEAST

I play the message over a second time, because I couldn't believe what I heard the first time around. I think that maybe whatever part of my brain it is that interprets language from sound must be damaged, but I play it again anyway. I hear it clearly this time. When it's done I just stand there for a while. I look around at my poor excuse for a kitchen, just a counter-top and a sink and a fridge. The place is wreck. There's dishes from meals I don't even remember eating. I barely have any actual food, just condiments and some old frost-bitten microwavable dinners in the freezer. I've been living mostly off of ramen noodles for I don't know how long. The window over the sink shows me the outside world and it's bright and blue and green and sunny.

I press the play button on the answering machine and listen to the message a third time, just to rub some more salt in the wound. The girl's voice tells me that my brother is dead. Murdered, to be specific. Everybody's been trying to get a hold of me for two weeks. The funeral was last Saturday. Her voice is filled with acid and there's no sympathy in it all, not for me at least. Not that I'd have it any other way.

When the message stops I delete it and go and sit down on my shitty sofa in my shitty living room and look at the blank screen on my shitty television. I light a cigarette and watch the smoke curl and undulate in the air like a shapeless phantom, the spirit of my dead brother. I can't say that I'm surprised, really. My brother was never that smooth of an operator and I know he was hanging out with a crowd of guys that liked to think they were tough but really they were just a bunch of stupid fucking kids with guns and a good cocaine connect so they called themselves drug dealers. Not that I was any different at their age. Not that I'm any different right now.

Can't say I really care that I missed his funeral either. It's not that I don't care that he died. I do. But the funeral would have been filled with lots of people that I hate or that hate me or both, and I'd be a lying bastard if I said that I was one for tradition anyway. Or customs, or rituals, or whatever a funeral is. They say funerals are for the people left behind, closure for the grieving. I grieve in different ways than most people, and I've got a hankering for a different kind of closure. The bloody kind. My kind of funeral. It's going to be loud and nasty and a hell of a time and I'm already getting hard just thinking about it.

I finish my cigarette and toss it into an old cup of water that's turned yellow from all the old butts in it and then I go back to my tiny bedroom and open the sliding closet door. It's empty, save for my one good suit, a black Wal-Mart brand I bought four years ago for a wedding that never took place. No, not mine. I remove it out and lay it on the bed and then I reach up into the top of the closet and pull out a wooden box inside of which is my Glock model 22 .40 caliber pistol with the olive drab frame. It's a sexy little piece of equipment. I insert a clip and chamber one of the rounds and then I grab the extra spare clip and I set them both next to the suit. Then I strip off my clothes that I've been wearing for about a week and go into my bathroom. I look at my face and my naked body in the mirror. My skin is pale as snow and I look like a skeleton. A junkie skeleton. The only color in my face is the dark unshaven stubble around my jaw and my messy black unwashed hair. I get out my electric razor and attach the number one clippers and for some reason to which I am oblivious I completely shave my head down to a light stubble and then I shave my face with an old fashioned disposable. I shower but I can't use any soap because the only bar I have is slimy and discolored and I'd need a power tool to pry it off the tile shelf. After drying off I put the suit on and stick the Glock in my inner jacket pocket with the extra clip.

From inside my freezer underneath all of the frost-bitten dinners I remove a large plastic baggy filled with what little money I've saved up over the years out of my veteran's checks, which I've been scrounging out a living from for way too long. I count out the money very carefully. It's stiff and cold and mostly in twenties and fifties, and it totals to just over two-thousand bucks. Should be more than enough for my needs. I stick it all in my jacket and get my wallet and cellphone and my nice stolen silver watch and a cute little switch blade and then I look in the mirror one final time.

I feel spiritual. I feel like a new man, a man with a purpose.

Most people's greatest fear is that life may be meaningless. Most people don't even think about it. I used to fear it too, obviously. But in an odd way, almost subconsciously, I came to embrace it. The meaninglessness of my life is what allows me to do as I wish with it. There are no rewards. No punishments. No cosmic tally of your good and bad deeds. If God does exist, he has a strange sense of humor.

The last few years of my own existence has been a blur of drugs and paid sex and pent up aggression that was boiling up inside me like a volcano and there was no future in any of it. Now that's all going to change. It already has changed.

The cops won't look for my brother's killer, not for real. They might spend a little time on it in the beginning, asking around the usual places, run prints, routine stuff mostly, all of it bullshit. Or maybe I'll get lucky and some young punk ass hothead detective will want to make a big deal out of it. But I don't think so. To them my brother was nothing but another hood found dead over a sour drug deal. It wasn't the first time, and sure as the sun rises it won't be the last.

I make sure that I've got everything I need from my house before leaving. It'd be inconvenient to have to come back here, as my business is taking me south from where I live in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania to a place called Norristown, just north of Philadelphia. I'm going to see the girl who left the message on my answering machine. Her name is Carlie Hewitt, and she was my brother's girlfriend of quite a few years. They were living together, so I may be able to get a look at some of his stuff to give me a lead or two. Though I don't expect that she'll be very happy to see me.

I lock my house up on the way out and get into my lame little black '99 Ford Focus and light a cigarette. It's a decent drive to Norristown, and time is of the essence.