quatre: good morning

It had been a blur- his arms strained against the straps and broke free of them, they had been loosely done with no expectations that this would happen. He’d waited, until the pain had subsided to a dull roar, until his skull had been sown back up, and until it had been trapped inside his head.

His brief scuffle with the “doctor’s”, the frenzied grappling as scalpels and syringes and surgical instruments were grabbed and swung, and thrown around, it was all a haze. He remembered the “timer” the detonator, and lunged for it, and seconds later he stood, back against the wall with it clutched in his hand. They were on the ground, clutching their wounds, bleeding all over.

Looking down, he saw that the screen had been cracked, and it was a mess of red light shining through the tiny black screens.

“When is it set for?”

“We don’t know. We never knew.”

“I don’t even have any meetings planned what do you mean, blowing away half the businesses in America, how can you not know?”

“You don’t ask questions. You never, ever ask questions. You don’t talk about it! There are rul-“

The voices had faded as he walked away.

A warm breeze blew at his back, stinging the wound, ruffling his shirt. Higher in the sky, the sun glinted from the windows, from the cars coasting by, from the sunglasses of people walking past. He wondered why he had bought the house, and remembered the other reasons; remembered imagining loved ones in every room, a home with the curtains pulled up and warm, clean sunlight pouring in.

Richard Gabourel walked down the sidewalk, not knowing where he was going, but knowing what he wanted to do. He had a life that could end any second, and a thousand things to fill it up with.