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The guy who gave me Rollo’s number couldn’t have been a friend. He might’ve wanted me dead, though I can’t prove it. Or maybe this acquaintance of an acquaintance really had been trying to help, and he had just completely misjudged what I was willing to do, what I was capable of. 

But Rollo had known, I think. He had shaken his head the moment he laid eyes on me. 

He pulled up in a silver car, compact, small, forgettable, and I was pleased. I had expected him to drive a raggedy pick-up filled with cracked TV sets, amputated sinks, rusted fixtures beyond recognition. The things no one else wanted. 

I should mention that I didn’t know what Rollo did, only that he needed an extra set of hands in exchange for an easy five-hundred. I knew the job would be dirty or illegal, probably both. Desperation had not made me brave, but it had made me willing. 

Rollo cracked open his window—here, here was when he shook his head—and waved me over. 

“You the ride-along?” he asked. His voice was rough, all grit and cigarettes. 

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”

I heard the click of a lock being disengaged. I got in the passenger’s seat. We took off. 

Rollo was hard to look at, probably because he was hard to define. He was round without being fat. He looked older than my father and healthier than me. He had no smell, no scent of cologne or working man’s sweat, just void. I shifted in my seat. Stared out the window and the slow scroll of worn brick buildings, and when I got tired of the desolation, I stared at my phone. 

“Put that thing away.”

I forced my neck to turn on rusty hinges, toward Rollo. 

“Focus,” Rollo said, gruff but not unkind. “Put that thing away.”

I felt protest bubble up my throat, some petulant whine I thought I had grown out of, and swallowed it. I slid the phone in my pocket. 

“The memes can wait till you’re off the clock.”

“It was a job application.” I tried to keep the accusation out of my voice. “I was almost done, too.”

“I haven’t filled one of those out in fifteen years. That’s the secret to success. Longevity.”

We drove on, insults and questions flashing behind my eyes like a fast-forwarded montage, and I voiced none of them. The jobs I have held the longest have been the one’s where I’ve barely spoken at all. 

“I have to make a quick stop,” Rollo said. “It won’t take long.”

We drove on. The brick buildings of downtown tapered and morphed, seemed to slowly transform into a series of houses, all bright colors and vinyl siding. I’d never been to this neighborhood before. Never had a reason to. It wasn’t nice, not by any suburbanite standards, but it was too nice for me. 

Rollo pulled in front of an old colonial, beat up and bruised. There was a swing set in the front yard. The seat on one of the swings was broken, limp and dangling and useless. In the driveway was a pickup truck, the kind I had imagined Rollo drove but did not. 

“There’s a toolkit in the backseat,” Rollo said. “Grab it.”

I unbuckled, leaned around my seat. There it was, a muted gray toolbox, bigger than I expected it to be. I clenched my teeth as I lifted it, bit back a groan, almost dropped it. The box rattled like a metallic snake. 

“Open it,” Rollo said. 

I Hesitated. Obeyed. 

“Shears.” 

I picked what I thought was the right tool. When I tried to give it to Rollo, he put up his hands as if I had threatened to strike him. 

“Not yet.”

He reached under his seat, pulled out a pair of pink vinyl gloves, put them on. A ridiculous image hit me, one of Rollo elbow deep in bubbles and soap, scrubbing out a pan and whistling while he worked. If he noticed the asinine grin tugging at my lips, he didn’t mention it. He held out a gloved hand.

“Okay,” he said. “Shears.”

Rollo got out of the car and made his way up the driveway. 

“You need me to come with?” I called after him. 

He shook his head without turning around. He disappeared around the back of the house. I pulled my phone back out. 

It hadn’t been a complete lie, that I was filling out job applications—but I was nowhere near finishing this one, and I hadn’t finished the five others I had started. The blank fields, the call for references I do not have, turn my blood to sludge, make my head feel too heavy for my shoulders. I write my name and it reeks of past impotence. 

Once, when I worked at a department store where my job was to run register and say hello to people, I got fired for double scanning a coupon. The system shouldn’t have allowed it, but it did, and someone found out, and they had been looking for a reason to cut me loose anyway. The funny thing is, I can’t remember if I did it on purpose or not. I think I might have just to see if I could. 

I hoped I could do better on my own. I bought marijuana plants and a sun lamp and this is it, I thought, this is the passive income I’d been craving, but one day I returned to my small garden and they had all shriveled, gone brittle and useless. I gave the remains to a friend of mine. The next time I saw him, he flipped me off, said the leaves didn’t even get him an inch off the ground.  

What was left for me to be, after all this wasted movement? Maybe Rollo knew.

Rollo emerged, short stride, brisk walk, face carved of stone. He carried something in his rubber-pink hand, something wrapped in white cloth. He opened the passenger door, tossed the bundle on my lap. My whole body clenched. I said nothing and waited. He got in the driver’s seat, removed the vinyl gloves. I looked away, just for a second at the bundle on my lap, and when I looked up again Rollo was staring at a clipboard, tapping at its edge with a worn down pencil. It was like he had magic pockets, bottomless and infinite, that held everything he needed. I felt I could learn his secrets if I forced myself to watch him long enough, but he was so goddamn hard to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. 

He dragged the pencil across the clipboard, a straight horizontal slash. Then he put it under his seat and we drove on. 

“There are plastic bags in the glove box,” he said, nodded at the bundle on my lap. “Put it in there.”

My tongue felt like a dried out paintbrush. I teased the edges of the white cloth. The coupons, it was those fucking coupons all over again, and there was no stopping it. With one quick movement I could lay the contents of the package bare. I could learn a secret about Rollo and he couldn’t take it back.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” 

There was no threat in Rollo’s voice, only a sort of weary curiosity. My fingers trembled over the bundle. I resisted the magnetic pull. I put the package in the plastic bag and tried to forget it existed. 

“Good choice,” Rollo said. 

A flush of pride, warm and rising from the pit of my gut, a sudden jet of dopamine at finally having done something right. I was about to thank him, but then we hit a pothole, hit it hard. I jumped in my seat. Bit my tongue and tasted copper.

“God-fucking-damn!” 

Rollo slammed on the breaks. I lurched forward. If I hadn’t been wearing my belt, I think I would’ve been launched through the windshield. 

“What the fuck, man? What the fuck was that?”

Rollo didn’t move, didn’t look at me. Just idled in the middle of the road. 

“Don’t curse,” he said.

The way he spoke, it took my anger away. Replaced it with something frail. I gulped and swallowed my own blood.

“Don’t curse,” he said again. “It’s childish. Immoral.”

“Immoral,” I repeated. 

“Even worse since you took the God’s name in vain.”

The God’s—I’d never heard it put like that before. The way it sounded, like something sacred I could never touch but had to honor anyway, made me want to take back my dignity. 

“But you, you fucking—” 

“If you curse one more time, it’s over. You won’t get paid.”

I clenched my fists; my hands shook anyway. I tried not to speak. I thought about the bundle and tried to guess what was inside of it, if it might change who the moral superior was. I wondered if that even mattered, if honor and codes meant anything beyond their adherents.  

We stopped in front of another house, this one small, hardly bigger than a trailer. It was the kind of place I imagined myself living one day. The front door was open a crack, as if we were expected. A dog barked in the distance. It sounded like a big dog. 

Rollo reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small revolver. He popped open the cylinder and poured the bullets into his hand. He scattered them in the backseat like birdseed. Then he handed me the gun. 

“The man you’re about to meet thinks he’s special,” Rollo said. “Thinks he’s above the way things are. If I went in alone, he’d put up a fight. That’s why you’re here.”

“Are you going to kill him?” The words came out calm. How strange. 

“Of course not. That’s bad business.” 

My eyes drifted toward the glovebox, toward the bundle nestled in the dark. The wrapped flesh of debtors. Of someone like myself.

“What do you even need me for?”

“I need you point that at him. I need you to watch me.” 

He reached into his jacket, pulled out another gun, this one bigger, sleeker, and probably loaded. Rollo got out of the car, started to make his way to the front door, inching along sideways and slow, a cautious hermit crab. 

I did it then. I reneged on the one correct thing I had done that day and opened the glove box. Unwrapped the bundle. Gawked at the blood-caked shears and the uprooted tongue, covered in crimson slime like a wounded amphibian. I wanted to run away. But I didn’t. I dragged my leaden skeleton to the front door, to Rollo. 

“Remember,” he said. “All you have to do is watch.”

But I couldn’t even do that. 

THE END


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blake’s stories have appeared in various rags, including Hypnopomp Literary MagazineTales from the Moonlit Path, and Bridge Eight.

His noir-toned novella, Prodigal: An American Parable, will be released soon by small publisher Trouble Department, and my urban fantasy novel, God-Box, is forthcoming from Literary Wanderlust.


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