A Noir Way Of Life

My watch ticked off the seconds like an annoying little brother, counting along with the microwave until the moment his butter-flavored pop-corn is ready, only to toss it back and forth between the left and right hands of uncertainty, cooling off the salty fumes of possibilities. The fallen kernels were my broken dreams, the opportunities lost from being too afraid of the heat they radiated, and I didn't even like the movie.1

The cold floor welcomed me like one would welcome a solicitor; with a bitter distaste, the kind of greeting that makes him wonder why he left Vegas with it's lights and it's girls. But then, he never was much of a people person, he's only doing it because it's the family business, and it's not like his father would listen to what he wanted and he can't just leave the missus, even if he has preferred the gentlemen after that breakthrough with his therapist. This line of thinking becomes obsolete when he is clocked by the bus and begins his slow bleeding to death, much in the same fashion I was.2

Industrial strength pain-killers roll out of my pockets in a pattern like a macabre game of marbles. This was the kind of situation that a college English professor would describe with words like 'incontrovertible' or 'indisputable,' that's how certain I was of my demise. Pretty soon I'd be just another goiter on the sickly thyroid of the city morgue, and I was one itchy growth on the neck.3

It was then that I realized the reason I could hear my watch was that my arm was broken and sprawled on the floor like the limb of a marionette, discarded by an ungrateful child, unable to understand the delicate nuances of puppetry. I was numb. Numb to the pain, numb to the world, blocking it all out. I knew only the fast-approaching song of death. It was a haunting melody, one that went one step beyond the crescendo and arpeggio of life's voices, holding up that 'wall of sound' as a barrier against the unknown. For death's song is a solo that picks off those in the choir of the living.4

My senses faded, like the end of an intense movie, sight and sound were the audience members flooding out like ants on the march to a tiny war, the toy soldiers of their composure defiantly ridiculing our century's Bacchus lovers as they prepare to strike a blow for little plastic men everywhere.5

And death came to me, like the flow of electricity out of your television set, reducing the lines upon lines of the dots upon dots until there is an infinitesimally small white dot, visible only to those with a vivid imagination, but without energy it can no longer exist, not even in conception and it, just like myself, ceases entirely, wasting away in oblivion.6