​Here’s the boiling sun

This is where you realise you fucked up.

Freeze frame on your eyeballs spun all the way into your skull, body gone diagonal. Here’s the point where you hear your voice disembodied, narrating something about wondering how you got here. Some dissociated double hanging outside yourself still living in this movie kid-you hasn’t grown out of, world projected into the unreal, because living is easier when you can pretend you’re the star of some fucked up reality show, even if the plot has been one shitty jump-scare after another. Difference is. Difference is this time when the tape starts rolling, when the bright flash fades into stuttered motion and you feel yourself ragdolled in the dirt, the world reforms into sick reality, huge and heavy and twice your size. Eyes like chainsaws. Cold and focused – a measured kind of rage that slams your stomach in your throat.

This is how you learn the meaning of powerless.

You’re sloppy when you’re mad. You can boost cars with your eyes shut, hotwire in under a minute. At seventeen your license is new, but at this point it’s just a formality – you’ve been driving since you were old enough to see over the wheel. Call it therapy. The surrogate father. That was Marlon’s excuse, at least, both of them with suckass excuses for dads, leaning on either side of the same car. Paternal substitutes clad in metal suits, engine where the heart goes.

Fucking Lonny. Can’t tell how long it’s been since he was lost to the road. Feels like just yesterday, forever ago.

If a car lets you down, you can fix it. Get another. Steal another. Whatever.

Ain’t the boost that fucks you. Blame Marlon. Blame your dad. Blame the prick at the bar led you on two hours, left you high and dry, the first in a series of stupid non events that started sometime in the late afternoon and with mounting frustration and a certain brand of classic idiocy propelled you towards your final destination. You knew before you shucked the lock that this was a bad call.

This is the shit you tell yourself when trying to reconcile your dumbfuck lack of situational awareness.

The pulp of teenage hubris is gunky and red between your teeth. Black in the street lit dark where it splatter smears along your top lip. Sprays across your chin. Flash-fried shock and here’s the burning truth – you picked the wrong car. You picked the wrong fucking car and because you are a cocky dumbfuck loser d-bag who wants to fuck the world in every which goddamn way, so friggin’ sure of his unmatched talent for talking himself out of any stupid mess he gets his brainless ass into that it didn’t occur – not for a single microsecond – there was non-zero chance of finding yourself in a situation where the only way you are getting out is in a body bag.

Don’t fuck with the Family.

You’re hearing it in the bone wet smack of knuckles on skin, fists like sledgehammers pounding against your cheek, in your gut, the dry retch that yanks on cracked ribs broken by another blow, Marlon’s voice keeping tempo with the assault:

Don’t. Fuck. With. The. Family. In your ear as if his ghost is bad company, inert witness to your murder mumbling futile reminders of simple rules to stay alive.

Hey, Lonny, hijo de la gran puta here’s a family man. Beating the piss outta me. Funny how shit works out.