... your fist grabs a cold jackknife, just in case...

"You have no fucking clue what I’m talking about, do you?" You nod sheepishly, but in your coat pocket your fist grabs a cold jackknife, just in case. You notice the fast and ragged pulse of the man’s carotid artery just below his pale fleshy jowl as he patronizes you with his definition of "unnatural death". "We include deaths by accident, by suicide, by quick, sudden and unexpected illness, and, yes, death by another man’s hand, yes, murder, or, how I prefer to call it, manslaughter (legal definitions be goddamned), also womanslaughter and childslaughter." His voice is thick and milky with phlegm, but he refuses to clear his throat. "Of course, we don’t count death of old age or long drawn out illness or even the poor soul who drinks himself to death. Drinking oneself to death is not perceived to be an unnatural way to go in these parts, heh heh..." His warm, moist corpulence emits a farty, sugary stink --the scent of a man who overindulges in sweets. His teeth are gray and crooked.

The knife grows warm in your hand as the man fumbles for words to express the utter wonder of this stretch of unnatural death, this unbroken "red streak" as he calls it. "Yes, the red streak, as we call it (we, of course, being the citizens of this fair burg). The red, naturally, denoting the presence of spilled blood, which these kinds of ends usually have, often in abundance, even great abundance. Ours not a large community, you may have noticed. No one can properly claim they were first to notice this streak. No one can properly claim they were first to ascertain this daily connection. The cognizance of this daily event came to each and every one of us as if in a dream, because we communally shook ourselves from a deep slumber one gray morning and knew it to be undeniably true, and we could never remember a day previous when it was never true. Oftentimes this ‘event’ happens sometime in the morning, very early in the morning: a man slips on a sliver of bath soap, cracks skull on bathtub faucet; mother slips rat poison into a noisome child’s porridge; a jogging reverend, taking his daily constitutional before morning prayers, is rundown by a distracted teen driver, holy man’s head crushed by car tire. Sometimes the morning passes without incident, and even the afternoon and early evening. By then, all of us are on pins and needles. We look at one another with the bitter knowledge that any one of us could be the victim of a crime or accident. To even consider that the day could pass without incident.... well, there’s a story of a man, a man who read books, who thought the whole red streak business is, as he called it, ‘100% bullshit’. On one particular day, the morning passed, and the afternoon passed, and the evening passed without one unnatural death. Evening turned to night, and the hours crawled by. Some gathered at ‘Tipsy’s’, one of our many watering holes, and, between drinks, discussed the matters at hand. It was 11 pm, one hour left in the day and an incident had not occurred. The man who considered the red streak bullshit was deep in his cups, blurting to all within earshot that the red streak was, yes, indeed, bullshit and that no one should fall for such contrivances and man-made superstitions. ‘Just wait one hour,’ he said as the hour turned eleven. ‘In one hour you’ll be free of this so-called curse, this idiocy called the red streak, this dumb weight of fate everyone hangs around their neck in this fucking worthless town. It’s so heavy everyone walks with bowed heads.’ The man, this idiot, then took a long draught of a gigantic glass mug of foamless piss-yellow beer, a faint smile on his drearily wet lips, almost proud of his (not quite) cleverness. He burped and continued: ‘Consider the freedom you’ll have. Never will you have to avoid risk, to avoid even the possibility of risk. Never will you have to sweat and wallow in fear. Never will you have to look timidly askance, to press yourself tight against a wall. Never will you dwell in dumb anxiety. You can walk freely, talk freely, know that chance and accident turns only on an axel of happenstance and not on a preset map. C’mon, be happy! Bartender, you bastard, drinks to all my friends...’"

¡Matalo!

Shit Reigns!

a nasty and misshapen beginning...

What will follow will only be the nasty and misshapen beginning.... Will you be my friend? I only ask because some excursions require some wrinkle of companionship, no matter the quality. And where we're going, a friend will come in handy. Hopefully, also a hand to hold. I won't lie to you. This will be grim. This will be a bad place.

This place is not a city, but a town. Perhaps not even a town, but a clumsy and rusty abbatoir. The air is always warm, and usually reeks of raw meat. If not raw meat, then the aroma of salt and butter from a nearby citizen's sweat. It must be said: a high majority of the townspeople are grossly overweight.

Another strange truth about this town: a least once daily, a town citizen will die unnaturally. Strangley, this is a bragging right for the town. You greet an upstanding man-about-town on a main street sidewalk, issue a mild and unexciting "good morning"; this man, round, blubbery face shiny and bright strawberry red, becomes quite agitated, his thick eyes popping like ping pongs... He stammers excitedly, "So, who's it gonna be? Who's gonna kick?" His chimpanzee grin melts to nothingness as he perceives your increduity. You have no goddamn idea what the fat goon is talking about. "You stupid, pathetic bastard," he says, quite rudely. "You have no fucking idea what I'm talking about, do you?" You nod sheepishly, but in your coat pocket your fist grabs a cold jacknife, just in case. You notice the fast and ragged pulse of the man's carotid artery even through his thick and sweaty throat as he patronizes you with his definition of "unnatural death". "We include deaths by accident, by suicide, by quick, sudden and unexpected illness, and, yes, death by another man's hand, murder as it's usually known."