by Graham Swanson
DEMONS fluttered from tipped-over garbage canisters and crawled over
spilled water cans and smashed HUGGIES boxes. The crooked brickwork
glowed over the foggy street lamps and the clouds finally blew away
and a few planets shined like holes in the sky. Their bruises and
bullet scars on their hands and necks scabbed over. Every night they
jump right from bed and get to work. While their women stuffed powder
into bags in closed garages, they wasted no time shipping it across
town armed with silver daggers.
The liars they intended to kill hid from the war ballads dropping
from a heavy bass stereo by waiting in the dark apartments of their
elders. They already stepped out and immediately met a spy walking
tall with his hands in his pockets. While they wore diamond rings and
brand new Nikes, no furniture decorated the living room and no
silverware lay divided up in the plastic tray in the kitchen drawer.
Boards covered up the windows, but they still watched out the slots
towards a street of fools and johns. In the magnificence of the city
light, their fake jewels shined brighter.
The new kid drove sweating over the four bodies in his trunk. His
gas needle wavered below E. He still had to cross Central to reach
the chemical bath of the Bike Shop. If the Cat knew that he took his
keys from his pocket to take the Cutlass, then he could count a
finger for every corpse that night. He had no money to get more gas,
and the frauds of the darkened apartment already spent his treasures
in the foggy alleys between wooden faces of lathwork fences. With New Central street in view, the night lit up with ultra-blue and manganese
red.
To the new kid’s relief, the lights passed on to speed away after
racing vehicles screeching out of the wind mist of the gas station. On Old Central, his phone rang, and on the other end, a voice hissed for him
to reveal himself to a posse of lowlifes. He almost hung up, but he
saw his reflection lit up by the phone light in all darkened windows.
They called him names, they mocked his family, and they threatened to
be there in his nightmares. He stayed on the line, “I have the
sharpest teeth, I don't even sleep, and your four men learned it
tonight.”
The demons on the other line hung up first, and they huddled in the
pink warm light of their mother’s basement. She packed bullets into
their clips to take with them to stroll for the next morning. She did
this with death ringing her eyes and a cigar drooping from her lip
every night. She wore the best clothes and drove the car to get
lobster to eat and brought them back a to-go platter of calamari.
They wanted to storm out to feud but her knife outweighed each of
theirs.
Their mistress broke the nose of stronger men who ganged up on her
and attempt to wrestle her away. She cracked each of their heads with
a knife sharpener from under her bed and told them to get real before
they marched into the darkness. Too many of her children left behind
rings and she still wore them on her fingers. She never forgot their
sweet names or their beautiful faces. They became men under her
motherhood shortly before drowning in pools of their own blood.
The man who executed them knew exactly how to shoot them so their
spines would separate from their brains, leaving them alive but
paralyzed, so that their mothers would stay awake at night in horror
knowing how they died. He danced among the potholes and sinking
ledges, slept in the trash of abandoned halls, listened to the music
of crows singing of the delicate pleasures, the candy-sweet taste of
manflesh. He carried no ID because he was older than his driver’s
licenses. His heart stopped beating a long time ago, yet he still
walked the brick paths smiling at the smell of blood tracking behind
him because rain clouds gathered around the moon.
The killer possessed two gods. They rubbed on his hips from the
pockets of his raincoat. He took out the Glock to fend off punk
muggers from disappointing their mother, and he used the carbine to
destroy vehicles and break down stronghold doors. Each time before he
delivered mercy of shattering sparks, he took a moment to hold the
weapons against his dead heart and held them up to the spirit lights
of the sky to be blessed by the souls of fallen demons. Then he spent
the ammunition buying souls from the street.
This silent lord spent the night cumming on the face of a girl who
until she met him, was on a full scholarship to become a doctor back
home. She needed the crack he dosed her with. He took his pubic hair
and made her look like a cat with long whiskers. He still had a water wrinkled and color drained copy of CAT IN THE HAT on a shelf. All his
books contained brightly colored animations, cartoons, and few words.
The silent lord possessed phenomenal writing skills, and his text
messages pounded phones louder than any voice command. With one
message, all demons in the neighborhood moved crack. With one more,
it all paused. He learned it from leaving love notes behind for the
crushes he had in the schoolyard before those girls got pimped. In
this Garden of Eden, he was the top cat.
One other old man, the Rat, knew the Cat from the playground swing
set. They talked loudly about the girls he acquired back at his club.
The Cat pressed one button, and those ladies left their bedrooms to
come to his box under the alleyway then they went forth selling his
rocks and returning the earnings in duffle bags. They feared him and
merely admired the silky personality of their guardian. He was a
real DEMON, not just a black goatee in a red cape.
The Rat left his club early after his phone went off with a photo of
his car on fire. None of his frightened guards attended to his
stifled orders so he left the club by himself to face his accuser.
Outside in the empty lot, the car stood perfectly fine. A fresh
downpour of rain washed it clean, but the bumpers grinded low against
the pavement. He got down to check the tires. Each one completely
drained of air but not a single cut of damage.
Naked demons from the club stepped out to see the Cat appear in a
cloud of mist as the lot lights blew up and showed the pavement in
crystal fragments. Foot patter echoed under the cover of darkness.
The silk suit tried to hide in his car but the last thing he saw
before the windshield shattered under a shower of red hot sparks was
an antler being forced into his armpit and through his heart. He
died there trying to murmur to the Cat under bubbles of blood and
mucus. “We grew up together as kids, aren’t we are still
friends?”
The Cat smiled with an unflinching eye and planted a coverless copy of
Stuart Little in the Rat's lap, and turned the pages to that the face of
the rat in overalls faced the cab light. The man tried to tear the
antler free but his arm didn’t bend far enough to take it all the
way out. He died after three more weeping breaths gasping to say
something to the persecutor angels in black wings swarming his
vehicle and pecking flesh from his bones. Under his club he kept
young girls chained to radiators making cam videos for the dark int.
The crowd whispered rumors of the dead man being an informant to the
13 Illuminati families, and so they left his body outside his
dilapidated home to be eaten by starving dogs.
All the money the Rat obtained ended up in rubber bands on the Cat’s
shelf on the pedestal he slept on under the catwalks and alleyways.
He kept it out in the open but no thief dared to climb down the
gutter to find it. He spent the money as fast as he made it and drove
around in a brand new car with no plates, and flew from city to city.
Each time he returned to find his home in the box entranced by
invisible trespassers. He bought a new box of bullets and he poured
them out. He stored his poems inside.
One influencer poet quit school and found himself squatting in the
studio apartment of a crumbling tenement complex. He never met the
Cat but tried to seduce several of his women, and even got one to
come over to stay the night. She told him everything he wanted to
know, but she didn’t want to leave with him to a new world. The
poet opened the music studio in his laptop and recorded a scathing
song swearing vengeance on the Cat and the streets he lived beneath.
He put his frustrations aside and went back to pulling a red wagon to
peddle albums to the lowlifes carrying paintings into the sewers. They
ignored him because they thought if he hated the Cat so much, he’d
be better off confronting him rather than singing about it.
The Cat really really really liked the song a lot. He even heard it
playing from car windows and from apartment balconies. The more he
listened to it, the more he admitted to himself that the young poet
of the street possessed remarkable talent worthy of his envy. All the
years around the stars of music, from the penthouse rockstars of the
Midwest to the limousine trains in the West, he never took a liking
to singing, but this kid made him feel the loss for his past. It’s just
he wished the young man possessed the courage to sing it to his face
on his dais on which his box lay, so he left the alley to be the
boy’s number one fan.
The Cat saw the demon poet pass by several times but he never
recognized the dirty coat of the Cat sitting on a park bench,
standing in the street at night, or watching from rooftops. He
watched the boy sleeping from the rickety fire escape and wanted to
take his hand and hold it hard. He almost felt emotion thawing in his
chest but after a shower of small needles passed in his chest, he choked
and fell ever harder in love. He wrote a song with a salute of
gunfire from the catwalk at the peasants below.
Bullets shattered the windows of widows and scared hustlers out of
their hiding places. Playground pieces ricocheted with rapid bullets,
empty clips fell to the ground far below, and a thunder of birds
lifted from building tops into the moonlit clouds. The poet never saw
the Cat before, but he never forget the shadow silhouetted against
the brilliant strobes of white and red fireworks bleaching the walls
of sinking ruins with dark coat tails unfurling in the wind. Like
nothing he imagined before, his imagination went forever captured by
the terror of this demon escaping into the fog of night without even
touching the ground. Not even the universities had something so awe
inspiring.
The Cat never saw his schemes as crimes but if the poet made songs,
then he conducted operas. All the gunfire and no one died that
night. Babies giggled in the arms of their mothers at the sparkles
and firetruck blasts filled the night sky. The random attack became
the talk of the street. The young champions of the school sports team
looked up to the horrifying shadow lurking behind the curtains of the
city.
Those young demons went home after game practice to play video games as the Cat smoked blunts of 9 POUND hammer. He watched every one of
their games and cheered for the injuries they inflicted onto the opposing schools from the back of the bleachers. After the games and
the triumph teams marched home, the Cat walked onto the field to
anoint the victory with burning sage, or the defeats by crushing the
bones of a rabbit. He never participated in the thrill of war games.
He ran from the drifting Martin packed with masked warriors.
The Cat participated in his own ways. After academy bells chimed, he
hung out in the parking lot by the fast cars paid for by bribes, and
inside he told the athletes about weak spots in their opponent's
armor. On game night they slaughtered the opposition to the shrieking
approval of parents and cheerleaders standing up and throwing their
voices out howling in celebration of broken bones. The team burned
sage in dark basements to honor their guardian angel. The coaches
never could kick the Cat out of the hearts and souls of their
champions.
By graduation, these young demons entered the Cat’s service on the
front lines of his war against the city. They marched in the middle
of the windswept streets with heavy weapons under black robes. With
one blow they crushed the spines of their enemies. Everyone came out
to greet the death squadrons in the street with prizes and gifts,
flowers, and wine bottles. The guardians of the street drove in luxury
sedans like the oxcart of Charlemagne and every child adored them.
The Cat finally took total control of his side of the city he
adored, and no living being in the city dared test his long awaited
reward of mortal souls. His arm reached every phone, every cradle,
and every car from the guy sleeping in the ditch to the human
resources recruiter of the gleaming corporation towers. Bank vaults
opened for him before the robberies commenced, detectives conducted
raids only to find photos of their families pinned to the wall, and
terrorists from foreign lands walked freely into smokey bars without
passports or even a fake ID. The Cat just needed to press SEND. The
dice rolled in his favor at last.
Daughters of wealthy publishers flew to the city to meet him and
join his brotherhood of slayers in the dark channels under the city.
He didn’t even need to seduce them on INSTAGRAM with photos of a
palace or a sports car. They volunteered to join his army and use
their family’s wealth to destroy his enemies. He sent them to be
brides of the heroes strangling brigands on the street and shooting
down helicopters over the peer. At all times a ring of all female
bodyguards from across the world protected him from police snipers
and he didn't need to bite a single neck.
One of the Cat’s trusted warriors yelled at him. Shielded by a
phone screen, he accused the Cat of quitting the use of force out of
weakness. His longest serving paladin, a follower since before
puberty turned his skinny bones into gallant stature, told this to
some stranger visiting from a place where the sea met the sky. He
said it under the same street lights the Cat lost his heart. They
tried to tell the Cat not to be alarmed by the betrayal, but he
already knew. Someone was giving the identities of his drug
traffickers away to the FBI.
The brave days of the FBI sending agents undercover to infiltrate
organizations ended long ago, and now they recruit from within the
ranks of their prey. They communicated online far from the front
lines of danger. Instant communication means they can kill their
enemies with a drone strike with a press of a button in a base
fortified in TEXAS. They are experts in covert action. They are all
nerds of the internet and they spend all their lives lurking behind
computers in dark basements of government offices.
The traitor sat on his pedestal in a tower overlooking the brilliant
barrel fires on one side of the city, and the glamorous theaters on
the other side. Surrounded by actors, dancers, singers in his parlor,
he talked like a Templar but didn’t claim spines. He never tortured
a captive rival taken by the Cat nor sold a slave to workhouses down the coast. All because he knocked up one woman and she aborted it without
his consent. The Cat knew that people sometimes appear harsh, but
they don’t wish vendettas on anyone unless it's someone’s fault.
In the safety of his menagerie of performers, he dressed in the
robes of the crusader and wore his dagger in full view across his
chest sash. He stood and fired bolts at glass rings on the balcony
overlooking the green sea tides. The guests borrowed his guns to
fire the next rounds in the contest and he always provided them with
spare rounds. In bed, he told a starlet all about the battles he won
and the champions he slew with the weapon she undressed him with.
As a person on the stage, he took the role of performer.
The stage became his bed, and the sheets sunk to the floor with each
thrust of his rupturing hips. His guests didn’t notice the
squadron of black robed fighters waiting in the shadows of the wall.
After he rolled off her and they cuddled in each other's filth and
sweat, the bishops of death drew their shining long swords. Shredded
bedding snowed out the window in white ribbons. Hundreds of lost
souls from all over the city were at risk, and now the lights fell,
the curtain dropped, and a dozen armed men swarmed the stage.
The actors pleaded to be let out as the party ran out of wine to
pour over the women and rails to snort off the prop guns. They pushed
against the door, but they didn’t know about the dark clerics
waiting in the hallway with their heavy weapons rested against their
shoulders. Not a single one bowed gracefully before exiting stage
left, stage right, and their heads rolled across the floor one by one
into the Traitor’s bedroom as the warriors prayed to their weapons
to bring the martyr compassion in the afterlife and to understand
the sins they committed.
Blood soaked the walls, ran down the columns, and splattered
against portraits of the Traitor’s now childless mother. Bloodstained the mattress black. Blood dripped from the ceiling, and blood
drenched the laps of the all mighty slayers. One by one they passed
each other's weapons around to take turns hacking at the bones, sawing
out organs from ribs, taking off arms, legs, but they left the head
and face intact for the funeral.
The mother of the traitor must pay the price for the misdeeds of her
child. As the graveyard hole swallowed the casket with what could be
recovered of the body, she heard two dozen capes hover in the fog.
The Cat held an umbrella in one hand over her head as the rain began
to filter from clouds of pollution. He braced his divine 9mm in the
other against her racing heart. She used to be his favorite person in the
whole world.
“I’ve been with you since you were in diapers. I’m not even
trying to stop you.”
“So what’s up with you talking shit with him on the phone?”
His throat ruptured.
“He was just playing.”
The Cat almost fell for it, but a fake person doesn’t look up to
the sky when speaking with conviction with glassy drunken eyes, and
rotten breath. Her posture slumped and instead of taking his hand
when he offered it to her, she collapsed into the mud in the shadow
of the tombstone. The Cat promised her a mausoleum to contain her
body and the bodies of her family before he shot her in the temple.
He kicked the body into the pit with her son and left to let the
gravediggers plug the hole with clay. Crows assembled around the open
grave, but they can’t eat fake meat.
The Cat pressed a button on his phone and watched hooded exiles
scurry out of doorless vans and bullet riddled dumpsters. All over
cars moved his supplies from the array of burning barrels to even the
gated communities protected by cameras and Dobermans on the city
outskirts. The rain poured harder as night fell and the green sea
mist floated first onto the beach of dead crustaceans and capsized
fish boats, then filled in the spaces between black towers. He held
his weapons over dead and prayed to them to deliver him beyond this
deranged and decrepit playground of ruins to an empire greater than
Spain. Trappers worked hard knowing he watched them.
Anyone else claiming to be the main pusher deserved the blowtorch
that took their eyes. Every time the Cat removed one, he found
another in some dirty pit accompanied by lowlifes. They carried newer
guns, a bigger arsenal of high powered gunfire capable of shattering
the cannon of a battle tank or penetrating the armor of a security
truck. The Cat offered them his embrace among the legion of black
robed mutilators if they only stopped the lies and agreed to work for
him. He even offered to pay their hospital bills, but the lies
persisted.
New rivals arose from the ashes of every burned house, and every
dead mother. They armed themselves in suits of Kevlar and chain
links. The Cat wore rags, mites crawled in nests around his hair, and
every woman who slept in his box on the dais under the alley spoke of
glaucoma, of open sores and swelling bumps, rashes that he scratched
until they bled, and pain that burned so hot that he preferred not to
make love to his brides. He dug up the mother he killed and hung her
body up in ropes under the cascading waterfalls of light and rain
prominently above his home, and every night he asked her to show him
a son to help him fight his enemies. Secret enclaves behind alleyway
labyrinths echoed with voices of old world children barking the war
songs of the lost poet threatening to devour a mangy tabby stray
and leave its dead carcass on the doorstep of the Cat.
Bombs reduced secret dance clubs to heaps of crawling brick, matches
dropped down fuel lines incinerated gas stations tagged by their
vigil, corrupt judges washed ashore on the beach in trash bags, and
so the demon knights in dark robes took to marching down the street
sweating from the heat of torches in their hands and exhausted from
carrying M4s straight from the locker. All down the lane twisted
murals parodied them on the bullet torn face of every building from
the open streets to the breadths of the narrowest alley path. They
put down their hoods to look above at swaying damaged war helmets
chained to balconies. Every fluttering shadow up high nearly drew
concentrated fire from their weapons. The Cat watched from the
highest bell tower warned them not to let these harmless taunts bring
dishonor to their new empire before it even got a chance to free the
oppressed.
Maidens braced the .44s of their dead boyfriends. They watched from
windows. Dishonored policemen with night vision scopes monitored from
closed causeways over the silent battlefield. Any homeless man who
didn’t run away to find shelter elsewhere found speeding bullets
dropping them into heaps of steaming refuse. Any demon unaware of the
war declaration endangered themselves by hearing the shots. They
swarmed church doors begging for sanctuary. Sisters barred the doors
and stood over the palisade arch armed with anointed shotguns to
chase the herd back into their hives.
The Cat spat liquor from the top of the bell tower, as one by one
his champions found themselves alone shaking in the cold night. For
the Cat never knew a son of his own, he always called his black robes
executioners his children of the awakening world but a needle of pain
showered his dead heart. He gasped as they stormed the brothels. They
didn’t come out, and none of his messages pinged with *seen.
Helicopters soared overhead and tanks crushed barricades to push
their way into the downtrodden theater. Weakness left the burning
city and only steel pillars remained in the white charcoal.
The Cat watched war machines tear down the playground of his first
drug deal, and bury it in flaming wreckage. The pains in his heart
grew. Missiles obliterated the stone porch he met his best friends on
where they shared stories of first kisses and sips of stolen whiskey
long ago. His black knights exited holes in the brothel wall and
charged into wavering curtains of smoke to get decapitated by sniper
fire. The survivors escaped to cover behind the walls of the church
to be impaled by spiraling javelins, and the remains of his fearless,
little army came face to face with halberds in the ranks of the
fiercest, most heartless DEMONS- so toned by the horrors of the Cat
that they appeared more beast than man with horns and claws, nails
and outstretched wings, gleaming MG-42s freshly cleaned and
calibrated. His heart vessels quivered in stifled bursts and a
trickle of warmth pumped over corrosion in his veins.
Real demons ransacked the city. They
pulled down every statue and broke open every fire hydrant. By
sunrise, a pink haze glowed over the rebar strips and melted shoes
sticking up from smoldering powder as ancient cannons fired into the
ocean. The Cat vanished from the tower, but his phone landed in the
grasp of a creature born from the kindness of suffering, and
everlasting torment. In the dens of monsters, angels gnawed on bones of the
dead knights, blood speckled robes looted from rubble and battlefields draped the fireplace, the guns and
lances of the Cat's army melted into tiny silver statues worn around every neck in the new city. In a jar on the mantel floated a shriveled black heart. It rippled in a bath of
oil.
Orange bags of medicine spilled on the floor but busy hands kept packing
nylon until trailers tipped over. All phones across
the nation warned of a new epidemic, but in a drafty back room
cooled by the spinning blades of a frosty vent fan, the nephilum listening counted freshly minted c-notes. On the floor beneath the
office brothers and sisters worked cheap not to build an empire but nor PUNISH the extinguished demons outside and beyond. They wore
cave jewels on their belts and platinum crowns above the star on
their foreheads.
