A People's History

 He loved finding books. The weight of them in his hands, the way they opened, the delicate pages turned by his hand, or wind. They felt so mysterious as his eyes moved from line to line. Most of the time the pages had become dry and brittle. Occasionally they would flake into the air. A gust of wind touched his worn clothes. He closed his eyes and tried to remember his mother's face. She had been beautiful. Her smile, the memory of it, made him smile. Her voice, what did her voice sound like? It once sang him to sleep. When had he last heard it? He felt a tear forming at the corner of his eye, wanting to escape and weave down the slopes of his cheeks. There were no memories of his father. He let the book fall from his hands. It was no good to him, even if he had known what it said. His stomach rumbled. Soon, it would be insistent. He walked down the cracked and over grown highway, towards a state that no longer existed, in a country that was only a memory. 

No Help Here

I found his notebook a few months after he had passed away.
It was in his bedroom between the mattress and the box-spring.
There weren't very many people that came around after he passed,
so I just left his things as they had been. I sat on the bed and began
to flip through the pages, reading bits and pieces here and there.
We weren't as close as we had once been by the end, we still
cared about each other but it as different. There were times where
it was hard to read his writing, not so much because of what he had
written but because his penmanship was like mine, atrocious. What
I could read wasn't surprising. He struggled to get clean but refused
to let anyone help him. I tried, I really tried to help out but he just
wouldn't have it. He wrote about how lonely the struggle to get
clean was. He didn't have to go about it that way but what more
can you do when someone refuses your help? What can you do
when someone refuses to ask for help? When I was done I set
the notebook on the bed and looked out his window. It faced
the brick wall of the alley. Below, I could hear the garbage truck
gorging itself on the cast off remains of so many lives.

One Hot Afternoon Nap (Draft 2)

         I went to sleep in the middle of the afternoon to the sound of her voice singing to me.

         I could feel the heat grow as the fan recycled the hot air. A helicopter had been combing the neighborhood looking for a man they would find locked in someone's home. He was a petty thug like all the other wannabe badasses with rap sheets. When the police cornered him he emerged from the house with a woman in her mid-40's in his arms. He brandished a pistol and pressed it against her temple. Guns were drawn. Shots were fired. A few bullets hit him in the extremities while another pierced the flesh just below his heart. The fatal shot blew off a chunk of his skull. They both collapsed to the ground. Red oozed out across the ground like cherry syrup. She was never quite the same after that afternoon.  Covered in blood and brains she sobbed in gasping breathes with his body next to her. She had been grazed in the leg by one of the officer's bullets, but otherwise physically unharmed. The story would later make the rounds of the local news affiliates. 

         When I woke up the shooting had passed and the record had finished. The afternoon was still hot as police taped up the crime scene. At least one person would have that afternoon seared into memory.

One Hot Afternoon Nap

I went to sleep in the middle of the afternoon to the sound of her 

voice singing to me. I could feel the heat growing as the fan

recycled the hot air. A helicopter was outside combing the
neighborhood looking for a man they would find locked in
someone's home. When the police finally cornered him he emerged
from the house with a woman in her mid-40's in his arms. Guns
were drawn, shots were fired. A few bullets hit him in his extremities
while another pierced the flesh just below his heart. The fatal shot
blew off a chunk of his skull and brain matter. She was never quite
the same after that afternoon. Covered in blood and brains she had
been grazed in the leg by one of the officer's bullets, but otherwise
physically unharmed. The story would later make the rounds of the
local news affiliates. When I woke up the shooting had passed.
The afternoon was still hot as police taped up the crime scene. At
least one person would have that afternoon forever seared into memory.