Big Maria

by Johnny Shaw

Government and the corporations and the media tangled up like pythons in a knot. An orgy of perversions. People don’t matter. Not the small people. Not the invisible.

No matter how many people he had around him, he had never felt more alone.

His mind drifting, Harry wondered if people ever lost their sense of smell. Like a deaf or blind person, but their nose didn’t work. He remembered hearing that that was one of the things that happened when you got struck by lightning. If you lived.

Ricky knew the old man was talking lies, but talking about gold was too fun. Everyone should spend some time talking treasure.

Times when not doing something is stupider than doing something stupid.

“Ridiculous just means that nobody else has tried.”

In the real world, love wasn’t a good enough reason to do anything. It was a romantic excuse to make horrible mistakes. The right decision usually hurt.

Loneliness wasn’t about lack of proximity, but lack of connection.

It was like any big job. It broke down to a bunch of smaller tasks. Every day, every step in the plan, and every task crossed off the list would bring Harry closer to his gold.

The girl was completely shaved down there. He didn’t like that. Why would anyone want to see a woman’s cooch? Those things were scary. He needed a thatch to keep the lady stuff from scaring his willy.

“You protect someone by fighting. No one ever protected anything or anyone by giving up.”

“We go through our lives, we do good things, bad things. Can’t take either back. But we can draw a line. We can say from now on, from this point, I ain’t ever going to be a son of a bitch again.

“Don’t do nothing a guy in a movie would do. Do what a normal person would do. Nothing stupid or heroic, ’cause stupid and heroic are the same thing.”

An object that once only existed in a third-person sixty-year-old rumor now sat in front of them. The potential of its contents was beyond their comprehension.

“But our motherfucking gold mine is smack-fucking-dab in the middle of the biggest fucking military jumble-fuck that the fucking free world has ever fucking seen. And also, motherfucker.”

Just because a person grew up in the desert didn’t mean they liked the heat. It just meant that they were too stupid to move to a place where people were meant to live.

Hospital rooms were jail cells for old people. The nurses were the guards. The doctor, the warden. Your malady was your sentence. If only Frank could figure out where to dig the tunnel.

Everyone has a neutral emotional state. Some people are happy until tragedy befalls them. When the tragedy passes, they return to their natural state of happiness. It’s like a default setting. There are happy people and unhappy people. Nice people and assholes. Everyone has a gear they idle in.

“Eventually you’re going to see. Destiny, luck, fate, three sides of the same coin.” “A coin only has two sides, Harry,” Ricky said. “Heads, tails, and the side. Sometimes a coin lands on its side.”

When you’re young, your life is all future. Dread or excitement, you’re looking forward. But when you get old, it all switches to the past, about what’s behind you. What do you do if you don’t like what you’ve done? You can’t look to the future for atonement, because the only future you got is nothingness.”

“I am very high,” Bernardo stated. “Yet still, I wish I was higher. Because only then could I eventually become the highest. I am taking a nap.”

Four hours later, the three men were tired beyond the limits of exhaustion and in the worst moods of their lives. Which was a real milestone, considering that their lives hadn’t exactly been all rainbows and blow jobs to that point.

Quiet hospital beds are for quitters. I’ll do what I do. I’ll take the rocky earth as my bed any day of the week.