Havoc

by Christopher Bollen

I mean, how did I become this failing contraption on the tiptoe edge of extinction?

Grief has no sense of theater; it nestles itself into the most ordinary corners of the day.

(music, don’t listen to music, it shoots sorrow right into the veins).

For fifty-four years we didn’t just finish each other’s sentences; we could start them.

What do I do? I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. I help them to press the eject switch. That’s one definition. Another? I sow chaos. I clean house. I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worse. But I don’t like to think about the murder.

At my age, injuries appear out of nowhere, like dangerous men on the sides of highways, trying to convince you to stop for them.

We all need to escape our lives every so often. To recognize the cage we’ve found ourselves in, the bars around us that we’ve accepted as normal because they’ve risen up so slowly and imperceptibly over the years. That’s how life betrays you, day by day, when you aren’t paying attention.”

Children aren’t the world’s inheritors, they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.

To my own surprise, I love it here in Luxor. A home. A family. A fortress of protection. A few cherished friends. No outward indication that anything is wrong with me. At least not until the boy arrived. Here’s a warning to keep in mind for your own future disasters. You can only withstand losing everything in your life once. There can be no second time.

“Are you crazy? Are you sick? You are very sick woman, asking me to murder a child.”

“I don’t want your money,” he hisses. “You need jail.” He lets go of my arm and stomps across the dirt to fetch the butcher knife.