The Same Agenda in a Different Hall

    It was the same agenda in a different hall. He knew where he was though he’d never been there before. Not that he could remember. His gaze shifted from the window to the closed door. From mirror to the fluorescent lights overhead. Back to the mirror. The glass.

    Scratched across the bathroom wall, a message: WE KNOW YOU’RE on CIA PAYROLL. He read it in reverse in the mirror. He heard footsteps at the staircase. He heard echoes from the walls, the whispered voices of doctors and drug dealers. A scratching behind the wall. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

    Then – a spontaneous displace of rage. Curses! He smashed the mirror and the room was dark. empty. The air was still.

    Was this the same crime scene? Two murders in two weeks. Two different murders in the same room. The same agenda in a different hall. Was it a mixed message? Crossed communication? Did it matter? The sensations were exactly the same. The smell and touch of blood.

    A moment of hesitation and he was back across the hall. Double-backed and empty. He smiled. “Terror on every side! Let not the swift flee away,” he chuckled. “nor the mighty escape but they shall stumble.” He laughed again. “Charge! Horses! Chariots! A day of vengeance and revenge!”

    He was not a religious man, but he liked the liturgy and the rhythm of the prophetic register. He was not a pious man. He was a killer. And a killer had arrived with an appointment for murder. He knew what was coming. And he was ready for it. “I am no one and nothing. Paroled and free to do as I please.”

    He’d received the word, a message from his handlers on his machine: “We have vital signs. That is a 1033 weapons transfer. Legal.” Authority was given. And power.

    Still that echo of a hidden voice. “I know what you did. I know what you did.” Scritch. Scritch. Scritch behind the wall. “Warrior upon warrior. The mighty man has stumbled against the mighty, and they are fallen both together.”

    The fluorescent lights flickered. Hummed at the back of his neck. A horripilation down his spine. The copper smell of blood. The ache in his tooth and burning in his throat. Pain is memory. Memory is pain. He smacked at his head to stop the pain and wailing filled the world.

Jeremiah 46: 2-12

The Creature

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the
accomplishment of my toils.” – from the journal of Victor Frankenstein

                “You are children of your father, the devil.” – John 8:44

Infected spirit of madness and man’s vain striving
a lifeless thing infused with a spark of life and being
an incomplete imitation of the divine
in the malformed image of his creator.

Yellow skin stretched tight over
 a work of muscles
                                arteries
straight black lips over straight white teeth.
Dull yellow eyes light
and the demon corpse lives.

The creature lives,
born of the father, but abandoned
                                                the creature lives
rejected, alone, despised.
He lives on the ice of frozen mountains;
he lives on despite the ice of his father’s heart.

You might also appreciate this Prayer to Saint Frankenstein.

HazMat Situation Prompts Evacuation

Did you hear the one about the adding machine salesman from Brooklyn

who was placed in charge of the town’s HazMat team?
His bones were radioactive by the end of the dance;
General Pershing gave him a medal.

Outside in the alley, Bowery bums were drinking fatal doses of liquid smoke.

A bottle of spontaneously combustible solids was found in the pocket
of one unidentified (and unidentifiable) man.

Madam Curie went on her second tour just after that,
carrying test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pockets,
but she never came back.