“I've always felt, since I was small... That I was different from the others. Special, in some way.”
Before cigarettes and alcohol, cars and girls, work and bills, marriage and mortgages; betwixt red maple and palm; back when Grandma Susu woke me every morning with a tall glass of chocolate milk; when I still kinda believed that toys came to life when people left the house; back in that prepubescent fog wherein I still enjoyed Blue’s Clues but had developed just enough self-awareness to be embarrassed about it; when music skipped and movies barfed tape; back when Miles, my best friend, lived right by the fishing pond on the border of my backyard; when trampolines were gravity wells around which all children orbited; back when we thought time could be stopped and things would never change; when I could pick up Between the Lions and Dragon Tales on PBS if I moved the antenna just right; back when the internet was confined to large gray cubes and was mainly used for printing out cheat codes; when clouds only existed in the sky and Final Fantasy VII, not everyone’s pocket; back when Game Boys and asthma inhalers were the only devices kids had; when I would leave the house with nothing but my wits because phones were still tethered to walls with curly cords; back when true freedom was just beyond the picket fences, in the overgrown alleys between houses of red brick and cheap vinyl siding; when we all knew the neighborhood cats by name; back when politics were boring and there was just so much else to talk about; when neighborhoods felt like they were owned by people instead of banks and politicians; back when parents kept their doors unlocked and kids swept through like little tornadoes; when we would spend afternoons ringing doorbells and running away; back when I would fall asleep on the floor enveloped in the soft glow of video game cathode; when sleepovers were the best thing in the whole entire world; back when Miles lent me his friend Lauren’s Game Boy Camera, which I traded for store credit to buy the game with the cool spiky-haired blonde guy on the cover.
“Ha, ha, ha... my sadness? What do I have to be sad about? I am the chosen one.”
It was around this time that I heard some sort of commotion coming from outside the office. Matt’s dad, a goblin of a man, who must have come home early, was shouting at his son. My stomach dropped and I was suddenly aware of the blood inside me, burning, for I was obviously trespassing in Matt’s dad’s office, having been told several times by both Matt and his dad never to go into the office—or the house without the parents present, for that matter. My face was all flushed red, full of hell and hemoglobin, which I tried to gulp down. I had only a few more questions to go, so in one smooth motion, I twirled and rolled the chair to the office door, locked the deadbolt, then twirled and rolled once more back to the computer, where I took the mouse in hand like there was no tomorrow and started just clicking away as fast as I could, answering the remainder of the “Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!” quiz questions as if I had cast Haste on myself and then jumped into the body of Sephiroth, like it was no longer me answering the questions but Sephiroth himself, in the flesh, clicking mighty fast clicks.
I want to watch the President bleed out on stage while surrounded by his goons, who are all hunched over his morbidly obese body, protecting him from further gunfire, totally unaware—in that very chaotic moment—that the president is now just a corpse, having given up the ghost after the first bullet ripped through his skin and shredded through the cartilage around his sternum and slipped right through his spine and then, finally, burst out of his lardaceous back; the bullet—blood, pus, and serous fluid twirling behind it like a little horizontal tornado—lodging itself into the wall right behind where the president once stood all tall and arrogant while giving some elaborate speech about how we’ll soon reach the Promised Land if we just rape the planet a bit more and get rid of all those nasty poor people in the slums eating all the cats and dogs, right before he collapses, simultaneously pisses and shits himself, and then twitches out a little bit in his own bloody-piss-poop juice before going completely still and just ceasing to be a thinking thing at all.
