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dispatch fifteen
Sucker Fuckers by Benjamin Parris
debuted 1 November 2009 | kept 457 times | click to keep
Heather Myers killed someone today. That’s what the newspaper claimed in its grubby print–stabbed him eighty times.
I sat down and shook uncontrollably. My eyes burned. This couldn’t be. She was a good girl, wasn’t she? I grew up with her, I should know. I had the strangest feeling of believing and not believing at the same time.
Unable to absorb it all at once, I consulted the paper again. This happened on Hillside Avenue, according to the reporter. Pulling myself up, I ran to Hillside Avenue as fast as I could. Could a mess like that still be there? People stared after me as I bumped them running by. Their angst barely registered on me.
Heather Myers, just seventeen years old, my age, was of course not a good girl in the eyes of the community. She stole things, picked fist fights, and got in your face for disrespect. The toughest Tom Boy. Our white ghetto was no place for a girlie girl. Adults didn’t know where she was coming from. I did. She was an angel to me since forever, in retrospect, my first love.
She was attacked, the paper said, cornered like a dog and stripped in the street. I ran until my legs felt disarticulated, floating past; hit Hillside and turned the corner. Where, exactly? Hansen’s Market, five stores in, obscured by the crowd. I glared hoping to part them and a gap opened.
I found it on the street. No one had cleaned up the gore yet. Or no one would. No police tape marked the perimeter. People were going about their business like nothing strange had happened, strolling on through. A pool of blood dried uninterrupted right in front of Hansen’s Market just like something had been butchered.
From there the fluid trail led away down Allen Street for over four blocks. I followed it as if I were walking through the story backward. A supine beefy degenerate covers the pavement perforated with eighty holes–I couldn’t get over it–and nowhere vital but for having lost all his blood. When enough of the blood pours back in he rises, perhaps to his hands and knees. He staggers backward, one hand on the building, reabsorbing a drop at a time. At the residential section, he crawls back a record four blocks, rising to his feet, growing stronger all the time. There he meets my Heather in a violent encounter and–I tried not to think about it any more.
Heather was five foot nothing and skinny. Her attacker, as the paper called him, was six foot one and 250 pounds. He had possession of the knife but she took it away from him. Impossible. She was a tough little cookie, but really? I used to wrestle her. She never won. Eighty times? The whole thing was so crazy wrong I didn’t know where to begin.
I thought of our days together. Did I have anything to do with the way she turned out? Did this all make sense? I sat on the ground and thought about what happened when we were close, when we were twelve. A series of incidents starting with the guy we called Old Man, probably only middle-aged, whose name I would never know.