My palms and fingers are sweaty, crammed into the square pockets of my brown sportcoat. I've often wondered why they call it a "sportcoat" when that's the last thing you'd want to wear if you were doing sports. The last vestiges of thursday afternoon cling to the top floor windows in swathes of gold. Adjacent to that, there's a goodbye-blue sky meandering deceptively swift after the glowing yellow horizon. My eyeballs crawl reluctantly down to to the grey and purple shadows on street level. Waiting to cross the street, a cop car pulls up to the crosswalk, and the mustached officer glances at me, as I gaze perpendicular into his window. I pull a cigarette from the pack, light it, draw, and click my brassy zippo shut. Cool. I'm startled by a younger fellow in a sky blue hooded sweatshirt to my left, two fingers gesturing in front of his lips, asking me for a smoke in common ghetto slang.

"I can't," I tell him.

"I've only got two left; one for dinner, and one for breakfast." He strikes past me, no longer concerned with me, if he ever really was. A few blocks later, I cast down the smoldering filter and finger the smooth indentions on the chamber of the revolver in my pocket. It takes one hundred years or so for my heavy legs to carry me into the cool air of the gas station. The lighting is white, like I was on Mars, and I remember Emily's story. The buzzing comming from the cold drinks is only distracting to me, as I place a pack of gum neatly on the counter. I look at the space where the frail attendant's teeth used to be. His glasses look too big for his face. I'm sure the poor bastard jerks off to pictures of airbrushed women in the pissy bathroom around the back. I know I would.

"That'll be it for ya?" His words crowd around me, lingering longer than they probably should. I look into his nicotine-yellowed eyes, and trace the trigger guard with my index finger. The gun is warm in my rain-forest pocket as I nod and give him exact change. I walk out with a heavy pack of gum, elbowing my keys around for room. I'm terminally poor, cuz I don't have what it takes to commit robbery.


Car headlights are passing me and I think about the hospital I used to work at. Gay, black David would be haggling with me for an early lunch break around this time. I'd let him go, like I always would, with a smile and a nod. The front windows of the houses I pass are warm, yellow wax museums without people; just brown tables and clocks I can't read. My face is an easy description in a lineup as I glance sideways into parked car windows.


I'm back at the bar, smoking, floating in the disembodied chatter and laughs that crest into the clack of pool balls. Here, I manage to forget about the lonely din of the invisible crickets singing softly between this chair and my dingy apartment. The veteran bartenter, Chuck, reads me like therapist, and the loose skin around his eyes and mouth crinkle. All that's in my jacket pocket is a near-empty pack of cigarettes, and I come clean:

"There IS no gun, in my pocket, Chuck."

"There never is, William," He says as he places another scotch and water in front of me.

"On the house," He informs me. I smile back, sadly, warmly.

"No, there never is, Chuck." The watery scotch is kind of a diet liquor. There never was a gun, either.

Artist's hands weren't made for guns anyway.