A BULLET'S TALE

Destiny has entrusted me to the will and whim of Lt. Reginald Holcomb, a seven year veteran of the LAPD Drug Interdiction Unit. Randomly plucked from a box of one-hundred 9mm bullets, my nine brethren and I breathe as Reginald does, from the edgy air of mean streets and smoggy clandestine meetings, from the man-made world of hope, despair and altercation.

We began as legions born where form meets function, our uniformity a thing of beauty and purpose, each one of us a classic killing implement when coupled with the proper blend of skill and intent. Hollow points that flatten on impact to bore through flesh and shatter bone, smooth brass shafts filled with gunpowder ejaculate to ensure a smooth trajectory. Our every atom begs for empowerment to simply do what we do. In our realm there is no ‘good’, there is no ‘evil’, there is only cause and effect.

On this day, perhaps my day of awakening, Reginald pilots his black and supposedly “unmarked” car toward an abandoned warehouse near the wharf, my own vessel tucked away by his left beast, out of sight, always at the ready. I can feel his excitement mount, the rhythmic cadence of his heart quickening against my chamber. There’s a certain promise in today’s air, as if for me it will end somewhere other than tucked away in the drawer by Reginald’s bed, always within instinct’s reach.

A voice barely one octave below frantic breaks from the police radio, and suddenly Reginald is throwing the car around corners, speeding haphazardly down streets choked with traffic. Laconic urgency ripples across his surface, I feel it also, and I tense against the near-future seemingly pregnant with the very thing I seek. It’s as if some divine alchemist has taken over our ‘present’, melding Reginald’s flesh and bone with the power and resolution of my solitary purpose. We are truly alive, he and I, here together on Life’s canvas of the absurd.

Of course time doesn’t really exist you know, and now I see it all unfolding at once, simultaneous and pristine, like a beautiful three-hundred and sixty degree view of the infinite provided just for my pleasure…Reginald slides the car to a sideways-stop, flings open the door and spills his person into a crouch behind it while slipping his gun from worn black-leather in one practiced motion. He guards his profile as best he can and aims my host toward someone still invisible. I quiver upon the precipice of my future.

Twenty-five or thirty feet ahead and to the left lays a man, perhaps one of Reginald’s comrades, unmoving and awash in a dark-burgundy pool of sultry consequence. Pandora’s Box ripped open it seems, and Reginald’s demeanor absorbs the pallor of his surroundings as his resolve hardens.

Some small movement tugs his attention to a point near the rear of the building, just behind a stack of rusty barrels needing only one or two stout gusts to send them tumbling. Reggie takes a deep breath, exhales nearly half, and refocuses his aim and perceptions. He freezes, posed like some statue of the already-dead.

I see the future of the supposed perpetrator, still young, his time expired before wisdom comes his way. He looks for escape, over the sagging fence and into the decadent bowels of some Bukowski-like salvation. He quickly gauges his odds, and breaks for the fence some ten feet away… he never sees me.

Reginald pulls the trigger, which causes the hammer to almost instantly impact my firing pin, and I’m free, flying across the thirty-odd yards ahead of sound and fury, ahead of any dreams left unfulfilled. Unrealized possibility becomes certain destiny as I enter balmy flesh still lusting for better days. My soft-copper head flattens as I tear through his left kidney, continuing on to shatter his spine before ricocheting through his stomach and into his bladder. Almost immediately I’m still, alarmed by the enormity of my disfigurement, yet awed by the intoxicating flush of such battle.

My new host finds himself thusly shattered, crushed into the fence that now marks his passage from this life. I’m too deeply ensconced in the soft tissue and ebbing warmth surrounding his bowels to see his difficult death-slide mimicked as his belt’s buckle snags on the decrepit fence, suspending his body like some sad caricature of agony as he sucks one last gasp of despair.

I hear footsteps now, strangely muffled, not like the crisp sounds that reverberated through the gun’s metallic womb. The footsteps come close, then cease, and I think they must have been Reginald’s. And I wonder what he sees in this aftermath, do things seem as surreal to him as they do to me? This hoped for resolution no longer shines as it did from the ‘before’ side of things, and I wonder what now? Once more I hear footsteps, except this time they seem to be fading away, leaving me all alone among the silence and chill of death.