Crumbling… ~ Part 6

Serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday

Part 6: The Phantom Typewriter Appears

Why did I run? Well, I’ve gotta assume that any broad who’s holding a piece on me has a hideout on her somewhere. I hit the door like a stallion out the gate, all bang and bravado and potential broken bones. It’s nothing like how it looks in a John Wayne movie. First of all, every fiber in my shoulder sang out in a perfectly unison chorus of “What in the hell have you done …?” And then the back of my neck added: “Motherfucker!”

I ate a chunk of the hot asphalt when I fell, my pedaling feet tangled in the pink leash attached to a gray mutt of a poodle, said leash attached to a stout and balding guy in Bermuda shorts and a tan Corona T-shirt, a wet stogie parked in the corner of his mouth, black Ray-Bans shielding what were no doubt beady eyes. I’d bet anything his name was Louie and he was a minor rackets player but liked to boast to his friends, minor players in the grand design themselves, that he was a made man.

Suddenly I was one with the asphalt. The hot earthy smell exploded into my lungs moments before my incisors were scraped of their enamel by the concrete. There was the sensation of one hundred wasps peeling the skin away from my chin with their stingers. My eyes rolled back into some unexplored chasm of my cranium.

“We’re tired of it!” a shrill and tiny voice shouted. It was the black midget. He was crouched over me with the muzzle of some kind of handgun looking awfully comfortable in my face. “You are fumigating the universe with your mind essence!”

That was the moment I passed out. It was the same moment, I would later learn, that the Phantom Typewriter appeared.

Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1