Writers are bleeding hearts with years beyond our age of damage and pain. Our minds are the most blood soaked battlefields. Our pain never goes away we use it as our inspiration. We write about the people who hurt us again and again. We tell the horror stories of our childhood through our characters. We make it their childhood so we can talk about it without having to admit that it happened to us. We write about our emotions so we don’t have to talk about them. We cling to our imagination like it’s a life line because it’s the only childlike thing we ever had. We are the kids who had to grow up too quickly.

The trolley approaches

down the isle.

Maddeningly slow

The smell preceding it.

Does Mr. Langolier

Want chicken or

Would It take the beef?

The hostess doesn't know

About the bottomless,

Walking amoebae

That is sitting strategically

in front of her

in 27F, by the isle.

Or maybe she does know

And just pretends,

Keeping appearance.

The behemoth

Places the butter cartridge

Under the chicken Parm,

In its hot tin receptacle

But upside down,

Touching the heat,

Let the processed fat soften

For a neat application.

It's heart is now beating fast.

A little patience,

Moistened with drool.

For the moment,

It inhales the salad

And perversely,

the fruit cocktail

And sponge cake

with its thin,

Impoverished raisins.

It then pounces

on the helpless fowl

With the buttered bun

As the bludgeon.

Do I want the chicken or the beef?!

The question doesn't leave

It's mind, nagging him.

Was that an ironic joke?

"Want" has nothing at all

to do with it.

"Or" is also a failed conjunctive.

The hostess is ignorant,

At the moment,

that despite this aperitif,

The living vortex

will ultimately have both,

Asking embarrassed for more

Like oliver twist,

Making a sham of things.

But It's The Economy squeeze,

And therefore no claim

To self-respect is credible.

By breakfast, she catches on

To whom she's dealing with.

And just places three cups

of tomato juice on the tray,

with commensurate amounts

Of pepper and salt,

A string of a tiny

packets, which she

didn't bother to separate,

like a leash.

Hoping to appease

The famine.

But of course, all for naught.

she had no Tabasco...

Speak of your sorrow

Cry, please don’t hold

Here, now, is your chance,

Airing your pains, tearfully

Downfallen, lost, hopeless

Exposed for what you are at final count, after all this turmoil, a jerk.

Nothing will give me more Delight, than this moment of late justice

Feelings of greater satisfaction, are truly too far between in this life

Recalling all the ways that you

Expected to win, not caring any

Until now, you saw but to hurt

Divorced from safety

Ever more lamenting

"I am not a murderer.

A strange way to start this off, but I feel it is important to get that out of the way. I am not a serial killer, I do not relish in the feeling of blood on my hands, and, god forbid, I do not find sexual pleasure in death.

No, no, none of that describes me or my job.

I am a contract killer. After high school, the realization that I was not actually good at anything came. Unable to get a job, I ended up homeless for a while. I floated between shelters when I could, became a quasi-religious soup-kitchen enthusiast and raider of food banks.

Then, I had the misfortune of I finding out that I was rather skilled with a knife. And a gun. And various other weapons. Which was interesting.

And then I found out that assassin-for-hire was a rather lucrative job market. So, I did what any person with nothing to lose does: I jumped on the bandwagon.

Was it a good idea? No. Did I do it anyway? Yeah. I mean, I was desperate. I only had two pairs of socks. No one realizes how much they love socks until they only have two.

The first time I killed someone was before I stepped into this line of work. It was in self defense. A man tried to rape me, which is not uncommon for homeless folk such as I was. I had a knife which I had stolen from a food bank, and I stabbed him with it. How I felt when I saw the blood bloom from his stomach, when I saw him turn from a person into a thing had no parallel. Don’t get me wrong, it was horrifying. But at the same time, I had never felt as powerful as I did then. The death went unnoticed, which goes without saying. No one has a care for the homeless, especially not law enforcement.

I did a little research at the library (free internet!) and found out how much money killers-for-hire make. And it was a lot.

It should be understandable that I decided to try my hand at it.

I found a website one of the articles had said that the assassins found their work at. I haunted it for a couple of weeks until the library asked me to stop coming, so I moved my operation to an internet cafe (a dying breed). Finally, someone contacted me (@devilmaycare666, which was a little spot-on for my liking) and offered me a job.

It was low-profile, they said. An average Joe that owed some money. He had been warned but refused to pay the loan shark back, and now they wanted someone to take him out. I decided not to tell them that this was my first real time, because I needed the money. The shelters I frequented had barred their doors when they found out I had been stealing from them. I hadn’t slept in a real bed in two weeks, and cardboard mattresses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

My first kill was pretty sloppy, but I got the job done. Broke in through a window, found the guy asleep in a tornado of chinese takeout boxes. I wanted to slit his throat all classy-like, like in the movies, but I found it doesn’t work that way. Had to hack through his windpipe, which is as messy as it sounds. I threw up in his bathtub after. Then I stole his cash and socks. It was necessity.

That hit paid for a stay in a cheap motel where I researched the real ways to kill a man. My next hit paid for a nicer hotel, and the next one an even nicer one.

I ended up a proper entrepreneur. I had a skill-set that certain people required, and I marketed that skill-set accordingly. I ended up with some job offers from some mafias (the most interesting way I was almost recruited was a letter in some matzo-ball soup. The Jewish mafia has an odd sense of humor), but I always stayed free-lance. Made more money that way, you see.

And money was all that mattered to me, because I had none for so long. When I fell asleep on my memory-foam mattress, I remembered the asphalt of the elementary school that I slept by. When I had shark-fin soup, I remembered the thin tomato that the soup kitchens offered. When I slid my cashmere socks on every morning, I laughed.

Everything fell apart three years ago. By then, I owned a brownstone in Brooklyn with my ex-model wife and our three Persian Greyhounds. My wife grew nationally-recognized orchids since retiring (we didn’t need the extra income). She knew nothing of my line of work and was happy with that. I am ashamed to say that she was a much of a symbol of wealth to me as my dogs were. I’d never met her parents. I didn’t know her favorite place or food or smell or anything. She had told me she wanted to adopt kids, like Angelina Jolie, and I had laughed. We slept in separate beds. She spent of her time relishing in my wealth, not caring where it came from, and I spent most of my time making more of it.

I was efficient in my killings now. No more windpipe-hacking. I aimed for the jugular, wore gloves, never left a print or a hair behind. Still, the police found me.

They took the prints off of my first hit, linked them to a DUI I had gotten (in my bullet-gray Ashton-Martin, gorgeous). I wasn’t that surprised when they came for me. My wife shed crocodile tears as I was cuffed. The dogs shit all over the hand-knotted kashmir carpet.

In prison, the guards brought me some of the tabloids. My wife, splashed across covers (I didn’t know he was a killer!, etc.). I tore the pages out and used them as toliet paper. She would have done the same. We were both opportunists.

I suppose it’s fitting, me sitting here, waiting for the fatal injection. A sort of poetic irony. After years of fighting it in court, the police linked my prints and methods to hundreds of murders around the country. They missed some, too. I was sentenced to death.

And here I am, waiting to die.

Still, I maintain that I am not a murderer. I did not kill for fun, or for sport. I killed because it was the only choice I had. The blood of those I killed lays not on my hands, but on those who paid me. I am not a murderer so much as a knife or a gun is. I am a tool that was put in the wrong hands.

I suppose it is not my choice to make. Though I believe that I am an innocent, the law disagrees. That’s fine. I guess those I killed felt they were innocent as well."

Noah Lablos, on his deathbed, 16/9/2018. He leaves all his money to his dogs, in hopes that they grow to be as fat and rich as he was.