Back from the dead

You can never tell how much your past affects your life until it comes back at you like a bitch-mistress riding a harley leaving skid marks on your pure white jacket. For Johnny, this was one of those nights. I hadn't been sleeping so well. Being a monster brought back from the dead can do that to a fella. Still, I can't say it was all bad, at least now I had a family that knows what I'm going through - a bunch of mean-ass bastards who have been cursed with the fate of loneliness. The greatest irony is that all us bastards decide the best way to deal with it is to constantly remind ourselves that we're monsters by hanging out with each other. You can see it on everyones faces. Damned by god and man, we lie in these sewers, huddled in bunches with each other, looking to the blind man next to us hoping for answers. Fucking blind leading the blind.

Most of the bastards here have a mind like a canary locked inside a steel cage, and I'm damn glad of it too. You don't want to know what's going on in a monsters mind. If only Johnny were so protected, his mind like an angry 400 pound gorilla who has just had her babies taken from her. His dreams wash into mine, stained like an old photograph left in the sunlight.

I can see him as a child in Detroit - Smog Central, dressed up in browns and greens like a boy scout selling cookies, metal lunchbox in hand, dirt stains on his knees and a scratch mark on his arm dripping blood onto the floor. God, he really did look different then. The woman walks towards him, race-car red lips and ocean-green eyes.

"Get outside, you little monster! Can't you see you're dripping on the floor!"

She grabs him by the arm like a rider pulling a stubborn horse, slaps him across the face and feeds him to the howling wind - the metal lunchbox left behind like a dying man on a battlefield. Hate wells up inside Johnny as he rubs the ice-cold water on the wound. It stings, but not as much as the festering scar inside his heart. She will pay. Oh, yes, someday she will pay!