up, mime a request for permission.
Melody looks at me with confusion. “What,” she whispers.
I mouth these words to her: “Just a mugging?”
As Sasquatch feels my entire body up and down, Melody stares at me, reads my story over and over, seems to finally comprehend the gist. And something in her changes. She wipes the tears away, the breathing slows and calms, her lips cease to tremble and so easily produce her answer: “Do it.”
They never want you to give up the violence.
If Sasquatch knew these would be his final words this evening, I’m guessing he would not have said, “Shut up, you ugly slut.” For these are the last spoken before I plunge my fist into the toddler’s throat. As he falls to the ground, drops the knife to his side, and lunges both hands to his neck, I kick him over with my foot, step down on his hand-covered gullet, and put most of my two hundred pounds on it until he coughs up a little blood.
I turn to Melody and ask, “You okay?”
She rests sideways against a Dumpster, closes her eyes and nods.
Sasquatch’s gag-screaming has become quite distracting; I take an old sneaker from behind a trash can and shove the toe in his mouth.
I turn to Melody and say, “I’m gonna make sure he doesn’t follow us—or consider running. You might want to look the other way.”
She says, “Okay,” but keeps watching, gets to see firsthand my sinister capabilities. This is not a softened story from my past; this is here and now, an image she’ll recall for a lifetime.
Then it hits me: The stories didn’t cut it. My tale of dismantling Morrison was not good enough. She needs to see it happen. She needs to know she could never be with someone filled with such imbalanced rage. She wants to watch. Unfortunately for Sasquatch, I must deliver.
I grab a broken two-by-four from a pile of loose trash, look down each end of the alley to be sure his muted screams won’t draw attention, and swing the board down on his lower leg, over and over, until I’ve removed all functionality from his ankle. While the toddler squirms, I find his knife and kick it into the sewer drain.
I look over at Melody and she’s paying attention; I could never know what she’s thinking, but she’s taking it all in. Though it seems so wrong, I have to continue, to disappoint her with who I am, to provide her the mechanism to break whatever chain has her tethered to me. She does not appear bothered my actions, so I step it up another level.
I face no fight in destroying Sasquatch, no regret in wrecking him for what he would have done to Melody were I passive. He is another Morrison. Another loser destined to sip his food through a straw.
I hold the two-by-four in my hand, walk up to Sasquatch’s fright-filled face, listen to his muffled coughs. I walk behind him, kick the shoe out of his mouth—the begging instantly begins, a random repetition of the words please and no that resemble Morse code—put my foot on his forehead and line up the two-by-four against his chin like a driver against a golf ball. “Now we’ll give our friend something to remember this moment,” I say.
I pull the broken stud back slowly, wind up to swing, when Melody cheers out, “Yeah, give that bastard a souvenir!”
She catches me so off guard, uses a term so unknown to people outside of the tight team of men that comprise our crew, I feel like someone just swung something against my own head. I stumble forward, my foot slipping off of Sasquatch’s skull as Melody rushes to cover her mouth—but the way she’s propped up makes it hard for her to move, and she fumbles around like she didn’t mean to say what she did, tries to pretend the words were never spoken.
I attempt to process the meaning behind what she said, but the confusion has thrown me off course, made me less capable of providing physical destruction. I toss the board back in the trash and watch Sasquatch whimper and grab his throat with one hand and his leg with the other. I hate him. I hate what he would have done to Melody. I hate what he’d probably done to women before, how he’ll continue to victimize society with his alley muggings and petty crimes. He needs to pay.
I reach down, grab him by the shirt, and say,