trapped.

Crap job.

Girl I love, but don't want.

Apartment that is too suburban chic.

Job I hate; but then, I've hated every job. They either overestimate or underestimate me, and I consistently get fuct.

Car I can't afford and want nothing more than to get rid of. That fucking car is ruining me, and I can't get rid of it. It's not even in my posession now, a "Friend" was going to fix it, a month ago. Haven't seen it since. In the meantime, I have payments; I have a big black dude that wants to repo it.

My only hope was college. that's a wash.

Failing out of school. Can't hold down a job. A girl that thinks she loves me, but a relationship that's falling apart at the seams. Financial failure.

Loser.

I wish I had a gun. I don't have the balls to cut myself deep enough. I've tried; all I got was scars. I should've done the deed in the desert. Christ knows I had enough opportunities, enough motivation, then.

I want to know how this story ends. I don't want it to be a suicide. But with each passing day, I become more and more bored with the story, and just want it the fuck over with already.

I wish I had a gun. It wouldn't be a pretty ending, but at least it would be an ending.

melody

"So, what, you think I killed my wife? My own wife, for chrissakes?"

The cops across the cheap desk said nothing. Just looked at him, waiting to provoke a reaction. No more good cop, bad cop; no more stupid cutesy games. On the desk in front of him lay one of his last pictures of her, their vacation to Cancoun. The woman that was the lead investigator sat oppossite him, eyeballing him hard, waiting for what he had to say. The cops in the corners, who he had come to call Shorty and Skinny in his head, wore the bored expressions he had come to know all to well.

Alex sat back, hitting the wooden chair hard, exhaling a cloud of smoke in disbelief. He knew that this was what the days of sideways questions had been getting at, the days of not-so gentle interrogation. "How was your marriage? You have another woman? How's your temper? You ever hit your wife? Just a little?" They even sent in a big, beer-gutted detective, almost certainly a wife beater himself, who talked to him about how they all did it, right? No big deal, gotta keep your woman in line, right?

Like he could ever hit his Melody. Beautiful Melody. The picture on the desk was her at her best; her tanned skin against a thin bikini and a delighted smile on her face. He knew he had been the source of that smile.

Even knowing that they had been trying to nail him on this for days, his mind reeled when the accusation was finally said out loud. They were going to try to pin her murder on him.

She had been found three days before, after being listed missing for an entire agonizing week. Seven days of not knowing where she was; alive or dead, suffering or simply run away. A week of torment until they found her, naked and mutilated, on the side of a highway.

They thought he could do that. To his own wife, cut her up and turn her into an almost unrecognizable piece of meat in the dust on the side of the road. He stared at a small stain, probably blood, on the institutional desk between him and his accusers. He saw the blood, but was also seeing the blood in the photographs he had insisted on seeing. The crime scene photos where his wife had been found; blood everywhere, dust and bits of trash sticking to the gore. The pool of blood surrounding her filled his vision until all he could see was dark red blood, everywhere he looked.

He lashed out.

Later on, when he could look at the situation rationally from his cell, he knew this was a huge mistake. He should have calmly told them no, he didn't have anything to do with his wife's murder and he wanted them to catch the bastard that did. He knew they were grasping at straws, accusing him. But at that moment, all he could see was the blood and dust stuck to his wife's body, and the people accusing him of putting her there. He acted on that, instead of rationality.

He didn't say anything. He reached quickly across the table, grabbed the cop opposite him by the hair, and smashed her face into the table. She was a big woman, but she wasn't expecting it; she would leave another bloodstain on the table as she lay there, bleeding and unconsious.

The other two cops reacted quickly. Shorty, about 5'6" and 280 pounds of linebacker material, came straight at him. As soon as the woman's face was buried in the institutional green of the desk, Alex stood up, grabbed the wooden chair he had been sitting on and brought it straight down on Shorty's head as he bulldozed in.

Shorty was on the ground, but Skinny was smarter. He had headed out to the desk to get help. By the time Alex laid aside the broken chair, there was a half dozen cops in the doorway, jostling to get a bead on him. He put up his hands, knowing he couldn't beat them, knowing he had just doomed himself.

But forefront in his mind was still his wife, smiling on the beach at Cancoun, then dead on the side of the road. His mind snapped, coming to a decision.

No matter what it cost or who he had to hurt, at that moment he dedicated his life to finding out who had murdered his wife. She was always his first priority; now, she became his only priority. He would find her killer, and he would do to that person what he had done to Melody.

He surrendered to the police. But as they put on the handcuffs, he held thoughts of torture and murder, and began planning.

the flea market

this is the first chapter of a very long story. there will be an intro before this, possibly a dream sequence, cliche though it is.

"Your mom would kill you if she saw you with that."

Aaron turned with the antique revolver in his hand, catching the glint of mischeif in his friend's eye despite Nick's scornful words. "The thing dosen't even work. It's just a fancy paperweight now." He spun the barrell anyway, or at least tried to, it had to be forced through each click. He threw the gun back on the table and started on down the line.

The Harper's Ferry Bazzar carried just about every variety of junk imaginable. An old drive-in theater that had been converted into an open-air market, where every Sunday, weather permitting, anyone who could pay the fee could have a spot to set up his folding table. There were some regulars; the shabby man who owned the pawn shop downtown, a retired millworker selling military memorabelia, a woman with various crystals and cards who lived on the the edge of town and claimed to be psychic. Then there were the travellers, who apparently bounced from flea market to flea market in their ancient motorhomes trying to get rid of whatever junk they could then get out of town before anyone caught up with them.

The next table had on display a small mountain of books with worn covers and egg-crates full of vinyl records underneath. Nick picked up a book and started haltingly reading MacBeth, in an overdrawn British accent.

"Put the stupid book down, that table's for old people. C'mon, it's hot, I'm ready to head over to Strictler's and get some ice cream."

"How can you leave? There's only another few tables, and who knows what's on 'em? You know what Ms. Ravis says about quitters."

"What?"

Nick muttered as he turned toward the next table, "Quitters never something something..." He muffled the last few words as Aaron let out an exasperated sigh and followed along. Aaron was bigger than Nick, and he was smarter (or at least did better in school), but Nick always seemed to get his way anyway.

When he caught up, Nick was standing at a table covered with cheap knives and swords, a standard of the Bazzar. There had to be at least five other tables here with the same things, and each of the boys had bought something off of them and then had the knives break on them a week later. But Nick was standing in front of this table as if he had never seen one before, gazing at each blade intently.

"Nick, come on allready. It's almost three o'clock, I'd like to finish my ice cream before dinner time if you don't mi--"

"How much for that one?" Aaron realized Nick hadn't even been paying attention to him, and was now pointing at a particular dagger on the table. It was more midevil than the ones they usually bought, they both preffered Army knives. But this one was worked in a way that reminded Aaron of the King Arthur books, or perhaps even more of the Tolkein books that he had only half finished. It was rusted in the crevices, and only perhaps four inches long total, but looked expensive none the less.

The man tending the table was allready standing close to the boys. "For you? Twenty dollars. But only because you remind me of me when I was young." Aaron rolled his eyes at the phrase that seemingly every salesman here used, but was impressed that the dagger wasn't more expensive. Still more than either of them had, but a good price.

Nick pulled his money out of his pocket. "I only have seven dollars."

"Ah well, then sucks to be you Nick, lets go allready. Stricler's is calling my name, I can smell the fudge sauce from he--"

"For you, then, I could maybe give it to you for ten dollars." Aaron was annoyed at being intterupted again, this time by the salesman. Apparently nobody realized he was there. "But only because I like you so much."

"Listen, dude, that's great, but he dosen't have ten dollars. What do we look like, the Trump family? Now if you'll excuse us--" This time Aaron interrupted himself, as he finally looked at the peddler. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but his skin had a weathered look that reminded Aaron of old country-western movies. His hair was shoulder length, hanging loose, greasy and with bits of what appeared to be leaf or dirt stuck in them. His clothes were dirty and disheveled as well, but none of this set him apart as different, almost all the people hawking their junk there looked like they just wandered in off the streets. But this man struck Aaron. For one thing, his ears were bigger than they should have been, not sticking out but up and back, almost triangular in shape. He had a scar on his right cheek, not quite grotesque but close. Even more striking were the man's eyes. The deep velvet color was unusual, but could have been contacts or just a trick of the light. What held Aaron's attention was the intensity behind them. The man didn't seem to be paying him any special attention, the lines of his face were casual, but behind those oddly colored eyes Aaron saw a watchfulness, a power he had never seen before. It was like flicking a lightswitch and turning on a star, and he stood stunned, staring at the placid man.

"Aaron, loan me three bucks." It took him a minute to recuperate enough to put together the words Nick was saying. Absently, looking at the ground, he said, "Go to hell, yonzer."

But Nick knew he didn't really mean it, so after some cajoling he forked over the three dollars. Nick paid the man with the purple eyes and took his dagger, tying it onto his belt like some Robin Hood in Levi shorts. Nick announced he was ready to go to the ice cream parlor (even though he didn't have any money now, and Aaron saw the three dollars he loaned Nick multiply), but this time it was Nick who led the way pulling Aaron along, harrassing him about keeping up the whole time.

Aaron couldn't stop glancing back at the table where the man with the purple eyes stood, but after they got no more than fifty feet away he turned back and could no longer locate where the table stood. There was no empty spaces, but it was like the thin crowd had swallowed the man and his table up whole.

Even though he could no longer find the table or its keeper, he thought he could still feel those eyes on his back.

next chapter: at the ice cream stand. aaron is amazed as nick dosen't find anything odd about the event.

eventually, the man with the purple eyes breaks into nick's room and tries to steal the knife back. blah blah blah, something about the knife marks nick as being its rightful owner (change in color or something) so the man either kidnaps or persuades nick to come with him. enter faery land.

how hawkk got his axe

"Have you ever seen what one of these can do?"

Grummsh, the Orc King hoisted his massive Greataxe in front of Hawkk, laughing at his opponent's thin rapier and light handaxe. "What do you think you're going to do with that thing?"

Hawk simply smiled and swung the rapier at Grummush's right flank. The orc, who weighed nearly triple Hawkk, smashed downward, thinking to cut straight through the rapier and into the elf's ribcage. But there was no sound of metal on meat following the clash of the two weapons, Hawkk had quickly sidestepped and buried the small axe into the orc's opposite flank.

Grummsh howled with anger that Hawkk had drawn first blood, but did not intend to let the wound, deep but narrow, stop him. He brought his greataxe to bear again and started to swing it clumsily when the axe suddenly dropped in its curve. Grummsh willed his left arm to correct the swing, but found that he had no feeling left in his arm. His body was freezing slowly across from where the small axe was still protruding from his side. He stared dumbly for a minute at his fingers, turning blue as he watched, before the ice hit his heart and stopped it cold.

Hawkk retrieved his axe, prying it from the frozen corpse at his feet.

"Where on Earth did you get that thing?"