Falling Idols

Sensible Violence

You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. Your palms are pressed against the plate glass of the store’s window, a pet store, you never can resist it, taking time out to squat on your haunches and share a few moments with the puppies. With their big feet and fat little bellies, they squirm and trip all over each other trying to get to you, impress you, maybe you’ll take them all home. Show them the world on the other side of the glass.

“‘s’cuse, not to be intruding or nothing, but I’s needing to ask you something, okay, mind if I conversate with you a second?”

Money. He’ll want money, it’s as good as predestined. When you squatted down to watch the pups he was nowhere in sight, and you’d checked, too. You’re less a target for beggars when you’re moving and they know that, that it’s easier to pretend you don’t hear them, that your ears shut down in midstride.

“Basically I’s wondering if you could spare like a couple dollars so I could get something to eat, you know, I wouldn’t ask but I ain’t had nothing to eat for a couple days now—”

He talks with his hands always in motion to make you feel his urgency, feel his hunger, and you wonder if you should tell him to calm down, quit flailing so much and he’ll conserve more calories. He tells you how your donation will enable him to go back up the street a couple blocks to the Dairy Queen on the corner, alleviate his hunger with a double cheeseburger and fries.

“I’m not giving you the money,” you tell him, “but if you’re hungry I’ll take you to buy it.”

“I heard that, let’s go,” his willingness immediate, without the outrage that comes when they only want the cash, then you’re walking up the street, not looking as though you naturally belong together but are something odder, buddy cops maybe, and he’s just come in from undercover work, the reason he’s dressed the way he is, wearing that dirty sweatshirt with the hood fraying around the edge. He probably really needs the meal, unless he only dresses the part, although some don’t even bother, wearing two hundred dollar warmup suits and pricey new sneakers, as robust as marble statues come to life, with their hands out, telling you about all the meals they’ve missed.

“Got a head for business, must have,” he says about you, “be wanting to eyeball where your money goes.”

“Well, it is mine,” you say, then with a glance back at the pet store: “People eat dogs sometimes. Not here, but…”

“Get hungry enough, yeah, I can see that, my stomach gets to growling too loud, I’d eat me a Benji-burger too.”

“It’s wrong, eating dogs, no matter where they do it,” and he nods along with you, sharing a soft spot for man’s best friend. Or maybe he’ll agree with anything as long as food is coming, so you don’t mention the T-shirt that you own with the wolf’s head in the center, between two slogans: SAVE THE WOLF above, then underneath, PREDATORS KEEP THE BALANCE.

It’s midmorning and the Dairy Queen isn’t busy and the young woman with the dreadlocks behind the counter has no smiles for you or your new best friend, looking at him as if she’s seen him too many times before, and you along with him.

“So you let that fool shame you into buying his breakfast for him,” she says when you order, resenting it and why not, she’s the one with the job and the grocery bills.

“No, no shame. My family’s Norwegian, we didn’t do slavery.”

“Well, so nice to see someone with a clear conscience for a change,” she says, very unimpressed. “He want anything to drink?”

You turn to check, but your undercover cop pal is off in the corner, clowning with another just like him who’s rattling a newspaper.

“Give him a Hi-C,” you decide, “keep him from getting scurvy for a few more days.”

A corner of her mouth tics, as though tugged by a marionette string, you’ve almost made her laugh, or laugh for another reason instead of at you, at liberal Caucasian guilt too pervasive to be assuaged by pushing a nervous dollar or two away from your body before remembering somewhere else you have to be.

He trots into the restroom before the food is ready, is still there when it’s up, so you carry it to a table and wait, checking to see how ignored you are. You unwrap the burger and peel the bun back on its ligaments of cheese, exposing thick goo, mostly bright primary colors, unnatural, like a squashed animal in a subversive children’s book.

When he emerges from the restroom you’ve been guarding his food for a couple of minutes, as you rise he showers you with gratitude and the mingled fumes of malt liquor and tooth decay.

“God bless you, God bless you,” he says, overdoing it, you’re embarrassed, and when you leave him you return to the place where he found you, to finish your time with the puppies, who once again compete for your affections. Seems like everybody’s glad to see you today.

You tap on the glass and it stirs their blood, with furiously wagging tails they swat each other’s faces, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and you know if the world works the way it’s supposed to, these are just the ones who should inherit it.

*

It always comes back to canids for you, nothing else on earth as untarnished as the societies of dogs and dingoes, jackals and hyenas, coyotes and the progenitors of them all, the wolves, the beautiful wolves, with their tender and baleful eyes, said by an old Indian legend to have been the only human attribute to take when the gods tried to turn the animals into men. But human beings can only wish that their rites of dominance and submission were as pure.

You’ve always been entrenched on the canine side of that wide and irreconcilable schism between cat people and dog people, where each camp recognizes the inferiority of the other but only the dog people are right. Cat people laugh, haughty, say that they prefer felines because of their independence, their autonomy and self-reliance; say that dog people crave brainless obedience. But the true dog people know just how far self-reliance goes when trying to escape a pack on the hunt; know that what cat people are really identifying with is sleepy-eyed lazy indolence. Most cats, if they could, would be on welfare.

Since childhood you’ve preferred the company of canines, you sense a kinship that transcends species and they know it too, will defer to your mastery to a degree approaching the telepathic. Your impulses become theirs, their instincts inform your own, when you were a boy the area dogs would gather around you, nuzzling with their long toothy muzzles. You could strip down and roll with them, with young and old, they would accept you into their society of scents and sensibility as if recognizing some better part of you, beneath your hairless skin and flat face, you, the strangely-furred pug who walks on two legs. Cats aren’t the only ones who bring blood offerings, so you pretended you had some use for dead squirrels, for broken-necked tabbies, and no, you never once actually thought you were a dog, no matter what anyone said, and ever since then you’ve understood that the human animal is primarily characterized by arrogant stupidity and soft throats, a combination that constantly courts extinction.

Just as they see into you, so too do you see into them, they are Nietzsche’s abyss with the reciprocal gaze, or maybe the abyss is you. Show you a worthy dog and you’ll see past the millennia of taming, see past civilization’s dulling to the sharp primal edges beneath, the wolf behind those eyes. Except for poodles, pampered and self-loathing inside, and dachshunds, which are less dogs and more sorrel-haired rats.

The rest, it’s why they like you so, you know their ancestral secret and respect it, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and already you’re cocking an expectant ear toward the sky, listening for the howl that will split the city, then the world.

*

So enlivened are you by the day’s gift of the panhandler that you decide not to return to work. Instead you walk, not wanting to miss anything now that your senses are primed, you can track down further opportunities for trickery like any efficient hunter, blending into the landscape. You wear lots of gray and black because you live around lots of concrete and asphalt.

Work, too, is camouflage, was camouflage long before you even realized it, after awakening to your deepest nature. You log manifests and dispatch messengers, you help the city stay in touch with itself, for whatever that’s worth, old people do the same when senility takes hold and all anyone ever wishes is that they’d just shut up. If you really wanted to be happy you’d work in a pet store somewhere, but you tried that once already, and were fired when they caught you trying to smuggle all the dogs to freedom, even if they misunderstood everything, suspected you of planning to sell the stock to experimental medical laboratories, although they couldn’t figure out why you’d left the dachshunds behind.

After an hour of feeling the city’s shifting crust beneath your boots you take respite in a neighborhood bar, you’ve never seen or been seen here before, it’s beneath your usual dignity but happy hour begins early and seems to draw a clientele that needs it more than most. Paradoxically, all of them ignore each other.

You’re minding your own business when she comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You’ve had the darkened booth to yourself for less than the duration of your first drink, or the cigarette that she lit around the time she watched you sit down.

“I don’t mean to interrupt or anything, if you’ve got your heart set on sitting here alone, but if you wish you weren’t, I, I know how you feel, you don’t have to anymore, then neither would I, I mean it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”

A refill. She’ll want a refill, it’s as good as predestined.

“We don’t have to talk or anything, not if you don’t want to, it’s just that drinks taste better when you’re with someone.”

She talks with her hands held rigidly before her, a conscious effort to keep them from trembling, and doing a better job with her hands than she’s managing with her voice.

“Would you mind not smoking, that’s all I ask,” you tell her. “I have a very sensitive nose.”

Her nervous hand dives toward the ashtray, she grinds out the butt, not a problem for her, then she’s fanning the wisps away and lands in the booth, across the table, she and her purse and her glass with its lonely, rattling ice cubes.

“My name’s Merilee,” she says.

You nod. “As in, ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream’?”

She looks at you blankly, how could you be making such a mistake? “No, no, it’s spelled—” She catches herself. “Oh, you’re joking, I get it.” She slaps her forehead, lets it slide halfway down her arm, embarrassed.

You buy her another drink to go with your second, making an educated guess that she’s had a two-drink head start on you. When you catch sight of the booth in the mirror behind the bar you scan the reflection for the way you look together, the story it tells.

Two years ago you might’ve belonged together, but no longer, she left you and now she wants to come back, she’s had a rougher time of it than she thought, it shows in the puffiness along her jowls and under her eyes, while you have prospered, triumphed over the pain, and while you feel pity for her you’re not the same person she left, so how could you take her back?

Briefly you wonder who he was, if you’ve envisioned what has been, or what is still to come.

“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I, you don’t have to go anywhere right away?” she asks.

“Well, I have a dog I’ll need to feed eventually.”

Her eyes mist over with sorrow, as though she’s heard better excuses in her day, but is still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, she has hope, clings to it. “What’s his name?”

“Fenris.”

“What kind of name is that?” she asks, so you tell her it’s Scandinavian, just like you, and it brightens her afternoon, she believes you now, she says nobody would just make up a name like that and asks what breed of dog Fenris is.

“He’s more of a wolf, actually.”

With widening eyes, “You keep a wolf in the city, isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not for Fenris. He thrives on it.”

“I’ll bet you don’t have many problems with your neighbors.”

“Not anymore.”

“That’s funny, you don’t strike me as one of those guys who has to have the meanest dog around,” she tells you, it’s a fumbled compliment. “I knew this guy, well, lived with him for a month if you must know, it was Rottweilers or nothing for him. He was as hairy as the dogs, almost. But you, you have such a cultured look if you don’t mind me saying so, like you could be an artist maybe. And your voice, I could listen to you talk for hours.”

Which sounds like a threat, as she drinks two to your one, a ratio Merilee seems to have some experience with. Her hands start and stop for her cigarettes so often you lose count, her fingers drum with nerves and pretty soon the situation arrives where you know it’s been heading all along. She tries not to cry over things she can’t even tell you about, worries what you must think of her, with her eyes she begs you not to judge too harshly. She dumps her soul at your feet, skinned and raw.

“Loneliness is a cancer,” she says with frozen tears and a lurch in her voice, “and it never gets tired of eating at you day after day.”

It touches you like nothing else she’s said or done. “I know exactly what you mean.” You point to the front window, overlooking the sidewalk. “Walking around out there today, how many people did I see, do you think? Five thousand? Five thousand and they’re all selectively deaf, selectively blind. I might as well not exist for all they care. I could stand on a streetcorner and shout at the top of my lungs, and they’d hear me almost as well as they’d hear a gnat buzzing near their ears. They only want to know about you when they can take something from you.”

“Like your kids,” she murmurs with a faraway gaze.

“The world quit feeling, if it ever did in the first place,” and you’re saying more than you should but she’s made you talkative, “so we may as well just give it back.”

Give the world back to where, to whom, she wants to know. But you’re canny enough to smile and shake your head as if to admit you’re only spouting off, you’ve never thought it through. Merilee says she’ll be right back, she scoots off toward the restroom with purse in tow and while she’s gone you hold her glass and swirl it, checking to see how ignored you are.

When she returns your trick is done, you can tell she’s tried to freshen up, she’s washed the smudges from around her eyes.

“What was that about your kids?” you ask, and at first she’s hesitant but you persist, you really want to know.

“Anybody can make a mistake. It was only bathwater, it didn’t feel too hot to me.” She’s a talking shell. “So what about you, what’s the worst thing you ever did? You owe me one now, y’know.”

“Earlier today this guy came up asking for money for food, so I took him to get a cheeseburger,” and before you can finish she’s asking what’s wrong with that, it sounds positively saintly. “But while he was in the restroom I put ground glass in the sandwich. He was drunk enough, I doubt he even noticed. The glass was pretty finely-ground to begin with.”

Merilee blinks at you, her face is as blank as unshaped clay, in her bovine eyes you see the future, see how she’ll continue to propagate more kids that may or may not be taken from her bungling hands and what kind of specialized monsters and parasites they’ll turn out to be, the world doesn’t need them, although that’s all academic now. Or will be in a few more hours.

She slaps her forehead and laughs. “You’re joking again! You really had me going for a minute, you have the strangest sense of humor, did anybody ever tell you that?”

“No, never,” and now you’re checking the time, how many hours since tricking the panhandler, the glass should be well on its way into his aching digestive tract by now, small intestine for sure, indigestible razor dust cutting soft tissues along its peristaltic journey, if he’s drinking and he probably is his thin blood will leak out that much sooner.

“I like you,” Merilee says, and you nod toward her glass and tell her to drink up, every last drop, for it’s time you should be on your way, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and the end of everything that’s overdue already.

*

It always comes back to history for you, most history being cyclical, because of the fundamental stupidity of human herds that never learn, or less often the realization that sometimes the old ways really are best. New generations must discover this on their own, why should they take anyone’s word for anything?

Some months ago you first felt it, felt that cold wind blow to you from across the ocean, from Norway, home of your ancestral genes and much that you hold dear. For a few years it’s been going on and you never even knew, until your chance encounter with a small newspaper article, which led you to a more detailed magazine article, which triggered your search for all that you could find on the subject of the Norwegian church-burnings.

A war has been declared, fought mostly in the middle of the night, churches a thousand years old, some of them, set aflame and razed to the ancient ground, burned in the name of old gods once sacred to Viking lips and warriors’ blades. The newly churchless blame it on devil worshippers, poor Lucifer gets dragged into everything, if the pious have no greater sense of their own ancestry than that, then they’re no better than poodles and dachshunds, maybe they really should be burned out. The culprits are musicians in most instances, modern-day sons of Odin and Thor, evidently they’ve had quite enough of missionaries and meddling, would’ve put a stop to it, too, if only they hadn’t been born a thousand years too late.

From across the Atlantic and cold North Sea you cheer them on, their fiery tricks are the vanguard of revolution, the world is about to shake itself down like a tick-infested hound and these are the first true signs, and you’re a natural part of the rest.

Ragnarok is coming.

You hear it on its way, heard it trying to break through into the world a month ago, and the month before, and the month before that, you weren’t ready then but now you are, you’ve remembered everything, now it’s almost the second Thursday of the month again and it all depends on you.

*

So enlivened are you by this final countdown that you decide not to go home, in polls you’ve read wherein people share what they’d do if they knew they had but another day to live, and nobody ever says they would sleep more.

You’re minding your own business when she comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You’ve taken a break from your spree of tricks, both feet are aching in their boots. The blistered soles of your feet throb while you sit on the bench at the bus stop, your blisters have popped and feel raw inside sticky socks.

“You look kind of stressed,” she tells you. “Suck you off to relieve some of that tension? Twenty bucks.”

Vitality. She’ll want your life’s vitality, it’s as good as predestined. She can’t be more than fourteen and possibly younger, her body still has that slim, straight look of a boy’s, no curves anywhere, or perhaps it’s poor nutrition.

“Come on, you got a car nearby? I’ll do you there, do you so good your grandpa’ll come. No, wait, if you had a car, like, what would you be doing waiting for the bus?”

“You’re new at this, aren’t you?” you ask.

“Yeah, I’ve got these virginal lips, they’ve never known a man’s thing. Is that what you want?” She’s pouting like a magazine cover, hard little urchin’s face softening beneath a floppy hat, hair snaking from beneath in tangled dark strands and both knees of her jeans are dirty. “Okay, fifteen and we’ll go find somebody else’s car. There’s gotta be one unlocked around somewhere.”

“Do your parents know you do this?”

“Oh yeah, sure, I’m like sending them a postcard every week, ‘Hope you’re fine, I still don’t swallow.’ So what planet are you from, anyway, do they even have blowjobs there?” She rolls her eyes. “Ten, okay? It’s as low as I go.”

“You know what you need?” you tell her, because now you know that you can make a difference in her life, grant it some grace here at the end. “You need a dog.”

“Whoa, no, I’m all, okay, like I’ve done some weird things to get by, but I’m not into animal scenes, you really are a freak—”

You stop her before she can go any further, perpetuate this sick misunderstanding, the idea of treating a fine dog in such a way fills you with nausea, and never mind what the males will do sometimes to an unwary leg, they don’t know any better and you do.

“A pet, that’s all I mean, a protector, and to always love you,” you explain. “They’re a lot more reliable than people.”

“I had a dog once,” she says quietly. “His name was Sailor, and we … we never could hardly go anywhere without him following, he was so good at slipping the gate.”

She’s thoughtful now, you see the distant past overtake her, remake her, she’s no longer the pubescent whore. If a remembered mutt can do this much for her, imagine what Fenris can do to the rest of the world when he gets it in his jaws.

“I’ll buy you another dog tomorrow, all you have to do is meet me at the pet store on Lancaster Avenue. You know the one?”

“A dog.” She can’t believe what she’s hearing. “You wanna buy me a dog.”

“But it’ll have to be first thing in the morning. Later on I’m going to be extremely busy.”

“You. Wanna buy me. A dog.”

“They all know me there. If you want, we could walk over now and look in the window, you could pick one out tonight.”

The girl contemplates this, her mouth hangs open and her eyes roll up, she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “You are like the weirdest guy I have ever met.” She stops, abrupt. “Okay. Sure. Okay. Let’s go look at the dogs, maybe it’ll excite you, something needs to.”

The two of you walk along the street together, you’re much taller than she is, if anybody cares to look she could be your kid sister but of course nobody cares. The members of a wolfpack watch out for one another, but the tendency has been bred out of humans, another reason to give the world back.

“So is this your mission in life, or what?” she asks.

You wonder how to explain it all so she’ll understand, these are not simple principles, you may have to be patient.

“Everything we do makes ripples,” you say. “Like in a pond? You throw in one pebble and it makes ripples, you throw in two or three, then the ripples get complicated, they intersect. So what I do is, I go around throwing pebbles.”

“Right,” she says. “Why?”

“As long as I’m in the middle of the ripple patterns, that should keep me safe.”

“Oh, sure, the ripple patterns, why didn’t you just say so?” You’re really communicating now. “Look, I know that nice leather jacket you’re wearing must not’ve come cheap, but are you sure you can afford this dog?”

You assure her you can, after Ragnarok what use will anyone have for money anyway, filthy lucre will be utterly without value. Flesh and blood will be the currency of the future, and tomorrow’s princes those who have shown an aptitude for dealing in them.

For many years you’ve been hearing about senseless violence, commentators tossing the phrase around as though it were something they were proud of inventing and proud of scorning, above it all. They’re fools at best, at worst traitors to their species, ignorant of the natural order, they must think that deer run from wolves in a spirit of fun, that throats open and entrails spill from zippers, without a struggle. The culling of the weak can hardly be a senseless act, is labeled so only by a species that cherishes weakness, that nurtures it, that protects the weak from their natural fate. It demeans the whole system.

“You’re not Italian, are you?” you ask.

“No,” she says, she’s looking strangely at you. “Would it be a problem if I was, are you prejudiced?”

“Just checking, just curious.” People all around, in windows and in cars, no one sees you or this underage whore, how blind do they have to become before they never leave home at all? “Columbus gets credit for discovering it over here even though Vikings came centuries earlier. They know better, so what’s Columbus Day still doing on the calendar? It just bugs me. Some smart Norwegian needs to restake the claim.”

“There’s always tomorrow,” she says, then you’re looking at her back, she’s turned into an alley all but untouched by light, the bricks and wrought iron gleam with a wet nocturnal sheen.

“Where are you going?”

“Shortcut, this way’s quicker than going all the way to the end of the block. Believe me, I live out here, I know.”

So you follow, the alley slick beneath your boots. She takes your hand like a child afraid of the dark, you hope she doesn’t start up with the propositions again. Halfway along she pivots at the waist, scrawny torso spinning toward you when her fist slams into your stomach in that opening of your jacket, her fist and the small knife she’s holding. You grunt and she stabs you again, lets the blade pull itself out as you lurch back against moist bricks and slide down, her hands plunge into your pockets, deft and sure, they know what they want by touch alone and leave the rest.

Before you can tell her what a mistake she’s making she’s running away with your old name and your money. You sit against the wall, you’re aware of breath and blood, aware of everything but time, you sit until something clicks inside you, it must be after midnight by now, it’s the second Thursday of the month, if only you can hold out a few hours longer.

*

It always comes back to roots for you, in roots lies purpose, without roots how can anyone know which direction to grow? Roots are the human pedigree, ergo one’s destiny, as surely as pedigrees match dogs to duty, canis familiaris, a single species but many breeds. Pedigrees point border collies toward herds of sheep, and bloodhounds toward scent trails, while behind them all are the wolves, the beautiful wolves, who lurk in the northern woodlands of deepest night and in the dim bestial memories of those who build walls to keep them out.

Your fleshly grandparents were born in Norway but you’re an American, whatever that means, the answer might be found if you read enough bumper stickers but they don’t mean the same things on cars that are stolen or repossessed, and since you never know who’s driving, you’re better off trusting your roots. You have Vikings in the woodpile, plunder in your blood and Ragnarok in your future, as a heritage there’s a lot to live up to.

They’ve given you courage, these Nordic church-burners across the ocean, obviously they knew more than you at first, being so much closer to the soil of your common roots. With Ragnarok on the way they’re making preparations, you wonder if they too heard the howl of Fenris on the second Thursday of each month, Fenris apparently too weak to claw through into this world.

His howling is to be the beginning of the end, the old Norse legends agree that the trickster and fire demon Loki will slip his bonds, then he and his followers will meet the gods for the final battle and Fenris the mighty wolf born of the trickster Loki will unleash his howl of devastation to come and there’s Ragnarok for you. Of course everyone must die before the earth can regenerate into a new and better place, it’s a necessary sacrifice, but look at most of the people around today and sacrifice starts to seem perfectly reasonable.

You remember hearing these old stories when you thought they were just that, just stories, tales your grandfather told to pass the winter afternoons after your parents no longer wanted you. He would take you for walks in the country, you were quite small at the time, you would help him take his dogs out to chase winter hares and laugh and kick at snow drifts and wander so deep into the forests that the day he fell over dead out there you knew you would never find your way back, late as it was, so you went to sleep instead.

It woke you with its hot breath and rough tongue, you opened your eyes but couldn’t feel your feet, your grandfather lay where he fell although now his big belly was torn open and great steaming heaps of things lay in the snow. The yellow eyes looked upon you as if they knew you, knew everything you were and would be, you’d never seen an animal like this before, never so big nor so black, the dogs were nowhere to be found, and when it took your hand in its mouth you couldn’t feel that either. It tugged you to your grandfather, to the ragged edges of the steaming wound, where frozen hands and frozen feet might be warmed, how it knew such a trick you couldn’t understand. It had vanished before they found you, the two-leggeds, who didn’t believe you anyway. “Where are the tracks?” they asked, and with your drippy hands you pointed at the snow but they wouldn’t see, so you quit talking. They didn’t deserve it.

You’ve always remembered the yellow eyes looking at you, how they recognized you even if you didn’t recognize yourself and even forgot yourself entirely until a month ago, the latest howl of Fenris brought it all back, you’ve known who you are ever since.

You are Loki, you are the fire demon, you are the trickster and you’ve been playing tricks ever since, with ground glass and toxins and whatever else is handy. You’ve slipped your bonds as the legends always said you would, you wonder if anyone ever guessed that the bonds were forged not of metal but of a gray life of rent and repetition, and the gods damn them, they made you just one more link in the chain. No wonder escape took so long.

But now you’re here, now you’re free, it’s finally the second Thursday of the month, the end of all that was never really you.

*

By dawn you made it to the building that you selected weeks ago for this morning and you’ve been here ever since.It’s tall, vacant too if you don’t count the vagrants below, they look asleep and in one sense they are. Two evenings ago you tricked them, you left warm deli sandwiches for them, cyanide has a very fulfilling effect, they want nothing from you now.

The building might’ve been a hotel once, its brick shell and musty hallways feel as though they were built in an age of sunnier dispositions. You wonder what happened, if the hotel died first and took the surrounding area with it, or if it was the other way around, if the hotel choked on creeping blight. It does no good to lock the place, whoever tries, vagrants only chisel it open again.

From a high window you view the streets below while awaiting Fenris, the insignificance of two-legged comings and goings is so much more apparent when watched from overhead, perspective is all. They’re marbles in a crate down there, they roll wherever they’re tilted, no pattern to it, and no purpose either. As a trickster you can appreciate the joke, but enough’s enough.

You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You sit on the floor, back against the wall, while you settle your stomach, settle your vision, your head feels hot this morning, never mind this chilly air. When you see him you shift as well as you can, it’s not easy with your crusted belly and thirty-two pounds of weight resting across your lap.

For a moment he only stares, the room is atrocious, plaster crumbled everywhere and wallpaper hanging in tatters, same as the hallways, the whole place looks like a mummy.

“I’d ask if you need help,” he says, “but I think I know how ridiculous that would sound.”

Your soul. He’ll want your soul, it’s as good as predestined. Even from across the room you can tell what he is, he’s wearing a ministerial collar, not Catholic though, Presbyterian maybe. He’s carrying an armful of blankets, it’s what his kind does, they find the homeless in their homes and bring them blankets for the coming winter, blankets with salvation, thanks, much earlier inhabitants of the region were brought blankets too, blankets with smallpox.

“I followed the blood upstairs. I don’t know what your story is … but son, I beg you to let me get you some help, I beg you not to do whatever it is you have on your mind.”

“Today’s Thursday,” you tell him. “You know why it’s called that, don’t you?”

No, no he doesn’t, you know it even before he opens his pale mouth to confirm it.

“Thor’s Day,” you explain, slowly. “The day they dedicated to the thunder god. The one with the hammer. How can you be a holy man if you don’t even know what’s holy? You’re as bad as the rest of them down there. No, worse — at least they don’t pretend to know much of anything.”

He’s asking if he can’t call for an ambulance, get you to the hospital, that’s a nasty-looking belly wound and maybe so but they take a long time to die from if you die at all, depends on how the rest of this morning goes.

“That’s—” He’s shaking, now why would that be, it’s not that cold. “That’s about the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen.”

He speaks the truth, across your lap rests a McMillan M-93 sniper rifle, each .50-caliber cartridge is nearly as long as your hand and each magazine holds twenty of them, it cost you every dollar you had in the bank and some you didn’t.

“You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t even recognize me,” you say, then he tries to fool you, says sure, sure he does, the light was bad is all, but who’s he kidding, can’t trick the trickster. “That’s all right, nobody else does either. I’m used to it by now. Not that it matters today, right before.”

“Before…?” he wants to know.

“You really are in the dark, aren’t you? Doesn’t your god tell you anything?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, all the lead-in he needs, next thing you know you’re getting a sermon, for God so loved the world, well he doesn’t actually say it but you know that’s what’s going through his head, there’s a remarkable consistency to the sheep of the lord, and if anything knows sheep it’s wolves.

There’s a beauty in devastation that escapes the appreciation of most, they’re so attached to what has been they never think of what might be, never consider how a decomposing body can enrich a bed of roses, and that’s just the small picture. With the entire world become a graveyard there’s no telling what may grow in time, it’s the great potential that is Ragnarok, so rejoice you deaf, dumb, blind, and ravenous, a better world will sprout from your fat and clutching fingers.

“All of them down there?” you say, with a nod at the window, the street. “As a holy man you must be very disappointed in them.”

“No. Oh my, no.” The Presbyterian shakes his head, he’s even smiling a little. “They’ve given me good reason plenty of times. But then they turn around and delight me. And in between, there’s forgiveness to fall back on. I promise you, they will delight you too … if you’ll wait a little longer.”

You snort at his desperate naivety. “If they only had longer teeth, they’d eat each other alive and sleep the rest of the time, they just don’t admit it. I’ve watched it for thousands of years and it never changes.”

For a moment he looks puzzled, still holding the blankets in his arms, he’s a befuddled emissary, and then you hear it, Fenris at last, the mighty howl whose pattern you figured out is trying again and this time you’re ready, it permeates the sky, it rolls through the streets.

“Hear that?” you ask. “I’ve waited for this forever.”

“It’s just the disaster siren, for heavy storms and such,” he says, he still looks befuddled and why not, he’s so desperate now he’ll say anything. “They’re all over town.”

You’ve never heard such nonsense in your life, you may be a trickster but that’s no reason for him to take you for a fool. Today isn’t the first day you’ve heard it, after all, sometimes you’d be off work and Fenris would howl, the sound seeming to come from everywhere and every dog in your neighborhood would join in because they all remembered, their instincts hadn’t dulled, their ancestral roots still ran true.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” the Presbyterian says, “the city tests it once a month or so—”

Fenris hangs at the peak of his first howl, he’s waiting for you, Loki unchained, the father of the wolf. You tilt the rifle up from your lap, you squeeze the trigger without aiming and it makes such thunder. One second the Presbyterian has two good arms and the next has only one, the other’s no longer there, you think it might’ve flown back out the doorway and into the hall. He sits down among the scattered blankets as though he’s been hit with a hammer and stares at his shoulder and empty space, it’s a good thing he had blankets since there’s blood enough for them all.

Fenris lets his voice fall, then it crests again, when you swing the rifle around to the window your stomach rips with pain and starts to bleed again. You rest the massive barrel across the windowsill, no trained sniper would ever reveal himself this way but at thirty-two pounds the rifle needs support and you have no need of escape anyway, the world will fall around you now.

You bolt a new cartridge into the chamber and peer through the scope, everything and everyone in your face again, they swarm like maggots on a corpse and are equally soft and hungry. You settle on the first, and five pounds of trigger pull later you’ve made thunder again, the recoil pushes back a couple of inches into your shoulder and you’ve taken the guts out of sacrifice one. The second loses her heart and lungs, now you’ve got the hang of it, you’ve got the rhythm and the roll, no different than practicing on milk jugs, and it’s time to get tricky, time to start taking heads.

Twenty shots go by fast, Fenris seems to think so, he’s still with you as you snap on twenty more and bolt the next into the chamber, you bring the street up close again and they’re all in your lens now, some of them still standing there covered in bits and pieces and splashes of the fallen and they haven’t noticed a thing, for them not one thing has changed, sometimes you feel as though you’re the only one alive and you wonder what does it take, what does it take just to get their attention? Some guy down there is still reading a newspaper, you punch the next bullet through the headline, black and white and red all over.

All in all, they’ve at least made your job easier.

You’ll remember to thank them later, in that better world to come.