Black Man With a Pistol Hand

Is it as easy to kill a man with your bare hands as movies and television have led me to believe? Can you really just slip around someone and put them in a half-nelson, then grab their chin and just yank REAL hard and twist their neck 'till it breaks with a million tiny wet crunches and one big snap?

I was out for a run tonight, thoughts rolling like gravel in a rock tumbler, mind racing racing racing like it always does -- fertilizing a giant forest of fragile trees growing, growing growing until their roots snarled together and they choked themselves and died only to grow up all over again a million times -- as my body thudded sideways through a school of late commuters all moving in lockstep, talking furiously into cell phones and ignoring each other -- and then I just phased out of everything altogether.

It got dark, real dark, and I was away from people and cars and lights especially, just me, a giant panting guy with a baobab forest full of screaming monkeys growing up out of his scalp.

A lanky black man lurked towards me, morphing out of the black body of a tree trunk. When I say black I do mean that yes, he may have been of African descent, but his skin, eyes, teeth, head and pants were all the same precise absence of color. His head was elongated somehow, tall like that fucked-up looking Jedi in the bad Star Wars movies and both of his hand were massive, like gorilla hands.

One hand was actually not a glove, but a pistol. That black man had a pistol for a hand. Something in the way he lurched as I came up on him too fast to stop made me think he was going to use it.

I noticed his pistol hand RIGHT as my torso brushed past his and I was terrfiied for a second. The forest in my head vanished and all that was left was a flat disk of scorched earth/scalp.

If I needed to, could I have snaped his neck, then calmly stepped into t he road and hailed a cop car?

I didn't kill him, in case you were wondering. I've never killed a man before, and I have GOT to get my apartment clean tonight. I can see how killing a man would fuck up your whole entire night.

Plus, I think that pistol was a handicap. He can't help the way his hand is shaped anymore than I can help the fact that a deciduous forest grows out of my brain every ten minutes or so. I just said hi to him and he said "Alright now" to me, and then we were brothers, two men with strange and crippling mutations passing at night.

posted by Jeff Simmermon @ 8:53 PM