Jack: narrative Who: Jack P What: Blitzkrieg When: Post-all the death Warnings: Nada, save language
It was the dog that bloody did it. Tipped the whole sodding lot of it over the edge. The staff had scattered, that new photographer kid - chirpy, Jack mistrusted anyone that nice who didn't want something out of you - had been left a message that sent him on a Sisyphean task to capture a photograph of a particular granny buried in the neighborhood who had a serious old cat, rather than leave him within a sniff of the blood-trail down Main.
And there was a blood-trail. News, liberally poured over a sleepy hamlet, and even Jack, slow-burn rot roiling his ambitious gut couldn't ignore it. Nobody expected the newspaper to cover it, the local Sheriff managed the media just fine via the forum now and again, but it was there, splattered over the asphalt in the store of what-a-surprise, his mate's sister who had herself knotted up in death so tightly that it had to be choking her. So there was no one in the office, no one to take the worst of the misery out on until such time as Jack's spleen had vented itself and the news was stale, faintly smelly with it and impossible to report on and call it a story.
Because this was a story. And Jack sidled close enough to thoughtful, if it didn't get picked up by the mainstream, if it wasn't hard-hitting, then perhaps, maybe, close enough? Months had gone by since the sickening reminder of what morning afters looked like when you were high on the determination to succeed (and the best party drugs a man could acquire late night with a dash of black magic, had to be said).
Such things were made for the bottle in the bottom drawer. He drank. Most of the afternoon, in fact, as the forums cluttered with spooked bystanders, as the crawling dread of something occurring over in that wasteland termed the Facility at the side of town which had an air of a Stephen King novel at the best of times. Drank through until the shutters were slid over darkness instead of an afternoon determined to co-exist, until his desk was crumpled with paper and he'd drunk himself through the other side, until prose was easily marshaled, scalpeled into line with red pen surgery. He wrote. Rusty, god, the hinges of his sentences practically creaked but liberal use of whiskey softened the seams and oiled the passage of something like a story. Stripped down, pared to its bones and no conclusion, and Jack swept the entire kit off the desk toward the wastepaper basket with inebriated swagger before staggering out of the office and toward the direction of the lake.
When he woke, the cat was circling him hungrily, having bitten his wrist three times to encourage him to arise, and the better part of the roof - the bit that hadn't yet fallen in - was slate and tile and burst plaster scattered around him. Sobriety was a rattlesnake-strike, a throbbing, pulsing, nauseated-saliva-prickling lack of clarity that Bukowski knew to withdraw from smartish, no matter how hungry the belly.
And the paper? He left it to the staff. It wasn't as if anyone expected anything.