Checkered Badge

The clean air stung his lungs.  He waited for the attendant, impatiently, to produce a pack of cigarettes, and flung down his cash, not carrying about the change, to hurry outside.  “Time to burn,” he thought, lighting a nail, and hammering a lung full.  His eyes rolled in the sockets, a brief instant, before the matter at hand came back to his attention, and he wondered how much a bus would hurt if it plowed into…  Banishing such thoughts, he checked his pocket for the cold copper of pennies he’d been collecting, a handful of Lucky-Heads-Up.  And what luck.  There were still days to filter through, straining for gems from the flotsam and jetsam, but the fact of the moment pertained simply:  You’re not dead yet.  He checked his bandage, checkered with blood, darkening black and red.  The knife glanced off the rib cage leaving the jaw of his assailant open to payback.  His knuckles still ached where he’d earned purple crowns breaking the boy’s face.  “How many nights start and end the same?” he wondered, without want for an answer.

           
It wasn’t time for a miracle.  Those Ages are over, and this new kind, yet to be dubbed, lingered too fresh and stinking for understanding.  Better to simply put head down and plow forward hoping what passes for damnation can be redemption since no one really knows what lies at the end.  Rocks glasses like artillery shells, spent in annihilation.  His face morphed in the mirror behind the bar till he couldn’t recognize himself, save for the checkered bandage, which the bartender kept asking him to stop showing.  “But I’m just making sure I’m me,” he tried to explain to no one listening.