Sweet Revenge (Chapter 1 - excerpt)

CHAPTER 1 – IMAGINATION RUNS WILD

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but knowing what I know now (Have no worries, I’ll get to that too), I have rebuilt and recreated what my wife and son went through that day. I have refined the scene a thousand times. I do it out of guilt I suppose. Guilt at my failure to protect them. Guilt in wishing I could’ve switched places. Guilt that I failed to somehow prepare them for the worst. Guilt for not installing an alarm. You must understand that “living” it again won’t hurt me. It will only help me feel better by raking myself along the coals.

7:40 a.m. I believe. I know…Dana and I had traveled probably no more than three minutes from the house. Dasha was probably telling Deshawn that it was nearly time for them to leave as well.

They walk from the kitchen after Deshawn retrieves his lunch. The footsteps go from tap tap tap to shmch shmch shmch, their feet traveling over tile then plush carpet. Dasha gives one last look around to make sure they have everything.

Then the back door caves inward. The cracking of the door jamb startles my son and my wife. It is an unknown sound. Although, it doesn’t produce panic, only curiosity.

“What the heck was that?” Deshawn asked.

Rather than answering, Dasha heads to the back of the house to investigate- perhaps mistaking the noise for a bird flying into the kitchen’s bay window. That is when the panic comes.

She sees two figures through the closed blinds. She gasps, “Deshawn, go upstairs and call the police.”

Confused, Deshawn freezes, having never heard his mother say anything close to this alarming.

Dasha, “Now.” She speaks in the sternest of whispers as the men rush in through the door.

The men hadn’t expected anyone in the home. They had pulled up in a utility van that was made to look like the vehicle of the local satellite company. They had uniforms, but no masks. A blonde with longish hair, and a bald man with a handlebar mustache. Dasha can clearly see they are certainly as astonished as she.

There is a difference though: The men were not scared.

They advance, drawing pistols with silencers as they came. She tries to usher Deshawn upstairs, but as she turns to follow a gloved hand grabs her hair and yanks her from the third step. That queer feeling of sudden certainty when you know you are going to fall overtakes her. Then she crashes to the ground, smacking the back of her head on the floor.

7: 42 a.m. Dasha is dazed, but coherent enough to see the blonde rush upstairs and pluck Deshawn from the landing. Doubtless, he was heading for the ball bat in his room.

Her view is suddenly changed when the bald one hefts her from the ground. Tears escape her eyes. No scream escapes her mouth.

Deshawn is forced back downstairs, putting up a fight the whole way. Blondie has hold of him, shoving my son forward, Deshawn collides into his mother. Neither fall. However, when Deshawn regains his equilibrium he rushes Baldie- the man holding a gun on his mother, my wife.

Enraged, Deshawn now looks more like an animal than a 14 year old boy. Lips pared back, teeth showing, and eyes full of angry, stinging tears. Baldie waits for him to move in and without much thought or effort thumps him on the head with the butt of his gun. Deshawn crumbles.

That makes his mother finally cry out.

7:43 a.m. Baldie signals her to be quiet by taunting her with his gun. When it doesn’t work, he points it at Deshawn instead. That works.

Blondie looks at his partner. They exchange a brief, casual, but more important knowing look.

7:44 a.m. Deshawn rolls up and over and swings an arm up and into Baldie’s crotch. It’s a final desperate hope of escape. He tries to get away, probably hoping he can make it outside to get help.

7:45 a.m. It doesn’t work. Blondie fires, hitting Deshawn in the back. The bullet traveled the perfect path to hit his heart then left lung, causing him to asphyxiate on his own blood.

7:45:30 a.m. Dasha wrenches free of Blondie and in a last move, reaches out for her baby boy. My wife’s last moments were confused, angry, and without hope. Furious and embarrassed, Baldie fires into her face twice. The life leaves her and she slumps over our son’s body. My wife is left to bleed on our grey Berber carpeting.

As it stands now, the stain has been cleaned but I still see it. I see lots of things these days, few of them good.

I learned something from my mental reenactments though. In just over five minutes two thirds of my life was taken away. In the time it takes you to floss, read an article in a magazine, or some other inconsequential act, they were gone.

What I learned: Tragedy is swift.

My name is Delon Moss. There was a time when I had the perfect life. You’ve seen now what I believe to be the method by which I had that life taken from me.

However, to better help place it into context I will share with you exactly what I had; exactly what I lost that was so perfect, so dear to me. I’ll share it so that you may understand my pain just a little bit more. I don’t want your sympathy, and I certainly don’t want your pity. I’ll share it so that you may come to understand-if not necessarily agree- exactly what caused me to devolve...

Bro, Do You Even Joke?

                It must be a hard life when you have little to no sense of humor. Worse yet must be those who have friends who are religiously committed to being serious, the type that are perpetually unfunny, and wouldn’t know a joke if was written by Sam Kinison, delivered by Johnny Carson as a guest character on The Simpsons and then showed up in their Facebook feed as part of a meme about not knowing a damned joke was in the first place.

                A hard life indeed.

                I don’t know what these people do in life, but I can speculate: They don’t laugh as much as the rest of us, they don’t find humor in nearly all (ok actually all) aspects of life, and they are probably really stressed out most of the time. Oh, and they are constipated- granted I’ve nothing to base this on, but I’m just throwing it out there that they can’t be regular, can they?

                A few things though are tell-tale about the lifestyles of these sad sacks and how they spend their free time.

Psst, this is the part where I call out people for participating (or failing to participate) in things I don’t like, or have no interest in.

1)      Cards Against Humanity

a.       Now I can already tell that I’ve struck a nerve with some of you. I get it, it’s a popular game, manufactured by a great team of people who donate to charity (If you consider Wikipedia “charity”). But I don’t give a shit. The premise of this game to me screams “I am not witty enough to say anything funny on my own, so let me string a few random things together and see what happens…” (draws cards) “Harry Potter, testicular cancer, teabagging. Am I funny? Someone tell me I’m funny?”

b.      Further, I also think those that are seriously into this game have been either stifled creativity-wise as children or Mom and Dad never let an off color word fly in their household growing up. Either way they are dying for attention.

2)      They can’t make conversation

a.       You ever sat next to that person on a plane that you know is just not going to let you have a moment’s peace, because they are going to talk your damn ear off, and you are oh-so-very-sorry for making eye contact with them by accident when you first boarded.

Well, that person is an asshole, and turns out rare. So if I’m traveling alone, I’d much rather take the chance of running into Chatty Charlie than reading a book, or screwing around with my phone (which I’ll get to in a moment)- and this is coming from ME – a guy that generally dislikes…oh what are those things called out there in the world…oh ya- PEOPLE!

But it’s been my experience that most people feign disinterest (sometimes to the point of being rude) because they can’t actually talk to someone for any length of time, about something, nothing or anything. Granted, this is arguably a skill that is fading the world over with the increasing pressure to be social only through media and connect via technology rather than in person, but I digress.

3)      Cell Phone Love

a.       You’ve seen them, those lost souls with their craned necks and bad posture, staring dismally as they try to focus their eyes on a small, dim screen permanently attached to their fingertips. Talk about the walking dead…and to add to that actual factual science has now found that people that overly employ their cell phones as entertainment may lose the ability to entertain themselves without one.

This one’s hard to refute folks- you can argue with me about Cards and Conversation because that’s just me ranting about stuff (It’s my blog, it’s the internet, where else am I supposed to complain?) but this is actual scientific research! Science, that thing you’d never thought you’d use after you graduated. No wait that was math. Anyway, if you want to read it for yourself, click HERE.

                In the end, I realize that everyone has his or her own talent to draw from, but for the sake of the rest of us, those of you that have an underdeveloped sense of humor need to get out there and exercise it!