Literary Aspirations

Sometimes hethinks that a part of him must be dead because no living person seemed to understand that existence is fraught with pauses—it's in the upbeats of a saxaphonist's tapping foot, it's in the moment before his finger pulls the trigger.

He once heard some big shot novelist read her latest work out loud at the Wasteland Bar, south of Mars. It made him want to throw away his crumbling paperbacks back at the Bebop, because life does not occur in complete sentences; it's composed of gasping beauty, hitched pain, and stilted conversations in between. He wrote that down on a napkin in the bar, the red lights turning his spidery handwriting into a bloody testament of his descent.

When he could still taste life on the barrel of his gun, he read the Beatniks, the Lost Generation, and even the desperate Cowboys of today that considered themselves literary. Then, he was content to cater to life's fickle demands, instead of attempting to capture her on paper. Maybe I'll write a novel when I die, he thought dryly, half grinning at his own wit.

"I'm not going to die, I'm going to see if I was ever alive."