Oliver Benjamin
off, I picked up the phone and threw it against the wall. There it is.”
Pieces of the contraption still lay scattered in the far corner of the
room.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” Colin promised.
“What did he want?”
He swallowed a shot of Wild Turkey. “I think he wanted to
destroy everything good and true in the world. He probably wanted
to start with you, your landlordship.”
“You didn’t watch the news last night, did you?”
“No. News makes me nervous. I prefer cartoons. Nobody dies.”
It was then that Niles and Sprout walked in the door, hand in
hand, still glowing with the heat of recent friction.
Roy glanced over at them, and away. Then he slowly looked back
and turned his entire body around to face them.
Had this been a cartoon, and Colin was beginning to wish it was,
Roy’s eyes would have popped out of their sockets, affixed to long red
springs. He would have pulled an enormous sledgehammer out of his
pocket and pounded Niles into a very flat black pancake. But this was
no cartoon. Colin rushed over to stand between them.
Niles’ and Sprout’s hands fell apart. They stood unmoving in the
doorway.
“So, what’s this?” Roy said. “This is, what, is this what I…What,”
he fumbled. Finally, he just yelled, “God fucking damn it!” and
pushed past them, running out of the store. They chased after him.
Roy ran only to get away, and now found he couldn’t even do
that. A van was parked illegally, blocking the entrance to his narrow
alley. There was a word printed on the side of it, but only a portion of
it was visible. From where Roy stood it said only “bro.”
“Bro,” Roy said.
By the time the others caught up to him, Roy was kicking
furiously at the side of the van. He had already made a considerable
dent.
There was some screaming and more kicking and finally
somebody moved the vehicle. By this time it was apparent what was
going on, and they all streamed out to the middle of the Promenade
to watch.
It felt like they were gawking at horrible traffic accident, except
the accident had been their own.
“How did this happen so fast?” Roy said in awe.
Two men were stringing up a colorful banner over an adjacent
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