Valentine’s Massacre
It might seem like magic when dealing with that crazy not-so-little thing called love. The way unconquerable love can fade may often feel like a spell or incantation. It is not immediate; it happens slowly, carefully, and deliberately, as if it might be mistaken for something else, perhaps a headache or a bad day at work. Then, one day you wake up, and it’s slipped through your fingertips again, slipped the noose in the night like a stray dog that refuses to sit. I guess I might have a pejorative opinion of love; we (Maxine and I) hadn’t been having exactly a banner year. We were both really busy. We had moved in together, it was year four of the relationship, and all the magic seemed to be fading out. Maxine had just graduated with a law degree and was working full time, and I had just become a detective. Yes, sir, ladies usually smile, giggle, some even make fairly suggestive comments when I show my badge and tell them I’m ironically Detective Love.
“Detective Love, do you wanna frisk me?” or “Officer Love, I have something you can investigate,” I’ve heard them all. I usually didn’t share these suggestive comments with Maxine, but I think she knew the ladies gave me lots of attention in the uniform. I hadn’t gotten Maxine a Valentine’s Day present and she was long gone before I woke. I figured I’d just pick up some roses on the way home. This would be a different kind of V-day, though, and when I think about the events of that day and the investigation, they seem like a dream within a dream. I guess I was distraught over Maxine or maybe reality started to slip through my fingers, but the events that unfolded are as real as I remember them.
I was one of the first to arrive on the scene of what was being called a homicide. It was technically an infanticide, I guess. The scene was reminiscent of a bloodbath, and I honestly couldn’t stomach it at 11 AM on Valentine’s Day of all days. I guess my hope for a stress-free day at work was already over. The media, those vultures, had already staked out a claim not far from the overpass. There were dozens of reporters and cameras. They flashed pictures and asked, “What do you know so far?” and “Has the baby been identified?” My face was a stone statue as I pushed past the yellow police tape.
Amidst the flashing of blue and red lights, there was still mass confusion about what had happened, and traffic was backed up for miles. People had pulled their cars over to the side, just to get out and look. There had even been a second casualty; a man had died in his car from heart failure, and, because of the traffic, the paramedics couldn’t get to him in time. In all the confusion, no one was quite sure what had happened, in what was truly a horrific scene. As far as I could guess, it appeared as if a baby had been thrown or dropped from an overpass onto the freeway. We weren’t sure who the culprit was. We weren’t even sure who the victim was. After we assumed the baby had been dropped, the rest of the events were pretty standard. The trucker swerved to get out of the way, but he was going too fast. He slammed into the body going about 40-45 mph. The honest-to-God truth was that there wasn’t much of a body left. The body had been turned to paste; the truck’s force had left only tiny pieces of the body intact.
I had to stop to regurgitate on the side of the freeway; the baby’s arm was found approximately 123 feet from the overturned Mack truck. It didn’t even look human, more like a gray synthetic fiber from a futuristic mannequin. A severed baby’s foot was found several yards from there. There were other scattered parts around the accident. The Mack truck had swerved into a minivan which in turn had slammed into a Prius. After that it was hard to count the accidents in the massive chain reaction. The main concern was the dead baby, of course; we couldn’t seem to identify the body, and the odder part was that no parent had called in a report about a missing baby. We checked the local daycares and preschools, and nothing. Strange. I figured someone would say something soon and went about investigating the accident.
There were several other undiscernible body parts: an ear, a foot, a small piece of the spinal cord, but not much else. Several feet from the severed baby’s foot I found what appeared to be the wing of a large, white seabird. Too large to be a seagull, too small to be an albatross. Another oddity? Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure but bagged the white wing as evidence.
There were several witnesses: two older Caucasian ladies in their mid-sixties, a ten-year-old Hispanic girl, a single female Filipino nurse, yet, here was the odd part, all seemed to have seen the truck hit the baby in one form or another, yet none claimed to have seen anyone, a culprit, drop the baby from the overpass.
The ten-year-old Hispanic girl was the most informative and said something rather intriguing that stuck with me: “It didn’t drop” (she was referring to the baby).
The Hispanic girl reached her arms up. “It came from the left….” She paused.
“If anything, it was thrown….” She looked nervous.
“What are you saying?” I questioned.
“I’m saying it looked like it was thrown,” she said simply.
The words looked like it was thrown stuck in my mind.
“From where?” I questioned.
“I don’t know…I didn’t see…maybe from a moving car,” the girl said with a completely straight face. Was she involved? I took her name, Maria Amado, and informed her I’d be in touch.
On my way back to the precinct I noticed several couples arguing. One of these couples was having an outright altercation, so much so that I had to stop and break it up. As I pulled this woman off her boyfriend, she was maniacal in stating, “HE TOOK SOMETHING FROM ME.”
When I asked what, she broke down in tears. Eventually, I left her sobbing somberly on the front porch.
And then something happened that was seemingly inconsequential except that it was so odd. I was walking down the street, when a harp dropped from an apartment building above and smashed and dashed itself on the pavement below, several yards from where I was walking. The harp was fairly heavy; it made a sound when it hit the concrete as if music herself had cried out for help while being crushed with a sledgehammer. I was unharmed but frazzled. As I stopped at the local florist, I was dismayed to find that they were out of red roses.
Out of red roses on Valentine’s Day?
The clerk, who I would have normally guessed was on drugs, then went into some bizarre story about how they had had many red roses in the back but they all mysteriously wilted and died around 11AM. Something weird was going on; I could feel it.
In the car, that old Sam Cooke song was playing, Cupid, please hear my cry, and let your arrow fly, except somebody had replaced the word Cupid with stupid. Old Sam Cooke was bizarrely singing, Stupid, please hear my cry, and let your arrow fly, and I had to look around as reality seemed suspiciously like some Reality TV show. At the precinct there were more strange occurrences than one could count. Something was seriously amiss; the place was a madhouse. It was practically overflowing with perpetrators and witnesses, people complaining for one reason or another; there were dozens of assailants and solicitors waiting to be booked. The phones were ringing off their hooks with what Janice claimed were hundreds of domestic disturbances. Hundreds of domestic disturbances on Valentine’s Day? I needed a break. I grabbed a coffee and went upstairs to the forensics laboratory. The rather large wing was first thought to be synthetic. Dr. Yupik was looking at it under a microscope and still seemed somewhat baffled by the white wing.
“I don’t know what to make of it. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was biologically engineered,” Dr. Yupik said scratching his beard. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you find the rest of the body?”
I replied that I hadn’t.
When I arrived back downstairs, I checked if anybody had reported any missing babies. Still nothing. Again, I pondered. How could that be, what kind of mother doesn’t know her baby’s missing for what was something like four hours?
“Maybe she’s at work,” Officer Hogan suggested. It was a distinct possibility.
Officers Hogan and Nunez and I went looking for clues back at the scene of the horrific accident. Traffic had resumed its normal flow. We still didn’t even know how the baby had gotten up on the overpass. Theoretically, someone would have had to have dropped him down. The spot where the Mack truck had slammed into the baby was far from where we had found the body and the white wing, so we spent some time searching the scene of the accident.
I wandered around aimlessly as if it were a dream, perplexed by what I was seeing. When I got home, it was odd, but my love Maxine seemed even more distant. She was staring blankly at the TV, a stack of depositions on her lap. She wasn’t really there. On the tube, a famous Hollywood couple had separated, hardly headline news. I leaned over to kiss her, but as I moved toward her, she retreated as if I were toxic or had leprosy or some other infectious disease.
I pulled a bouquet of flowers from behind my back. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
She inspected the flowers. “Why’d you get lilies?”
“They were out of roses,” I explained.
This fact seemed to annoy her. She put her head back down.
“Is something wrong?” I inquired.
She didn’t even answer.
“Can you at least answer me?” I raised my voice attackingly.
“Babe, I worked a fourteen-hour day,” she said sadly and put her head down.
“Did you hear about the baby getting thrown off the overpass?” I interjected. She gave me a disgruntled look.
“I’m just saying that my day wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows,” I said defensively.
I went into the bathroom trying to make sense of this insane day. Outside the door, I heard the phone ring and Maxine pick up. “You’ll never guess,” she told the phone, happily chatting away, as if moments ago she had been a completely different person. I wanted to call her out on it, instead I went to bed angry. When she finally did come to bed, we didn’t cuddle or spoon; our backs practically touched like two great walls coming together to crush our love.
February 15th
The day’s events seemed to play on in my mind long after I had laid my head to rest. What had I just investigated? Like Dorothy in the Emerald City when she saw the curtain pulled back, I was suspicious that something was not right. I kept thinking about the white wing and what it might mean. When I awoke, something had shifted in my mind, as if the puzzle pieces that were my beliefs had somehow changed their form. I felt empty and it wasn’t just the fact that Maxine was gone, which was extremely unlike her, even considering how cold she had been acting. I checked my voice mail and there were something like ninety-nine messages. In the distance I could hear sirens and see the red and blue flashing lights of the long arm of the law. I absently fumbled for my keys, but found myself unable to unlock any doors. I felt as if there were literally something wrong with me; it was hard to pinpoint what. Looking out the window I could see the street littered with debris. The thrift store across the street had been looted and vandalized during the night. I felt a slight pain in my chest and had to sit down for a while. I dialed Maxine’s number, but she didn’t pick up. She was probably at work.
Eventually, as I got in my car and started it, I still felt as if I were in a movie. For example, the radio played “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. The part where John and Paul sing, “So pleeeease…love me do” seemed to ring in my mind, and looking up into the sky I half expected the gods were messing with me. The civil unrest of the next day was unparalleled, speaking personally as an officer who has worked race riots. The tsunami of anarchy did not abate, and I found myself working till well after midnight. It was just as well. On the fateful day after what I have now so vehemently termed the death of V-Day, I thought little of Maxine and the way she acted cold only toward me, the way her disposition seemed to change when she spoke to me as opposed to her friend on the phone. My first response of the day was a suicide; a man had plunged off a ravine after his wife of twenty years had just up and left him. Up and left him on Valentine’s Day? Everybody seemed to be acting extremely irrationally, as if someone had drugged the water, or something even more sinister were afoot. It had all happened rather quickly; it seemed as if the city had erupted with madness overnight. Too many atrocities to list. There were riots, some shootings, some even more bizarre cult deaths like hangings or drawing-and-quarterings, a hostage situation; several larger complexes and skyscrapers were still ablaze with fires. The fire department was understaffed but had been working tirelessly all night. The city was in shambles and it would continue to get worse.
What was going on? Hadn’t it all started with the homicide yesterday? The madness clearly started then; my mind kept coming back to the alleged baby who had been dropped from the overpass. What was I missing? Was it even a baby? The mother of the alleged missing baby had never called. In fact, nobody had reported a baby missing. Our second call was a double homicide; a husband had found his wife in bed with her lover, normally an open-and-shut case, except, I thought, What does this case have in common with the others? Looking down the list of incidents, did all of them involve disputes over relationships? There were a few that didn’t, but for the most part they were all domestic disputes or altercations, in most cases involving that crazy not-so-little thing called love.
I felt reality slipping by the third call; when we apprehended a man in his twenties for kidnapping his girlfriend who had broken up with him, I had ascertained something very out of the ordinary was happening. The man was a timid, middle-class, blue-collar worker, no prior arrests. It had something to do with the baby dropped from the overpass and something to do with love and relationships.
The accident had long been cleared, but I went to Joy’s Auto Yard where the Mack truck that had hit the fallen baby was taken. I was searching for something out of the ordinary, something that might confirm my weird suspicions. The truck had barely been damaged; there were a few dings here and there, one on the bumper, and another in the grill. There were, of course, bloodstains here and there, where the baby had been turned to human pulp. After examining the truck, it was clear we had overlooked something. Near the bloodstains where the baby had been essentially liquidated, it appeared there was something stuck in the grill of the truck. It was small and appeared fairly inconsequential.
As I got closer I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It had to be some kind of joke. I stammered in disbelief, “It couldn’t be.”
“What is it?” Officer Davis, who had come with me on the investigation, asked.
Wedged into the grill of the truck appeared to be about half an arrow. It was a normal-looking arrow made of wood, but the arrowhead appeared to be sharp and golden. It was rather odd; when I touched it I felt a tinge of something that resembled regret in the pit of my stomach. It was stuck in there good, but I eventually fished it out. The arrow was strange; on it were Greek letters that I was unable to read.
I handed it to Officer Davis and asked what he made of the latest piece of evidence.
“It’s an arrow, sir,” he stated.
“But where did it come from?” I questioned.
“It could have been in the grill of that truck for months. It could have come from anywhere,” Davis explained.
“What if it came from the accident yesterday?” I challenged Davis.
“What are you saying?” he questioned.
I wasn’t even sure.
“I don’t know,” I informed him. “I might be losing it.”
Everybody (including myself) had apparently lost his or her mind, or maybe it was just everybody in a relationship. On the way back to the precinct, the streets were jammed. Someone had detonated an explosive device inside the lobby of a downtown major bank branch, and it had essentially shut the city down. There were reports of several shootings in the street. It was a massacre out there. The death toll was already up to something like sixty-eight and it would get much higher as the fresh fires burned all through the night. Sunday’s obituary page would have to be enlarged and would probably take up six to seven pages. By this point I was entirely convinced it all had to do with the baby dropped from the overpass.
When we finally got to the precinct, it was difficult to even make it in the front door. There were people flooding out the entranceway, and the main lobby was packed. The holding center was overcrowded with prisoners, and some people had just been cuffed to the radiator in the lobby. I finally made my way up to forensics with the broken arrow. Dr. Yupik looked dog-tired; his hair was all disheveled and his glasses were askew. He was still running tests on the large, white wing and was intrigued by the arrow.
Dr. Yupik, pondering something, stared off into space. “I’m not sure it’s a species of bird that I know of,” he said, a bit perplexed, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “Its DNA is very strange.”
I showed him the broken arrow. He read the Greek lettering as if he were reading a spell. “It conquers all and Time it steals, inflicted by the wound that never heals.” The words seemed familiar, and Dr. Yupik touched the tip of the arrowhead several times.
“Is that a riddle?” I asked about the Greek lettering.
“I’m not sure, but it’s obviously speaking of love.” Dr. Yupik touched the tip of the arrowhead again. He tapped on the arrowhead several times with his finger.
“It appears to be giving off some minor vibration,” Dr. Yupik explained finally.
“Like a tuning fork,” I reasoned.
“Like a tuning fork,” he repeated.
He pulled out a small mallet and struck the arrowhead lightly. It gave off a hum that was something akin to ooohhhmmmmmmmmm. It was strange, but despite the last two days, the hum made me feel as if everything were going to be all right. I felt the vibration spreading to my heart and my loins.
He hit it again, this time harder. The sound was much louder; everything in the room appeared to quiver, OOOHHHMMMMMMMMM. We were both dumbstruck, and I even felt light-headed.
“What the fuck was that?” I questioned.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Yupik stated shakily.
We both tried to ignore what had just happened as he went about his tests. Most of the results came back inconclusive, but Dr. Yupik could confirm that the arrowhead was made of gold, and after a carbon dating test, that it was very old. How old, was in question. He said that was hard to say. I eventually decided to put forward my very crazy hypothesis to Dr. Yupik.
He looked at me with something that was bordering on contempt. “What makes you say that?”
“Just a hunch.” I explained, “I mean, look at the facts: a baby ‘dropped’ from an overpass, no perpetrator, no witnesses, the large, white wing, the golden arrow.”
“That’s preposterous,” Dr. Yupik voiced.
“I know, but look outside,” I stated. He knew what was happening; outside, the streets were wild with insanity, buildings were burning, and civilization itself seemed as if it were crumbling.
I checked to see if anyone had reported a missing baby, a missing child, a kidnapping; still nothing. I called Maria Amado, the witness who claimed the baby had been thrown. Her mother answered and said she was out back. I explained to her that I was an officer of the law and it was imperative that I speak with her daughter.
The streets were like something out of Carnival in Brazil, except the people were not celebrating, they were suffering. The mob marched, not with protest signs but with weapons. A topless woman bleeding profusely from the head screamed as she ran past us. A burning man ran from a blazing building before crashing through a plate-glass window.
Maria’s house was a small, dilapidated shack that was clearly in need of serious renovations. Maria was playing out back down by a stream with a group of friends. When I approached, all the laughter and child’s play ceased immediately as if it were snuffed out by a monster. The children seemed to sense I was an officer of the law and that trouble was afoot; children can always sense that sort of thing.
Although it was unprofessional, I decided to conduct the interview in front of the group of children. I figured Maria would be more truthful, but I wasn’t sure how to start.
“Uh…I wanted to ask you a few more questions about the accident you witnessed yesterday,” I stammered. None of the children were breathing; it was as if I had sucked all the air out of the streambed.
“Okay,” Maria said calmly.
I searched for what I was trying to say, but stammered, “The baby…if it even was a baby…you said that he was not dropped…he was thrown.”
“That’s correct,” Maria said.
“Could you elaborate?” I insisted.
“Whatta ya mean?” she asked honestly.
I had trouble coming up with the words. “Just - er - go into more detail.”
She bit her lip, and I suddenly realized everybody was staring at her. “I don’t know, I was walking across the overpass. I was looking down most of the way, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw the baby fly across the bridge.” She used her hands to gesture positions. She squinted her eyes. “Like I said, the baby came from the side. He wasn’t dropped.”
My mind was reeling. Flying, did she say the baby was flying?
“So, what, then, somebody threw the baby?” I inquired.
“I didn’t see anybody throw the baby,” she confessed.
“But you said you were looking down,” I stated.
“I have excellent peripheral vision,” Maria explained. She had trouble pronouncing the word peripheral.
“Really?” I inquired.
“Yeah,” Maria said nodding her head, “I can see for miles.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?” I queried.
“Like?” Maria questioned.
Like a flying baby with white bird wings, I wanted to yell out, but withheld.
“The whole scene just seems really suspicious. Something’s amiss,” I admitted.
I made my way to the car not really knowing anything more than I had when I came to interview Maria. I needed a strong drink as I felt this case once again pulling at my sanity.
February 16th
The hours seemed to drag on into grayness. I’m not even sure what time I got home on February 15th; I do know it was well after dark and I was beyond exhausted. I’ll admit my sanity was slipping; after all, I half believed I was investigating the death of the winged god of love. Insane thoughts slipped through my mind. If the baby was Cupid and Cupid is dead, does that mean love is dead? Is that why all these horrible things are happening? It must be. It still felt like a dream. I just wanted to slip under the covers and cuddle up next to my love, but she was gone.
“Maxine,” I called out into the shadows of the bedroom.
“Hello?”
“Maxine?”
There was no answer.
Sometime during the last twelve hours, she had fallen out of love with me and moved all her stuff out. I desperately searched for a note. Nothing; apparently, she had left me.
My day (if you want to call it that) started extra early at about 4 AM; sirens were going off and the building had to be evacuated. There was a structure fire on the first two floors and it had spread to levels four, five and six. With nowhere else to go, I grabbed an extra uniform from out of my car and headed to work. The streets were pandemonium as if it were rush hour on parade day and not 4 o’clock in the morning. I weaved between looters and pedestrians, and tried to ignore the many violations I witnessed just on my way up the block.
Rubbing my eyes, I could not believe the scene unfolding before me. Was this the Apocalypse? I drove past several bodies lying dead in street; whatever this was, it seemed to be spreading like some kind of Cupid-bomb and we seemed to be the epicenter. There were now reports on the radio of several other cities experiencing the same sort of citizen chaos. In my neighborhood, crowds were scattered here and there, watching the major landmarks. As my headlights ran along the pavement, they reflected thousands of shards of broken glass from all the windows and streetlights that had been shattered. On my way to the station, the electricity of the entire city seemed to waver, flicker, then shut off completely, and that’s when the real chaos began. As soon as the few remaining streetlights shut down and darkness spread across the land, traffic came to a complete standstill. I saw people fleeing from their cars, and several of the empty automobiles, doors still ajar, being ransacked. Hand on my revolver, I opened my vehicle door and ventured out into the dark streets. A mob of people, all excited about the craziness going on, sprinted around a corner and disappeared. The air was filled with acrid smoke and the only light permeating the haze was from the sky, lit by the hundreds of fires that had been set ablaze. I came upon another smaller mob, but upon seeing my revolver they chose to go in another direction.
The air was thick with smoke, and it was getting fairly hard to breathe, when I came upon a donut shop still open for business. It seemed to have many peaceful patrons, and they had set up some candles but were almost out of donuts. Although everybody was calm, it seemed most people were really nervous, as if they thought this was their last night on Earth or the end of society in general.
I found a booth, one of the only empty ones in the whole place, and sat down. There was a quiet hush about most people, as they were quietly discussing the happenings outside and what it might mean. What was going on? Was this the End of Days? Was this all caused by the god of love getting smashed by a Mack truck? Well, no one was discussing the third question; still it was on my mind.
Against the ghoulish reflections of candlelight, a meek little waitress came over and took my order. They still had a little hot coffee left and a few donuts, though the donuts seemed kind of stale and may have been more than a few days old. I was sipping my lukewarm coffee and gnawing on my stale donut when a teenage boy, barely a man, entered through the front door. He wore a dark baseball cap backwards and looked as if he might be bleeding beneath the heavy flannel jacket he wore.
I could almost sense something was going to go down; sure enough after limping a few steps, the boy whipped out a pistol and yelled, “FREEZE, I need everyone to empty your pockets or I’m gonna start blasting.”
The customers were worn and had already been broken as they weakly reached their hands into their pockets. My hand was already on my revolver and in the darkness, I knew it would be fairly easy to take him out. The teenage boy was jittery and shaky as he pointed that pistol around the darkened donut shop. “DON’T MOVE,” he screamed, his gun shaking in several different directions.
People had started to dig into their pockets and pocketbooks to dish out money, when there was a large explosion outside. I could’ve shot the boy dead right there, but somehow that didn’t sit right with me. I wanted to find the reason for his holding up people at gunpoint. The boy had pulled out a plastic bag and was collecting wallets and watches and some purses. Nobody was putting up a fight; many of them figured they were dead already. As the boy got closer, I noticed his attention wavering. He was focused on getting the hell out of there and didn’t expect a confrontation, so when he sauntered up next to me with his plastic bag full of treasures, I drew my revolver as quick as Billy the Kid, put it straight to his head, and asked snidely, “Why do you look so sad and forsaken?”
“Put down the gun,” I said calmly.
He did not put down the gun. The boy was clearly in shock; he almost panicked, and I almost had to shoot him dead right there, but then reason seemed to kick in.
He had a sad look in his eye, a look of helplessness and lost faith. “My love is gone,” he said simply.
“Where did she go?” I inquired.
“I don’t know,” he said blankly.
“And that’s why you’re robbing everybody at gunpoint?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he stated, this time looking at me.
I had his attention; I had to act fast. “If I told you what really happened, you’d think I was nuttier than the Son of Sam.”
“What’s that?” he asked lowering the gun and the bag.
“You’ll think I’m nuts,” I informed him.
“Try me,” he said with a hint of a smile on his lips.
I cleared my throat; I wasn’t even sure how to proceed. Should I be completely honest? “This all started two days ago when that baby got dropped off that overpass.”
“Do you remember?” I inquired.
The boy nodded.
“At the scene of the accident, I found a large, white wing and a broken arrow with Greek letters engraved on it that said It conquers all and Time it steals, inflicted by the wound that never heals.”
The boy seemed unimpressed.
I continued, “Since that accident, everyone’s gone crazy, particularly people in relationships, so much so that you know what I’ve been thinking?”
“What?” the boy questioned more out of humor than anything else.
“I’ve been thinking that maybe, just maybe, that baby was Cupid. And if Cupid’s dead, does that mean love’s dead, too?”
“You are crazy…” the boy said plainly.
But I cut him off. “My love is gone, too,” I said loudly. “I feel completely empty, but I’m not using this gun in my hand to go around robbing people.”
In the darkness by candlelight, it looked as though the boy had tears in his eyes. “I feel like I can’t breathe,” he said gasping a little.
“It’s all part of love,” I said, trying to sound wise.
“Your love seriously left you, too?” he asked.
“She did,” I answered, my voice continuing to elevate. “And for a while part of me was convinced it was because of that baby. But part of me thinks that maybe it was just a baby, and it’s actually my fault and maybe love doesn’t exist.”
It all happened so fast, I didn’t even really have time to reflect. I do remember thinking, I thought I’d have more time. Quickly, he jerked his gun, and, I’ll admit, I did not hear it go off, but I could feel the bullet hole in me and the warm life running from my body. The scene was surreal; I clutched my stomach which had grown red and wet. This wasn’t happening. The lines of reality continued to blur. I felt weak and tired so I slid to the floor of the donut shop, the boy having run off in fright. I closed my eyes and thought of the accident.
As I lie on the floor dying, I find that when I open my eyes the has scene shifted and I am back at the overpass, except I am still bleeding from the stomach. My mind is trying to process the whole thing. It feels like a bad dream, the overpass, investigating the death of Cupid, my love dying, everybody’s love dying, civilization crumbling and falling, and I am beginning to wonder if I wasn’t the one who jumped from the overpass. I am looking for my love, Maxine, but she is gone. I look around me unsure of my reality as the life drains out of me.
