to take Niklas’ tirade seriously but suddenly apprehensive of the explosive undercurrent present in his voice and the aggression that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen.
Slowly he turned and leaned forward toward her with a hard, earnest expression chiseled into his features, looking as though he were trying to hypnotize a rabbit while simultaneously balancing his chair on its two front legs. He distorted his face grotesquely and raised the pitch of his voice until it approached a squeak, inquiring mockingly: “Hey, honey! Is it gonna be cash or credit card today?”
Jacqueline clapped the lid of the laptop together and placed it on the floor next to her, unintentionally allowing one end of it to drop the last few centimeters. She turned her head away in a mixture of disgust and frustration before rising from her chair. She stood silently with her arms folded across her chest and looked wordlessly through the open window.
A magazine slid over the edge of the table where Niklas was sitting and hit the floor before his feet with a loud slap.
A split second later, he shot up from the table and shoved his chair aside, sending it skidding across the wooden floor, a resounding screech filling the room as the chair hurtled toward the wall. He then turned and reached for a bright green, sweat-stained baseball cap which he had placed on the window sill. To Charles, Niklas nowadays always had a peculiar odor. Charles wasn’t sure why, but Niklas seemed lately to smell like a combustive mixture of horse shit, old sweat and turpentine. Charles harbored the suspicion that Niklas perhaps never bothered to brush his teeth anymore. He only occasionally shaved. Charles suspected that he never bathed or showered on days like this, on days when he had been having one of his binges.
And it was difficult for Charles to say for sure but he suspected deep within that Niklas seldom bothered to sleep anymore. The only consistency that Charles could discern in his stepfather’s behavior was the fact that he continued to drink like a fish.
Charles, as he sat witnessing this scene from his vantage point across the kitchen, came to despise his stepfather more and more with each passing day. He thought about what it would feel like to reach out and just kill him, right then and there. He fantasized in his mind about what it would feel like to just grab the small swell of chest hair that poked out through his open collar of his red-checkered shirt and choke the last vestiges of life out of the sleazy drunken bastard with his own two hands, simply to alleviate his mother’s misery and conveniently, in the process, that of his own.
Strangling him was out of the question, though. He fretted that Niklas probably didn’t even need to breathe oxygen to be mean, let alone live. He was probably one of those arsenic-based life forms which scientists were certain existed somewhere in the black void of space.
So, if strangulation was not an option, what would be the best method to go about dispatching him instead? In an academic fashion perhaps, employing simple brute force and the wonder of physics to gauge and explore the critical junction in the relationship between Niklas’ cranial stability and the momentum of a pole or a wooden two-by-four in full motion–would his skull then split like a ripe watermelon? Would it contain just as many seeds? Feeding him to an oversized snake was another intriguing option for a young boy of his age, but he had recently learned in school, much to his disappointment, that there were unfortunately only four indigenous kinds of poisonous snakes on the entire continent and not one of them was even close to being large enough to do the job–to meet with any kind of success, he would be forced to import one. Explosives were a further option. They were spectacular and usually pretty efficient, too, but they also tended to be messy and apt to attract undue notice. Charles knew that people in the suburbs could be notoriously nosy, he sighed, and few people would be willing to consider selling any sizable quantity of dynamite to a minor like himself. If anything, a low-key inconspicuous solution would probably work most effectively: Niklas’ bare feet adorning a vat of cement while he slept off what would then be his final hangover, headed for a moonless nocturnal rendezvous at the mouth of the wild and treacherous Andrew.Scoggin sound, for example. Or, if all other ideas and efforts failed or simply proved impractical, he could always simply flatten the son of a bitch out front in the driveway with the four-wheel drive when there was no one around. The rear-view camera in the car would make the task fun and easy. He just needed to grow a bit more for his feet to reach the accelerator.
Deep within, though, Charles knew that neither he nor anyone else would ever do any such thing. And Niklas probably did as well, if indeed the thought had ever occurred to him. Which is why he continued to make the lives of everyone around him resemble one long nightmare.
Donning the green cap as he left the kitchen, Niklas threw the door wide open and stepped onto the porch. The screen door protested, creaking loudly on its bent hinges.
Without turning to face his wife, he continued his irrational discourse on the porch.
“And you know what I’m gonna do next time?” he roared. “Huh? Do ya?”
He didn’t wait for anyone to respond but continued.
“I’m not gonna order anything but a goddamn bagel. No cream cheese. Nothing. And no tip either for the goddamn fat bitch!”
Neither Jacqueline nor Charles moved. Their life with Niklas was turning into a never-ending series of sermons highlighted by bouts of lunacy and punctuated by occasional episodes of random horror.
After standing wordlessly for a few seconds, Niklas wobbled slightly back and forth before turning on his heel.
“And you better remember something: when we’re finally gone off to the better life, we ain’t never comin’ back. There ain’t gonna be no visits back to here or none of that crap.scheiss. Never! Never! Never! Nev …”
Niklas spun around quickly and belched loudly one time. Then he vomited over the railing of the veranda.
BARNZ AND THE BULLDOZER
“Yo Barnz, man! Yo, Come on now! Where the hell are you now?”
Fulcrum stood impatiently rubbing the stubble on his chin next to a huge mound of moist sand dumped directly adjacent to the site access area. He had a small sheaf of loose papers and a flexible touch.Screen gadget clamped provisionally under his right armpit. His brown faux-alligator leather attaché case stood in the dirt, leaning at an odd angle against his right leg. Aside from the marsh grass that grew abundantly out here, only a few other tattered low shrubs dotted the irregular fringe of the next parcel of coastal land being leveled to facilitate the construction of a yet another set of high-efficiency NextGen PowerCranks. The development plan called for the erection of a cluster of six units at this particular location. Although it was now already fairly late in the afternoon, the air still hung heavy with the day’s heat and humidity with not even the tiniest hint of a breeze to be felt out here today. Far off in the distance, one might well have seen the ocean reflecting the haze of the afternoon, shimmering a peaceful mercurial silver hue.
“Must be that friggin’ global warming they’re always jabbing about all the time,” Fulcrum muttered impatiently to himself as he coughed into his fist and rasped his throat loudly. The salt and the dust hanging in the air were a real source of consternation to him, dehydrating his lips and throat and making him feel as though he were a sun-dried fig. If there was any truth to all the gibberish about the climate continuing to get progressively worse, he thought to himself with a hint of irony, then it would be only a question of time before he was mummified entirely.
He began to move again, albeit in slow motion now. Each step, each movement of his arms or head was as slow and deliberate as though he was some kind of reptile in winter trying resolutely to avoid radiating any body heat. Fulcrum doffed his cap momentarily and awkwardly wiped the sweat off the top of his head with a handkerchief, holding the cap in his right hand with the papers still stuffed beneath his arm. It was what he referred to as his so-called duty cap. It was old and stained by what must by now be many years of dust, grease, smudge and sweat accumulated at the innumerable sites he had toiled on during the course of his professional life. And, even though just about every site’s safety regulations explicitly called for them nowadays, Fulcrum continued to harbor an unbelievably strong contempt for the culture of hard hats deep within his