Unlimited Breakfast Ch. 1 V.2

This city is caught in a fragile sleep, a place of vivid dreams and drool stained pillows. Its streets are like coral canyons in a warm sea heaving and flowing with people. The tropical heat forces dark green weeds and lush grasses to burst through the slabs of brick and concrete, filtering up like insurgents through colonising slabs of brick and concrete. Fruit trees, wild and untamed, stand along the long and straight roads that lead into the city from the rest of the world, opposing old colonial lamposts that flake black paint along the empty paths. The city itself is surrounded by a vast orange scrubland, and the fruit of the trees droops down unpicked into the short yellow grass by the side of the road, melting and deforming under the humid sun like the skin and bones on a corpse left to rot. 
Inhabitants drift down the footworn streets with dead eyes, trailing vortices of musty smells that mix in the wind. Living here means understanding existence and death as less a mere certainty giving room for wilful ignorance, but just a long way off. Life becomes nothing more than a process gone grey along the way of lain down tarmac, the soles of your feet grinding slowly as you shuffle out of your house, along that relentless pavement conveyer belt, until you reach the end of the road, the self checkout, life support beeping again and again, over and over, tolling like a bell for all your worthy achievements are worth until death herself packs you and carries you away in a big black plastic sack for life.

But then there are those with wild eyes and swaying step who cross the road, down off the pavement, into dirty alleys on the outskirts of town, where each footfall lands almost silent, a dull tap that reverberates around on towering buildings that creep up into the sky and hem in any wanderer or traveller. Looking up at their dusty bricks a one can see spiral of lush tendrils, pockmarked here and there with delicate star shaped flowers. Dark purple petals and waxy green leaves curl towards the sun. And down on the ground, as you walk, very occasionally a glint of one the many lords of the city catches your eye as a random copper coins. A coin first spent so long ago, spent for you, indebting you to this city even before you’re dragged out screaming into this unforgiving world. Born into a life of debt but nevertheless feeling the dry air on your wet skin lighting up your nerves like a blanket of ice, eyes wide and bloodshot, your gumless screams stifled by scratchy blankets covering your new nude body, trailing umbilical all over the shop until the doctor finally comes to decide if you’re an innie or an outie, your bellybutton sealed like your fate.

Most people in this city are poor, living on these outskirts. Here the streets have no signs, each twist and turn clearly an abesentee design- a secondary effect of the decision to build homes so desperately needed by a burgeoning population. The blocks separated by dirt covered paths cross over each other like tree roots exposed by the rain. Together the children of this shanty play, chasing eachother, dry smears of dirt settling into the crags of their palms as they laugh and scrabble like feral little magpies for any shiny flake by the side of the copper coloured houses. Each house is topped by its own patchwork of corrugated rust, and the walls slant into the ground, at different angles, sinking back into the earth. Within each thin home lives a large family, so close to the next that they can hear the life next door. Screams of anguish, moans of pleasure, laughter, arguments and everyday conversations seeping through the cracks in plasterboard just as privacy relents to mold.  And as the sun goes down you can catch glimpses of soft, wind dried limbs through stained linen blinds that gently waver in the breeze.  
The roots lead to central area of the city where tall white and blue glass skyscrapers hang. At a certain point the curved dirt paths give way to planned streets, each polished building casting a shadow and cooling the pavement. Every cornerstone and angle looks to be so heavily designed and ordered by architechs looking down from cold, dry, air conditioned offices. Black cars careen down wide silver highways lined with trees trimmed so perfectly by unseen hands. On weekends the city is paralysed, and warm winds flow through the square streets, the only sounds around being the gentle clatter of some thin plastic wrapping dancing down the alleys, before it disappears from view. The dull roar of the motorway that feeds the centre of the city is hushed for now. And as the work week begins the air begins to fill with a chorus of intermittent horns in harmony, distant sirens grow to scream on top of cars that careen like speeding violins towards their targets and out of earshot. And people in black suits appear out of nowhere to walk purposefully, their heeled tapping shoes crackling together and their heads bobbing up and down as they flood into their buildings hurriedly, to sit at their desks, plugging in letters transformed into demands and sentiments sent hurtling out the aeriels wobbling at the top of the buildings to other headquarters around the world, codified, encrypted, reaching satellites that perform handshakes with the reams of data beaming between computers, beaming down to be transformed back into light that appear again reflected, on the dead eyes of the ones who read it. 



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to be married with ---
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And it just so happened on that day I woke up from my half dream exactly at midday. I swore. I was late for the meeting with Joanna. I fell out of bed onto the chocolate brown rug with wormlike fibres by my bed and briefly considered going back to sleep. My room was small, a rental subsidized by the police sector I worked for. It had beige paint peeling off the walls revealing the old vanilla wallpaper, perhaps there was an infinite sequence of beiges underneath that one, but i would know until i finally put a sledgehammer through it. 

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Detective Chief Inspector McFlanaghan. Chaos and I play a fickle game, we make our moves one after the other, never winning, both playing, forever. I was born and raised in the city by my father, my mother died before I was born. Her name was Lela, the softness of her name hung tenderly in my memory, I only knew her from my father’s pictures. His name was Benedict. Like the eggs. And we had a saying in our tiny two-man family: don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. He must have come up with it, of course. We lived by that phrase. But then my father died in an omelet fire. The coroner decided that the cause of death was house fire tinged with a lust for breakfast. But that was my dad through and through. He loved breakfast. And he loved making it. He always made a habit of encouraging me to go out and make my own. His words still ring in my ears, tempered words that shone through the grimace borne of the gentle searing splatter of bacon grease onto his hairy arms. “Make your own damn breakfast!” he used to say, whilst waving his shiny, melted plastic spatula up and down like a wizard’s wand, shoulders twitching minutely at every tiny jumping drop of grease burning through his coarse but comforting arm hair. And I took those words to heart. Because it turns out that breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day, breakfast is life. He used to make an omelet every single morning for fourty-four years since he could reach the hob. He taught me to twist and push until you hear the cracking fires emerge. Twist and push and tear the knob right off to keep the flames firing the frying pan of destiny. And then crack your eggs. There were times when it seemed like he was telling me old news- ideas I already knew- but as soon as he was gone it was because I never knew his story. I never realized the struggle that gave weight behind his words. I never realized why he was telling me these things. He was full of wisdom, laughter, and breakfast.  But I never cooked my own. I could never find it within the deep shelves of my heart. And now im the one with egg on my face; some kind of demented yolk I can never wipe off.

So I had to find my own purpose in life. It just so happened my purpose found me first. It was chaos itself. I found my way to see through the charred, steaming hulk of our little burnt eggbasket. When our dream burnt down, I caught a glimpse into the writhing underworld of hatred. And so I remembered the ethos my father gave me before his pancakes were flipped. It was for me an ethos unexplored, where the night could set it ablaze at any moment. And so I packed my bags full of determination, hate, fear, eggs, turned them into weapons, against those who ride on the coattails of chaos. Against those who set the night ablaze. And all in all, in the deepest, darkest nights of your life Fate rides a flaming chariot through the sky, careening his reined charges through the snow that drifts so calmly in the air, and he enters your quiet life like a master cat-burglar. He delicately lays down the law of the universe right next to your sleeping face until you bolt upright and realize you’re right in the shit. I always hated Christmas. And so I am but a ghost in the footsteps of dusk, trying finding my path. I often find myself looking up, trying to see past the sodium orange lamplight that eats into my soul like moths to a stained rug. To me the sky is forever a colander; the stars pitted gaps in a bowl of black, the night seeps in.

Looking back over my shoulder at the never ending line of streetlamps, my gloved hands flipped up the collar. I reached into its folds, my quarry the crumpled pack of French blues. I pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply. I shuddered. A cloud of smoke fell up past my head. And it was a cold evening, no doubt Emerson, my partner, would be feeling it too, back in our wheels for this whole operation. Necessity had found us an old ice cream van. We called her Laquisha. She ran like a beaut, and we’d modified her original ice cream truck siren to be piercingly loud. We careened around in her, and as long as she continued to pump out 99’s, we would continue to pump out .44s, right out of her ample side window at whatever bastard needed one. One after another, in whatever form, we served righteous brainfreeze to this tangled cerebral mess of a town. I was glad Emerson was keeping her company. I had asked him to save me a couple of flakes to stick into a mighty vanilla swirl for when I got back. I smiled to myself as I walked down this dustily lit road. I paused. Why was I here?

I carried on smoking, walking, thinking through the cold, moodily and brooding as was cliche. I flicked my cigarette down a side alley, watching its orange arc fly through the air until it stopped, sizzling, in small pool of blood on the floor. I jolted and swore. Fear fluttered through my body like bacon in an iron skillet as I thought through my next move. I remembered that it was a Tuesday. Of course. And I began to follow the trail along the course concrete until I laid eyes on a body. It had fallen clumsily. I swore again and closed my eyes. Poor girl. As I opened them I was numb. She had a stamp on her forehead, chaotic milky eyes looking up into the night sky. Her limbs were strewn about, her left porcelain hand clutched an open packed of custard creams, she was missing a shoe. She was clearly dressed for a night out, long flowing black dress, torn in places, and a black velvet choker cruelly highlighting the damage sustained to her neck and face. And I noticed that the packet of biscuits was left full. Not a single one taken. Her lipstick, deep red lipstick, was smudged across her cheek like scar. And she was punctuated by an obscene smattering of beige crumbs, they were scattered like fallen stardust across the flowing black fabric that covered her empty body, a delicate, obscene galaxy all the way down to her midriff. She had light brown hair, curly, but lacking volume and lustre, as if unconditioned for weeks. The light failed to bounce off, any bounce long since gone. And as I stared with dull silence echoing in my ears I noticed the finer details. Suddenly, I heard the sharp slap of feet rushing up behind me. I snapped round, drawing my '44 as fast as i could. The footsteps stopped. I squinted past my dim shadow into the fog of the city night, my barrel hovering, pointed unknowingly in the briskness.
"…Show yourself!"
And from the deep dark at the end of the alleyway emerged a small thin man in an apron smeared with fingerstreaks of chocolate. He wore a tall white chef’s hat with a heavily mustached man giving both thumbs up, his eyes screaming happiness. He took a few steps forward, finishing the end of a waffle cone.
"It's only me, boss!" he called as crumbs spewed from his mouth in no apparent direction.

I paused, sighed, holstered my piece and zipped up my fly.

"Goddammit Emerson. You really fucking scared me there."

His eyes were always lit with the sparkle of a man who lives life for the sheer hell of it. That’s why he was with me. I followed hell, he followed suit, depending on the formality of the occasion. He was the yin to my yang, the bread to my butter side down. And there was undoubtedly a fire in his warm soul that never went out. But as those green orbs looked past me, his smile fell, the sparkle faltered. A single drop of vanilla ice cream fell from his bottom lip and hit the ground with a wet tap.

“Its… her” he said.

“Yes.” I sighed. “I know that.” We both turned around. Emerson had to turn around again so we were looking in the same direction. I understood his shock. No amount of death is ever right after a waffle cone. But the time for ice cream had been and come and passed away.