Depression hit him like a trumpet blowing in his ear and a bed that once had been an oasis of peace seemed like it was crawling with maggots.
He had a real blister on his foot from a hike near Lake Manacca yesterday that was supposed to clear his head but the trip had only cleared Thorn’s gas tank.
Now he was walking in the neighborhood, past the shells of forgotten houses and gang-tagged abandoned boats, in the dark, wondering if tomorrow was worth waking up for, when he saw the dance.
He knew the dance.
He felt the dance.
None of his friends had been common rats.
They were criminals, sometimes, and schemers and hustlers and wore their faults like soldiers wore badges, but they hadn’t been predators.
“Yo, man, look…” the guy doing the dance began.
Thorn wasn’t afraid of this guy, even though the nature of the dance told him he was being robbed. The comic books didn’t invent a spider sense, the street did, streets like this one.
Thorn was afraid of his own reaction.
Thorn didn’t want to get shot but he was so unafraid of getting shot that it should have scared him and the absence of that fright, that tingle, that lack of sense of self-preservation scared him.
But he wasn’t gonna give no one anything.
He had given what he could.
Santa Claus had come down the chimney of his life and left festively wrapped boxes of nothing.
The song that went with the dance was some kinda prebuilt excuse; the man, the rat, had kids at home, and you know, obligations, and the thing in his pocket wasn’t a gun at all, it was a boxcutter.
Thorn looked at it and laughed.
The guy didn’t find it funny, at all.
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