Worlds

He is running fast. The pains in his calves grow warm and burn. His chest tears at him and his lungs hurt. His throat growls and his mouth is dry. He wasn't ready. These shoes will not do. The muscle is separating and his shins throw him down. He can't breathe hard enough, but he wants to scream. He falls to his knees and the rocks cut him. The air is dry and the dust enters the wounds. The tears streaming down his face push dirt, and mud falls to the earth. Nothing. He was eating, and all is consumed. He watched the fire melt his children. He saw his wife beaten and raped and then shot. The bloody mud dripping from his wrists are welcomed by the weeds beneath him. There is nothing ahead. There is nothing behind. This Earth that breathed him life will drain it away. He stands and stretches. He's a good runner; he's three miles from where he started. He's in no hurry now. He just needed a chance to think. He's thought. Now he must act.

There is a man putting up a road block. He is not worried; all the fighting is two miles away. The air is cooling to his skin and he's thinking about a girl he saw yesterday. His truck has no armor or weapons. He is not here to fight. His AK-47 is on the passenger seat, it's not even loaded. His righteousness gives him strength. His God demands he sacrifice. He wonders, 'If death be glory, then how can strength be a gift? Perhaps strength of soul at cost of body, that makes sense. Glory for my' The man stops thinking as pieces of his skull, blood, and hair arc towards the pavement as a crescent motion repeats upon his head, a fist holding a stone. He falls into a pile of himself, gloriously. The man gets into the truck and loads the AK. He drives into town.

Two children hide under their bed. They make no noise. One pulls at her hair, the pain she feels distracts her. The boy is focused on the legs. The four legs at the end of the bed, the two feet facing him, the boots they wear, worn and torn. The pants, the belt, the buckle that shakes and swings, clinking, clinking. He could grab that belt, maybe no one would notice, the five people in that room. Maybe no one would hear over the creaking of the bed, the screams of his mother.

They let her scream, they like it. The man at the door is waiting, his world is that room, that bed, that woman. The woman is waiting, her world is beneath her. The children have no world, the boy is making one. His arms extended, he leans on his sister, she is warm and soft, and he has held her before. He is pulling on the belt and holding the pants in place. The kid whose belt is being removed is not in that room. He's home with his girlfriend, she is on this bed and she is moaning. There is no one behind him, and there is no one at his feet avoiding the boots that are worn.

The man in the truck drives slowly, anyone can drive fast but a man with nothing to fear. How can anyone possibly not fear the force upon this city, unless they are the force? Explosions in the distance, waves of smoke, fires, and bullets. He hears the screams. He stops the truck and gets out. The man enters the house, his barrel before him. At the doorway to that room he sees a man whose world he's beside. The man decides to be quiet, and despite all desires to fill the doorman with all his gun's worth, the doorman's head is introduced to the stock of an AK-47. As the doorman's world goes dark and shrinks, the kid without a belt enters the room. He finds his right hand holding a pistol to a woman's head; he quickly makes orphans and turns the pistol towards the 'dispeller of road-blockers and doormen'. The man whose world is all-encompassing moves away and waits. The small caliber of that pistol couldn't shoot through a wall. The kid whose penis had just left a dying woman he's never met is startled by her last attempts at breath. He fires on her twice. One bullet hits her in the chest, the other, small though it may be in caliber, easily passes through the thin mattress. The kid turns his gun towards the doorway and tries to move away from the bed, his left leg goes nowhere and guides the rest of his body towards the floor. The boy hadn't time to tie off the belt and it slips from his hands. His world was briefly a strap of leather and a leg with a worn boot. It was not the belt that tripped this leg. This leg, whose owner wore pants at his ankles. The boy's world was consumed. What did he think was going to happen? He had to do something, but how would that have helped? Now the owner of the legs that had faced him with worn boots could turn his attention to him, to his sister. His sister whose warmth was dispersing, the warmth of her now underneath the boy, in her blood. The girl is dead and this boy has nothing.

The man had focused on that gunfire and the thud, he re-entered the doorway, his AK pointed where the kid should have been. The kid's gun was pointed where the man shouldn't be, and he fires, he fires, and he fires. The man whose world had been all-encompassing now focuses all of himself, all that he is capable of doing, and fires into the kid. The kid is killed instantly. The man falls to his knees again. Even more blood and dirt drips to the floor. The boy emerges from under the bed, covered in the warmth his sister had given him. He walks towards the man. The man looks on this boy and remembers his own son. The man thinks perhaps if he had not entered this room, they would all be alive and before the guilt can develop, and swirl, and consume his stomach, a bullet from an increasingly conscious doorman ends all his worlds. The boy charges the doorman and is cut down. Blood from his chest, from his sister finds its way across the room, across the bed, across the exposed skin of his mother. The doorman rises, dripping in the blood and sweat of all but two in this room. He walks towards the bed and pulls out the girl from underneath. She was beautiful. He lays her body next to her mother, removes his pants, and fucks her lifeless body.