raised by wolves

Hours later, the cops have left. The medical examiners have confiscated the severed hands in order to identify them. They will go to the local emergency room and look for a man with no hands and they will likely arrest him. I look up at the black sky and wonder how you could handcuff a man if he hasn’t got any hands any more. It starts to rain.

The store clerk enters my alley through the back door of the convenience store. It opens with a heavy creaking sound of stubborn metal. He’s holding a grocery bag. Inside are sandwiches, hot dogs, bagels, donuts, sodas, bottled water and a stack of money. The clerk places the bag on the ground in front of me and through a knitted brow and pursed lips says: Thank you. I open the bag and look up at him and can’t help but smile. He looks very serious, and does not smile back. My smile fades.

The clerk tells me a story of how when he was young, his father owned a convenience store. The clerk’s father worked long, hard hours to support his family and keep his store open during a recession that seemed like it would never end. One night a man with a shotgun held the store up. Times were rough all over then, and it wasn’t enough any more to be an honest man making an honest living. The clerk’s father was shot and killed, and the store was closed. The clerk says that was the moment that he stopped believing in justice. He went on to follow in his father’s footsteps because he had no other choice. He planned to work and plod his way through his life until—he seemed to think it was inevitable—some maniac with a shotgun put an end to him the way one had put an end to his father. He says he thought the end would be tonight. When he looked down the end of the man’s gun, he thought it was all over, that finally, the gears of the world would be finished with him, would finally spit him out and justice would not matter.

“But you,” he says in a truncated, uncertain accent. “You have brought justice back.”

He says, for my trouble, he will feed me and clothe me and provide me with shelter as long as he can. He says he will hide me when the cops come for me. He says I will be safe and all I will have to do is protect his store. I consider his offer for a very long time. I look at the bag of groceries and the small stack of money. It is more than I have seen in years, decades, a quarter of a century perhaps.

I look up at him and I swallow hard. He does too. I give him the slightest nod and he exhales with relief. He bows and thanks me, quickly, quietly, and then returns to the store through the back.

That night I fall asleep looking into the night sky. It is the first clear night in what feels like weeks. My head is swimming with drink, the cheap stuff I bought with the pile of money from the clerk. When I look down from the sky, I am well beyond the wall of sleep, and I am once again dreaming of distant lands. I am the samurai again, and my shogun is pleased with me. There is a ceremony being held. There are streamers and fireworks and revelers and song and dance. I am being honored for my outstanding service under the shogun. Peace and prosperity will once again return to the land. By my sword, all that is not right shall be put so. By my sword…

When I open my eyes, I realize that I am inside the convenience store, still with the machete clutched tightly under my arm, inside my coat. I see the clerk, the one who unwittingly feeds me every night, eying me suspiciously. He thinks I’m shoplifting. I must be crazy, hallucinating. The clerk is small and Mexican-looking, with dusky features and a complexion like bricks downtown. He’s squinting at me down his nose. I don’t remember coming in. How have I been acting since I got here? I must be crazy.
But I still feel it. The calm is still there. I feel as light as a feather.

I make like I’m contemplating a purchase, casually glancing over the various bags of styrofoam chunks they pass off as potato chips, to make some attempt to appear normal, to let the clerk know that I’m not a threat. I would never dream of stealing from him. I am not the type to bite the hand that feeds.
I hear the bell on the door jangle and look up to see a man in a black ski mask and a leather jacket walk through the door. I notice peripherally that it is still light outside. I notice immediately that the man is also holding a gun. He’s holding a big gun, shiny and deadly, the kind someone pulls on you and you shit your pants no matter what. He holds it out in front of him with both hands and yells at the clerk to empty the register.
The clerk is caught off guard. He was too busy looking at me, watching me to make sure I wasn’t stealing. And the man in the mask doesn’t see me at all. It’s like I’m not even there.

The clerk opens the register and with heavy hands and a grimace that could freeze a man’s heart cold in his chest, begins filling a small paper bag with the register’s contents. He doesn’t take his eyes off the end of the gun. He swallows hard and finishes emptying the drawer. This place is too small to have a security system, probably not even an emergency alarm for the police. The clerk folds the paper bag around the money the same way he would as if the man with the gun were buying a carton of milk, or a soda and sandwich. The man with the gun still hasn’t seen me. I hear the words and feel the lightness, and my body begins moving all on it’s own.
I remember riding through the countryside on horseback, my armor weightless around me, a part of me, a second skin, just as the sword at my hip was as effortless to use as a third limb. I remember the feeling of the wind, the sound it made blowing past my ears inside the helmet.
I hear this sound even clearer as the blade, the machete with the green gilded handle drops in front of me. Swinging the machete feels like moving in water, easy, fluid.
The gun falls to the floor with two hands still clutching it tightly.
The man falls to his knees screaming, staring at his fresh new stumps. The man looks at me through his ski mask and I smile, knowing that today, I have acted righteously, I have brought justice into the world. By my hand…
When he sees the smile on my face, the man panics and gets to his feet and runs (I expect) like he has never run before. He will not come back, and he will never rob anyone again.

It is dusk here, and the sun filtering through the dying branches of trees in autumn reminds me of fields of golden flax and grain, a memory I didn’t know I had. I look up at the sky through the trees. Behind my mask, I smile.
The temple is multileveled and very wide, like something right out of a Hong Kong action movie. The only door of the strange, angular temple is a yawning mouth with nothing visible immediately beyond the threshold.
There is a sound of a gong, which is remarkably similar to the sound of the dumpster I sliced apart. There is movement inside the temple. A line of monks with their heads bowed appears, all of them silently staring at their feet. They line up on either side of me, standing with their heads bowed and hands folded in silent prayer or meditation.
There is once more the sound of a gong. I remain seated on the steps, facing the empty doorway of the temple. The monks pray vigorously.
From the dark portal in the temple emerges an ancient wisp of a man, a man who looks made of papyrus more than flesh. He wears a black robe over his monk’s vestments. His hair is long and white and sticks off the back of his head in a long, unruly ponytail. He has a thin wispy mustache to go along with his thin wispy body and hair.
He speaks the words from my dream.
I am held captive. My mind races like a combustion engine behind my forehead. I cannot understand.
But then something happens, and it’s all clear to me. I feel a great lightness, as though I might float away and never return to the ground. I can’t explain it, but it brings me such peace and inner calm. Enlightenment. It is embodied in the sword in my hand, and the swift, righteous justice that it bestows on me.
The old man releases the sword from his gnarled claws and I hold it in my hands. It gleams brilliantly in the sunlight, flashing blindingly, making you squint. I put the sword into the scabbard at my side, and behind my samurai mask, I close my eyes and exhale. Peace.

In the morning, I wake up and wonder what I will do that day. I cannot recall dreaming. I stretch my arms above my head and I feel something hard and sharp and metal beneath the pile of coats I was using as a pillow. My skin nearly leaps off of my back and I can’t believe it’s still there, that it was not a dream. I pick up the blade and examine it closely. I slap it’s broad side against the dumpster next to me and it makes a horrible CLLANGGG. I swing the blade edge first into the dumpster and it passes through so easy that at first I think I missed. I look closer and there’s a slice taken out of the rusted green metal. Nothing cuts that easily.
I get to my feet, holding the blade very, very carefully at arm’s length. I take a deep breath and as I exhale, I drop my arm diagonally across a corner of the dumpster. There is no sound until the severed corner hits the ground but my escaping breath.
The noise of the hardened industrial steel hitting the ground like the world’s worst cymbal sends a shock up my spine, sending me on an involuntary leap through the air. I hit the ground running and hide the machete under my coat. After a moment I realize I’m running still, and looking suspicious, and so I turn down a side street and immediately slow my pace. I cross my arms over my chest, the sharp blade of the machete tucked under my coat, under my armpit. I struggle to compose myself and regain my breath.
I find myself eventually heading in the direction of the park. It is a nice day and there are many people about. I keep my head down and avoid eye contact with anyone and it’s as good as if I wasn’t even there at all. No one bothers to look any more, and I don’t blame them. I’m just part of the scenery. This calms me down some, this line of thought.
I make my way to a bench, one of the ones near the tree that blossoms white in the spring time, and I sit. I grip the gilded green handle of the machete tightly under my arm. I feel something like a pulse, but all over my skin, as if I were surrounded by garbage bags inflated with flowing air. I close my eyes, and suddenly, I am seated on the steps of a temple. When I open my eyes, I am still there, and I am once again the samurai.

I usually puke in the morning and today is no different. I climb to my feet and shuffle away from the pile of partially digested meat byproducts and malt liquor. I dig into the trash and find donuts and bagels and eat my fill before wandering out into the sun to meet the day. I find an abandoned shopping cart nearby and for lack of anything better to do, I begin pushing it along in front of me. I might find something worthwhile to cart back, like a chair or a small table to sleep under.
I wonder sometimes what it is that makes me still desire so many strange things. I’ve had nothing for so long and still survived, you’d think I would have obtained enlightenment by now, a drunk old Buddha, miserable and alone in the rain and the muck.
I wonder what the Buddha would do in my situation. Meditate, more than likely.
Fuck enlightenment.

I wander around the city in the spring sun. There’s nothing worthwhile here.

I walk down an alley not unlike my own, but this one is behind a consignment shop and not a convenience store. I look in the dumpsters and find a treasure trove. At the end of the day, my cart is full of two new jackets, one brown suit jacket and one gray raincoat affair, a small folding chair, a new pair of slacks and a curtain that I can use as a blanket.
As I turn to push my cart and my loot back to my alley, something strange catches my attention from the corner of my eye. It is a green gilded handle. My eyes pop and my mouth drops open and I dive for it. On the end of the handle is not a ten-foot samurai sword like in my dream. I realize it is silly to have expected it to be such, but my old brain is not as sharp as it once was, and I have always been given to flights of fancy. On the end of the green gilded handle is, however, a short, sharp machete-style blade, spray-painted with black glossy paint. I looked around conspiratorially and then nonchalantly slid the machete into my cart.
I return to my alley with the words from the previous night’s dream echoing in my head. All that is not right shall be put so by my hand, by my sword.