They shot me when I was sixty four and I died two days later at 65. The bullet stuck somewhere near my spine and might not or have killed me in time. But patience aint one of they’ virtues.
It was the nurse that did it. I didn’t see it happen ‘cause I was asleep; which is normal for me at three in the mo’nin’, but I seen her eyes since and I can read her regrets. She dropped a seasoned packet of blood all over my shallow breathin’ neck and left a back do’ unlocked.
It could have been Tom Parkins, Monty Felix (motherfuckin’ illiterate ass redneck), or that dirty turncoat sonofabitch, Debro Blount that actually brought that bloodthirsty hound to the foot o’ my bed, but they was all guilty in the plannin’.
The first time I saw my body and the inner workings of my neck turned inside out like a spaghetti dinner spilled over my white beard and pearly bedsheets I let out a silent scream of agonized terror that only I could hear. I’ve been quiet, even to myself, ever since. No one can hear me anyway. God don’t come to Mississippi.
“But I do,” came a smooth voice of calm.
Immediately my worried mind felt soothed and a tingle hit…shit, what used to be, my brain. I liked the sound of this voice right away and wanted to hear more.
“Who’s that?” I tried to say but could only think in quiet.
“I’ve come to bring you eternity.”
“You tha Lord?” I asked.
“I offer you one last choice. Ascend now in peace forever, or exact vengeance on those who wronged you before you move past this life.”
“I would find them.”
I had been as light as a summer breeze for the first moments of my death. Expansive as the sunrays over a crystalline lake and still. Now I rushed like a gale force wind and was growing hot and dense. I found myself gliding over the glistening black asphalt that I had driven so often in life. I had grown smaller and I remembered Styrofoam and the toxins it would let off if burned. I spread far to the edge of the sidewalk.
Ahead of me a couple walked hand in hand and I hated them for their life. Had they looked behind them a wind of low hanging fog would have been all they had seen. But as I passed they’re feet they fell dead to the ground. They lied there together with their legs crumbled beneath them for another hour before anyone found the corpses.
I was being pulled along and with every inch my burning hatred grew more extreme and I loved the pain. Suddenly I was home and I knew what they were after. In the kitchen, the towering brute who had saved my life so many years before at the edge of a canyon in Korea stood guard. Debro dropped hard, his skull cracking on the hard tile floor just outside of the basement door.
I was down the steps where Felix dug in the soft dirt floor under my house. He had already penetrated four feet and was growing close. He fell into the grave he dug for himself. Tom was confused for a moment at the sudden falling out of his friends but then I was there.
He heard a howl like the wind rushing through a crack in the door and the lights broke. In the blackness he was heard to whelp like a lost puppy as I surrounded him. He was not as fortunate as his friends as I filled him up and taunted him for trying to take my only treasure.
“That blade would never fetch you more than twenty grand,” he heard me cry. “Was it worth it?!”
His spine snapped in half with the flex of my will and I let him die slowly on the dirty ground in a house no one would enter for nearly a week and I stopped.
“You have chosen,” the voice returned. “Come with me now.”
For just a moment after I was pulled into the Earth and before I felt that fire, I felt no regrets.



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