Intro (incomplete) to a story I am thinking of writing...
“A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
-Malcolm X
The shadows stir in the darkness as my eyes slowly begin to focus. Looking up at the lazy spin of the fan I slowly begin to fully awaken. It’s only October but I’m forced to cocoon myself within the confines of my bed to stay warm. A slow twist of the head reveals the time to be 4:37 in the morning and the beginning of yet another day. Crawling out of bed is the hard part, but once I get my body in motion the daily routine begins to settle in. I grab the nearest pipe and poke around the bowl looking for that last bit of green from the night before. The lighter temporarily lights the room as my lungs begin to feel with the warm, acrid smoke. A lone desk sits in one corner of the room with a dormant desktop screen while the gentle hum of the refrigerator reverberates from the small kitchenette. Aside from a small easy chair and some scattered clothes, the room looks bare and desolate. Exhaling the smoke, I pull on some jeans and a t-shirt and light a Kool in the barely lit doorway. The sun hasn’t even begun to rise and night still smothers the barren landscape that is Relax, Arizona. For a dingy, rural town, Relax was still the main hub for illegal business in the southwest. There is barely a handful of supposed “law-enforcers,” and even then a handful of cash can sway even the steadiest of minds. When I say the term “illegal business,” I mean literally everything that is heinous, immoral, and against the law. Alcohol, firearms, and narcotics, are only at the bottom of the list, while at the top you can find anything from supposedly extinct animals to even some small nuclear weapons (of mass destruction). It is almost as if there is some unseen, supernatural force that is drawing together the world’s most dangerous people and converting them into the world’s most dangerous community. To see all these criminals and degenerates in one place living peacefully, even thriving, was indeed a disturbing site at first.