An Unforgiving Reality by Patrick Sean Lee (the top 100 crime novels of all time txt) 📖

his fingers tightened into a fist. And then he saw Marvin walk to the door and push it closed.

                                       ***

    The man with no face glared up at them for what seemed an eternity. And then he began to slowly ascend the tree. Young Marvin gazed over the edge of the magical house, down, down, down. This time the dreamer knew he would at last hit the waiting ground. The little girl screamed.

    He lay trembling, a physical reaction to the poison still flowing in his veins, certainly, but the coldness, the helplessness, the brutality of his childhood ran like an arctic wave over the comparative mildness of his body’s rejection of the alcohol. His thoughts ran backward sixty years, dots and broken snapshots. The side gate of his home hanging on a single bent and rusted hinge, splintered slats of gray, discolored wood. Empty bottles and smashed cans. Everywhere an unkempt wildness and a silent anger that ran through the nettles and overgrowth of weeds. His mother weeping again, inside the house, this time not from a beating at Jack Fuster’s hands. Something else that maybe had been worse, if such a thing were possible. He saw himself standing on his tiptoes peeking through the kitchen window, raised open two inches. One hand covering the sobs coming from her mouth, her eyes closed tightly, and her head shaking back and forth. Her other hand half-covering the newspaper with headlines in bold, black script. The only words discernable…YOUNG GIRL FOUND.

    What? What was it? Marvin shook the dead memory away.

    And now, wondering at the hour, he lifted his left arm and pulled at the sleeve of the jacket to expose the wristwatch Maribeth had given him. Yes, of course. Maribeth. She had been real. The mansion had been real. Robert, and Richard and Trish Harris, the dogs. His chair in the gazebo, the lemonade and cookies, his room and comfortable bed. His fine and promising new existence. His mighty aspirations.

    The watch was gone, and his wrists bore tender marks, as though he’d chewed it off. He rolled onto his side and forced his hand to his rear trouser pocket, feeling for the wallet. It wasn’t there.

    What the hell happened?

    His pink pack and the life inside it were gone as well. Perhaps dropped somewhere along the way before he found his way back to the solitude of his pit. More likely stolen along with the wallet and the watch in some dark and dangerous alley. Whatever, wherever, it was all a dismal smear in his head. A feeling of self-loathing overwhelmed him.

    He crawled out of his pit and left the underside of the dock once more. He was broke, disgusted by the reality of what he was, had always been, and would forever be.

    And he was thirsty.

    Marvin steadied himself, thinking against his will about the nightmare and the little girl and boy trapped inside it, and then he stumbled down the street cursing the day he was born. He needed another drink. The numbers and patterned fields of colors stretching toward infinity faded more and more with each step, drawn like a curtain into blackness by the hand of a beautiful young woman.

 

 

He

 

just

 

needed

 

a

 

drink.

    Marvin Quenton Fuster imagined genes dancing energetically in a ballroom the size of the planet, all of them dressed the same in their spiral gowns, and flung close together in a maddened waltz. He grabbed at one with an almost imperceptible, aged look about her, a slight variation in the color of her hair, eyes that had beheld the passing of time. She slipped away into the crowd the moment his hands came into contact with her, leaving him holding pieces of shadow that dripped from his wrinkled fingertips.

 

Imprint

Text: (c) Patrick Sean Lee, 2010
Publication Date: 01-16-2011

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