by LJ Frank

7:00 a.m. Déjà vu. I sipped the Bloody Mary while sitting at a table on the café’s patio, throat parched from the dry air, and boardroom chats from the previous night managed by paid experts, their experience suggested not to trust anyone, a downward spiral arrives in the plural, jack shit was mentioned enough times by so many I questioned where relationships begin and end. I looked around to see if Jack was still there as he sounded rather intriguing, but then some things like espousing a nuanced truth retains a vocabulary of its own.

I moved my hand to feel my lower side and back. I felt an indentation somewhere in the feel, upon which my brain mentioned the word fuck. As the sun rose in the red streaked blue sky, another morning in the high desert began after days in a jungle of constabulary power and the politics of liberty for the few, safe guarded with enough money with the query of why pursue a woman or man that can afford to be pursued?

I asked myself whether I was missing the arm candy, a woman I met in the city for ten minutes at an earlier wine tasting. But my lips were alone once more and they touched the glass for another slow sip as I watched a coyote fifty yards away scamper across the terrain scavenging for their next bargain meal I supposed. I looked at my watch, a minute felt like an hour, or perhaps it was the other way around.

The moment is irretrievable. I wondered if I was thinking straight or crooked or did it matter? And was the wound visible enough for a bleed through reality, on second thought,  I’d rather not contemplate. Yet, I knew the reason I was there so I swallowed the remaining tomato juice and vodka, then I headed to my propellered flight to another place. Arriving at the airport I stopped at the foot of the stairs before I boarded the small plane and after surveying it I pondered whether I should bring along a parachute.