SLOW EFFICIENT BURN TIME

And now we're in Eileen and Hubert McDelan's living room, third floor, Abberdeen Apartments, above St.Paul street and a Korean man's Supermarket.

Eileen and Hubert are both old. Hubert retired almost twelve years ago and Eileen has been retired all her life. Hubert is grey and quiet sitting in his homey and worn recliner of blues and greens. His finger is massaging the CHANNEL ADV. button on his scuffed remote control, but it seems that he is moderately satisfied with reruns of Let's Make a Deal for now. I myself have never seen a single episode of Let's Make A Deal.

Eileen is writing a letter to her sister Margaret in Wyoming. You see Eileen is what we Canadians call, an American. She's half writing and gazing out her window into the barren Monday night street of St.Paul. There is a man by a phone booth despera tely trying to ignite a broken match. She can't seem to look away from him.

Flick, flick, flick "FUCK", flick, flick, flick.

Ignited.

The burn of tabacco papers. Then the burn of vegetation, cannabis.

That full smell is in the air now, and with a powerful pull marijuana smoke enters his lungs. For the remainder of this telling, he will be nothing but he. He is a man of moderate height, but he is very thin. Hair in dark locks barely reac hes his collar and he has wispy side burns that have grown like wings beneath his chin. Very much like that WOLVERINE fellow in the comic books. You know the one with the claws? If you don't you might as well go back to sleep, you've missed way too muc h already for you to catch up with the rest of the world.

"I think there's a hooligan down there smoking a reefer Huey." Eileen says, almost matter-of-factly, she meant to sound surprised and genuinely astonished but years of talking about the weather and other borings have dulled her intonations to slightly varied versions of the "matter-of-fact-speak".

"What's that Eileen? You say a man's grabin' at his peeper?"

"What? You idiot, stop watching that crap and get over here!"

"Fine, its not my fault if you can't learn how to speak properly" Hubert quickly rises, surprisingly for his age, and goes to the window to look with his wife.

"You see him. Suckin' away like no tomorrow, just like them hippies in that movie. You remember, uh Head, or Her or whatever."

"Gttchkk. Gneee. Gttchkkhkhkhkh." His lung's seize up tightly, holding the burning smoke inside. He's really moving on the shit. Marathon sorta fashion. Damn fast.

"You mean Hair." Get up to speed Hubert.

"What? Do you think we ought to call the police?"

"Naw, just ignore him, just some harmless bum...he'll go away, just come away from the window and we'll watch Magnum P.I. together."

"Yeah, that's probably best."

And so we leave Eileen and Hubert McDalan of 45 years and still going strong, and step out into the cold, necrotic realm of the street.

He gingerly placed the roach into a small plastic baggy, like the ones detectives in movies use to carry evidence. His face shines with the perma-grin and he begins a long cavort down the sidewalk. Eventually he crosses the street until he ha s come to a CD-store that just sells the unacquirables.

That's when he sees her. Her, just sitting there in the window, eyes gazing, unblinking, forever into the night. Her face is smooth, utterly, and impossibly flawless. Her skin glows with pale radiance, and her eyes are a very light green.

It is odd he thinks why does she just sit there in the window like that? Why doesn't she move? Does she like to just sit there? Does she enjoy the spectacle she is making of herself? He wants to say something to her, but he is too afraid , she is very eerie.

He looks at her entire form now. Her body is cloaked in black velvet, the collar of her shirt ruffled and high, just tickling her perfect ears. But where are her legs! He is aghast, they simply are not there, they just end where the floor of the display window begins. It's almost as if she's melded to the fabric of the store, like some amorphous humanoid from a Salvador Dali painting. Kip she is frightening...I fear her, but I want so very much, oh so very much I do...uhuhuh.

So alone she looks, so very alone. Like me. Maybe she's imprisoned! Oh who would restrain such an angelic face to such spectacular doom! Oh Kip I do not like this... not a tiny bit.

And it was now that He became very frantic. His eyes whipped back and forth from woman to streetway, from streetway to darkened alleys. I must find a rock, a mighty, terrible stone that I might destroy her cage and free her!

His senses were afire with thought and drive. He darted into the nearest alley, down the gravel hill to the desolate parking lot below. No rocks, but a garbage can will do. He lifts it one-handed, like an ape-tenfold.

Up the hill he goes, and in one quick action he heaves his tool of freedom heavily into the CD-store window shattering it into indistinguishable fragments.

"YES!" he roars and grabs the woman and holds her close, her expression does not change, even as the violent alarm begins to go. She's paralyzed with fear, I must take her away from this place.

He begins to run, her hard, uncompromising body clutched under his right arm. He looks like a schoolboy racing home after studies, his books effortlessly held to his side. Her weight is like papers and binding cardboard to him, like pencils and pens and a test for Mom to sign.

Down Court to King he goes, behind a townhouse and out the other side. He isn't even looking at where he's going, just trucking along like a World Athlete. His blood pumps like gasoline in a foreign car made for efficiency. Powerful he is, he can f eel it like his pulse or the breath streaming from his mouth. Street and sidewalk slide by like water, lights and noise of the humming city around him. He can smell the park, its clean, fresh quality nearby, Oh does he long for it, to race to that gian t gazebo in the center and lie down with her and guard her against the cold, the night and those who would hurt her and put her on display.

He can see the park up ahead, in fact it seems like hours since he'd first seen it.

Kip it must be far, ages away, at my speed, at my power, it must be miles from the Sun.

Streetlight after streetlight, his heart pounds harder and harder as he races with every ounce of effort to shorten the distance between hell and heaven. Behind him, his hearing picking up every sound in existence, the alarm still cries, viciously, l ike audible pain.

Finally he is there, his left foot touching down on a cemented pathway, flanked by grass that is very cold with the autumn-chill. His eyes, though so very adapted now, can't pierce the darkness of the park. He passes under a light for a second, his breathing is very noisy now.

CRASH. He thought the action before it occurred. His body slams into another and the woman, with the frozen, half-form flies from his arm. He lands sharply on his side, wincing out of pure habit though he feels no pain. Quickly he leaps int o a squatting position and sees her entangled in navy arms with badges of yellow, red and green. The man on the ground is carrying a gun.

HE leaps in fury at the sight of another would be captor, pushing the woman off her assailant. Dark features, a black mustache and paranoid eyes match his. The man with the navy draws his nightstick but He catches it, his reflexes shame a tiger's.

"Don't be stupid pal! Get off me! I'm the po-"

His speech is destroyed by the strike of a nightstick. Then another, crushes his teeth and upper jaw area. Another caves in his skull and finally a fourth breaks his nose and shatters the weapon.

He plunges the sharp utensil into the navy man's right eye, there is no more movement.

Fear, nothing but fear and danger here, I gotta move, the gazebo is useless now! Oh my! Kip help me!

He's up again and the woman is underneath his arm, he tears the unmoving assailant's semi-automatic pistol from it's holster and runs wolfish through the deep, black park. He feels for injuries, his hands rabidly caress her body but he stops himself, he will not be like that. Nonetheless she feels fine, no broken bones hopefully.

He races on, a yellow glow greets him as he descends a small hill and finds an imposing complex of low-rent apartments looming above him. In I will go, to find a safe place to hide! They will not find me! No Kip they will not find me!

An iron-fist destroys bullet-proof plexiglass and he shoulders an interior door to wood shards. Inside it smells like so many stale cigarettes and old lady piss that has been kept in a bag made out of rotted lettuce leaves. He races up flights of st airs, ignoring the modern concept of elevators, like he's going up some ancient bell tower, "liberated" maiden in tow. Little does he know he looks very much like Quasimodo himself, except He doesn't have a hunchback or facial deformities.

Up to the top floor, before the roof. He crashes a final door and races inside. Its empty, the tenants having moved out last month. To the master bedroom, where the moonlight is shining in, he goes. Into a corner he huddles after shutting the door . He holds her to his chest, gun in hand but lying on the tile floor of pure ice. He rocks her back and forth, caressing her hair.

"Everything is fine, I have you, I'll never let them take you back, and put you on display again. You won't ever be alone again. Even if you don't have legs, you're still very, very beautiful. Oh so beautiful, oh so, oh so..."

And more rocking, and more rocking.

Then, sounds. Movement in the hallway outside, doors opening, shutting. Feet clambering over wooden debris of a final broken door. A person is coming closer.

It is them! Your captors! They're quick, they're smart! But they will not have you!

A bulbous, dark shape framed in the doorway, horrid features, sprouting patches of hair. A jingle of silver in one hand? He is the dark Warden, his keys at his side.

"You will come no closer! Be gone, go back! Return to the darkness you came from!" His voice is filled with fear and pain, but he draws his stolen pistol nonetheless and aims it at the Warden's head.

"How the bloody fuck did you get in here you disgusting, perverted S.O.B.! Get out!"

I have come from the blackness of time. She is frozen forever in eternity! You cannot possess her, it is I who plucked her from the boundless heavens. She is mine! Mine you wretched fool! Crumble under the weight of my evil! Darkness crowds arou nd you at every corner!"

"NOOOOOOO!"

A minor series of explosions are let off as he fires the semi-automatic. He hits him square in the head six times; such a bath of gore and blood has rarely been seen, in fact as the man falls to the ground little remains of his bloated face. He cont inues to fire as the body falls out of the sights of his gun and slugs crash the window in the adjoining living room and whistle into the night air, out into undiscovered oblivions.

All, at last is at peace and he sleeps. He sleeps with all the beautiful security in the world with her firm body in his arms, her scentless hair caressing his face. Sweet, luridity encompasses the themes of his dreams as he fantasizes the extent to which she will go in repaying his valorous efforts. He is a hero.

Morning comes with screams that invade his last luke-warm delusions. He slowly rises to the sound of a fully amplified voice echoing through his head.

"COME TO THE DOORWAY AND LEAVE YOUR WEAPONS INSIDE THE BEDROOM" it is horrendously loud, but he does not comprehend.

He walks out into the doorway, the pistol still gripped in his right hand, vaguely understanding why he's even carrying it. Just now he notices the chipped nature of the paintwork on the bedroom walls, the wooden door turned inward, worn and light. He's in utlra-slow-mo now and the body of a man, in grey coveralls with the word SUPERINTENDENT on his breast, lacking the majority of his head, lies at his feet.

His arms swing as he walks, the right arm swings upward. The gun, nestled in his hand, hangs there in the air forever as he stairs at it, then eyes catch the shattered window on the other side of the living room and finally the man with the rifle in a building across the street.

"GUN!" a chorus roars.

Perfect aim

And a second head explodes, it is His.

Death comes, but thoughts linger for a few seconds;

Kip what will happen to her without....m..e..?

A woman with flawless skin, no legs and very light green eyes sits in the corner of a room with no furniture. She's splattered with blood.