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Threshold

Posted on May 22, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

“You’re making me angry, please stop.”

“Or what? You’re going to go all green and big and hairy and smash the shit out of the city? I don’t think so.”

“I’m serious man. Don’t make me angry. It’s not a good thing to do.”

“First of all, all I did was ask you how it feels to have turned thirty, to be riding the rollercoaster downhill all the way. That’s not such a bad thing. It’s only the truth. So what’s with all the drama?”

“Okay fine. Ha ha. Funny. I got it the first time. Now let’s move on.”

“What? Why? I don’t know too many thirty-year-olds, I need to know what happens. Do your balls start to sag? Do you see smoking hot chicks and feel nothing at all? Down there I mean. I’ll bet you already have wrinkles and grey hair. Your pubes graying too?”

He went quiet and very, very still. If his insensitive mate was paying any attention at all, he would have noticed. He would have seen the clenched fists, the closed eyes and the shaking. The juddering at the neck that threatened to shake his lower jaw loose. The planting of his feet while his toes attempted to claw at the floor through the soles of his shoes. The clenching of his ass and back, the tightening of his shoulders and the veins that popped in his neck and on his temples…his antagonist didn’t notice any of it.

He was busy going on about how he would probably never have a satisfactory married life now that the juice was drying up. He asked him why he didn’t just go ahead and kill himself. They were high enough, the fall would probably break his brittle bones and drive one through his brain or heart and it would all be over.

The braying bully’s name was Rishad and he had always been a bit of an asshole. He loved the sound of his own voice and there was little that excited him more than to think that he was killing with his comedy routine. He was twenty-five and as if that wasn’t annoying enough he had a whole bag of tics and tricks that was designed to exasperate and annoy anyone within earshot.

His just-turned-thirty victim was Angelo, a guy who had endured his fair share of abuse for being christened with a name that most people thought was gay. His mother said it was because she thought he looked like an angel. It didn’t help and he stopped telling people that was the reason he had the name after he got roundly laughed at in kindergarten when he volunteered the information. Rishad’s older brother was one of the few kids who remembered that story and he had repeated it around the family dining table one day so Rishad remembered it too.

And it returned to him right then, “Hey maybe the little angel can spread his wings and fly before he smacks into the ground. Come on Angelo, jump, jump, jump!”

They were on a bridge connecting the two wings of a suburban shopping mall in Mumbai, six stories up. Shoppers, families and hip young things in super-tight jeans were wandering through the temple of consumerist greed. For one brief moment Angelo imagined himself lying spread-eagled on the ground below with a fly swat of blood spreading under him. He imagined a girl screaming and several children crying. He imagined the look of fear and shock on Rishad’s face. For one fucked up moment, he thought it would be awesome to do it just to see that look on Rishad’s face. Maybe the bastard would shit himself and he could take the smell with him into the afterlife as his final enduring memory.

There was a high-pitched sound in his head. It was like a red hot needle was drilling from one ear into the other, opening up a tunnel of pure sound that brought with it, unadulterated pain. The feeling began at his toes, radiating inwards and up, past his ankles, knees, hips, sternum, neck, lower jaw and into his brain where it seemed to flood his brain cavity with a white hot ball of light. He was certain that his head was glowing but in truth he was just turning a bright shade of crimson. He needed Rishad to shut up.

“Aww, check it out, little Angelo is turning red. Can thirty-year-olds still blush?”

He was about to reach across to tweak Angelo’s cheek when it happened.

With a loud crash that rained glass and shattered wood on the kids, tarts and adults below, a branch from a tree across the road skewered Rishad, getting him in the chest while a smaller branch shattered his genitals and sent him sailing over the guardrail.

Another branch caught in Angelo’s shirt and pulled him towards the guardrail as well but it was a small offshoot and it snapped off when he slammed into the rail so that only the very dead Rishad was express delivered to the ground floor. It was a gruesome sight and several young women, an older man and a few children started a chorus of screams and wails that drew the attention of security personnel from all over the mall.

Angelo made his escape without being noticed, all he had to do was cover up the gash on his arm and t-shirt.

He had tried to warn Rishad. Something he hadn’t been able to do for the annoying bastard on the railway train who wouldn’t let him get off at his desired stop. He hadn’t even realised until much later that the electrocution from a freak spark arcing off the train’s connection to the overhead power lines was his fault.

He suspected that his own feelings had something to do with the crippling of an ex-girlfriend who had clearly been seeing the guy she was near-fucking on the dance floor, for some time before the few hours after she broke up with him.

He figured it had something to do with his turning thirty. He had felt something shift inside his head.

He didn’t know what it was, he didn’t know why he had it but he knew with the greatest certainty that he could really use the help of his very own Ben Kenobi to help him understand what he was supposed to do with the power he suddenly had.

He knew his luck wouldn’t last for ever and he needed the help to prevent himself from killing again.

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