The Goons
Alexander Holly | Filipa Silva
The goons are out tonight. Shadows of little suburban ghoulies dividing like osmosis by street lamps. Bats evaporating car windows into glassy mist. Chained dogs barking at the offenders over the fence. Combat boots clacking on pavement. Panting breaths echoing in alleyways. No mailbox is safe. They’re all decapitated. Erect wooden planks in grass. Bikes hanging on racks missing tires. Trees draped in toilet paper. Long white sheets waving in the wind. Armpits drip with sweat and caked in a thin slime of Speed Stick. Fake IDs shown to the Pakistani liquor store owner, who nods and takes their crumpled twenties. Rubber burns circles in the parking lot. Beer cans get crushed under car seats. The big one in the driver seat’s name is Drum-o and the skinny one’s name in the passenger’s seat is Bip-o. Two girls in the back whose heads orbit small circles. They’re strung out. Eyes faded. Hands trembling.
“Ever seen a dead body?” Bip-o turns to the girls, his elbow resting on the driver seat head rest.
“No,” they say.
“Ever look in a mirror!”
The goons giggle and smack the dashboard.
“Take us home, we want to go home!”
“We just got to do one more thing, just one more thing.” Drum-o says holding out one gorilla finger looking back at the ladies.
A yellow aura of light coats all of the passengers, a car horn squeals, they crash. Two cars smashed into wadded up accordions of plastic and metal. An explosion. Both vehicles hop in the air and fall in one heavy thud. Flame mohawks on their roofs. Cinder mixes with the night sky and vanishes. Sirens clammer in blue and red circling rays. Bodies are zipped up in black rubber bags. Cops lean on their cars and shake their heads. Smoke rising out from their cups of coffee. One forensics kid scrapes Drum-o’s braces off the steering wheel.
“They were just kids,” they say.
Now they’re numbers. Just another tally on a stat sheet. Probability. But the family on the opposite end is too. To think, they used to have names.
