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EXCERPTS
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"Absolutes," an excerpt from Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (HarperCollins, 2004) This really happened, this story. I've never told anyone, not the whole story. When civilians ask, I say, "No, never killed anybody." Almost apologetically because I know they want me to say yes. Because then they can ask more. Because then their minds can twist the various elements of a-woman-with-a gun-killing-a man into their own vicarious masturbation of fact. This
will be just the facts: I killed a man. I shot him at 1:33 am.
He died at 1:57 am. That's when I couldn't get a pulse, a heartbeat.
"Alive"--published in Brevity, an online journal of short literary nonfiction.
The
first time I got punched in the face--punched, not slapped or
shoved or struck or thumped by a flying elbow gone astray, but
punched as in a fist landed squarely on the lower quadrant of
my right cheek--it was delivered just after midnight in an apartment
parking lot off Airline Highway in south Baton Rouge by a man
at least five inches taller and a good 70 pounds heavier than
me. I was not his intended target. He intended to hit his wife.
She ducked. I didn't.
Fall 1989. Almost midnight at ToyJoy, a funky, noisy toy store swathed in twinkly lights and geometric neon shapes just off the Drag in Austin, Texas. My new friend, Leila, her husband, Burke, and I wander the aisles, shuffling sideways past jostling hordes of other late-night wanderers--mostly students and thirty-something adults --fingering plastic armadillos that glow in the dark, dancing hula girls with cowboy boots and tattoos, cow in a soap, glittery body paint (some of it edible), oversized spiders, sophisticated versions of two cans and a string..... I
gradually become aware of an argument between two men at the front
of the store. Clipped words, sharp as sticks snapping, grow in
volume, then shift to longer vowels. The words are less important
than the tone, and I know the underlying tone in those voices
well; violence is not far away. Something buried deep within clicks
on: my attitude, attention, body language alters.
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