Still Life

At the other end of my 9mm Glock, Louie Barnett stops drumming his fingertips on the green blotter with the brown triangle corners. Sweat slides down his pasty white cheek in small, saline globes like rain on a windowpane or a galaxy of nervous constellations in a blank sky. I jerk the barrel toward the still life of the hammer balanced on the edge of a rough-hewn, food-laden country table like it would fall any minute on a skull that laughed sideways below it. I thought that redundant. It’s disappointing, but you can only kill a man once.

Louie Barnett sits in a heavy, rotating, wooden desk chair on black and silver casters resembling Marvin the Martian’s head and helmet. He shoves back, walks the two steps over to the painting, and, with a trembling hand, pulls at the bottom right edge of the frame and swings it to the left. This reveals the safe. The office smells like vomit, and the muted evening light spreads like margarine over burnt toast.

Barnett stands immobile, his back to me. He’s five inches taller, but the 9mm takes up the slack. I slam the muzzle between his shoulder blades. He jerks forward, and his right hand rises to work the combination.

Yesterday, at Fat Frank’s Bar & Grill, Louie Barnett humiliates me in front of Marjorie and the kids. When my father came home from the mill, he’d make me crawl on all fours and squeal like a pig. He’d laugh in his duct-taped recliner, choke on his cigarette, and kick me until I brought him another beer.

“That’s the respect I get at the mill,” he’d say. “Get used to it now.”

That’s how Barnett made me feel when in a stage whisper, in Fat Frank’s, everyone hears him ask Marjorie if she enjoys my small man parts and no cojones.

As I figure it, Barnett employs me for one reason (Marjorie Barnett is his sister, and then she marries me) — family. And the only reason I let him is so I never work at the mill that destroyed my father.

Marjorie and the kids look down like they dropped something, like a pearl rolled under the table into a black hole. Then they turn from me. Couldn’t look at me. Fat Frank’s explodes in laughter.

I pull a thick, black construction bag from my windbreaker pocket.

Overkill.

“Put it in here,” I say, and push the Glock further into his spine. A sick tremor wracks his frame when, with a flick of my left hand, the bag snaps like the hammer on a mousetrap. It cascades in a staircase of rectangles, a waterfall of generations from a wallet unfolding in time. Barnett shoves wads of cash and stock certificates into its dark mouth.

“Now, get on your hands and knees.”

“What?”

“Crawl around,” I say. “Squeal like a pig.”

“You’re outta your everlovin’ mind.”

I lower the barrel and shoot him through the Achilles tendon. Barnett disintegrates like a Jenga tower. Then, he writhes and cries a few minutes. Eventually relents. Does as I instructed.

Now I run the East side, and Barnett and his once-toadies are my now-toadies. It’s glorious, Lord Acton. Everyone at Fat Frank’s listens to me and laughs at my jokes, especially when I tell Barnett to get on all fours onto Frank’s sunken, fryolator-grease-slicked floor (it’s a slippery slope), and his eyes look like a cat died in them. Ultimate respect when they laugh at your jokes.

And now I understand that still life on what was formerly Barnett’s wall. Now, I figure you can kill a man more than once. Just look at Barnett. By keeping him alive, I kill him time and again. Ad nauseam. Been doing that for two weeks. It never gets old.

And Marjorie and my kids? Well, they think it’s a riot, like when Barnett cants sideways, like a three-legged jackass, because of that lame ankle and then howls in a surfeit of pain. That’s when Marjorie and the kids laugh themselves sick.

BIO: Retired English teacher Jon Gluckman writes in a small southern New Jersey town outside Philadelphia, PA, USA. He is grateful that he gets to share his life with his beautiful and brilliant wife, Barbara, and his two lovable, knuckleheaded rescue puppies, Arthur and Bella. He believes, regardless of the hardships, that "Life is Good."

He has published work in Micro-Fiction Monday Magazine, 101 Words Weekly (x6), Mystery Magazine, Grim & Gilded, Mobius Boulevard, Frontier Tales (x2), The Best of Frontier Tales Anthology Vol. 15, Punk Noir Magazine (x2), Flash Frontier, Black Sheep Magazine Issue 21, The Fifty & Up Writer Awards: The Table Issue #4 (2nd place finalist runner-up), Dark Harbor Magazine, Urban Pigs Press, Weekly Contest (1st place) Author’s Only Collective, and 365tomorrows.