THE RETALIATOR

He stays in bed late, recovering from a sleepless night; the darkness was filled with mental disruptions, images that made him panicky, hyper.

He moves through his apartment feeling his back aching and a need for coffee and nicotine. He goes into the living room and picks up a red pouch and papers, rolls some tops cherry tobbacco into a smoke, goes out into kitchen and pours himself the last of the coffee from the day before, slops in milk and heads back into the living room. The dog is sleepily laying in front of the tv, the gray cat in the carpeted round perch on top of his scratching post, hovering at about the same level as the tv.

He picks up the remote and begins flipping across the channels. The huge screen fills with a double decker bus exploding into scrapnel and body parts; a black smoke envelopes the scene as people run about half crazed. Ambulances come next, then learned looking men and dressed up newscasters discussing the irony of a terrorist attack in London on the day after they got the Olympics, forcing them to go from celebrating a sign of the solidarity of civility in in all governments, to mourning their dead and drawing lines in the sand...

There is a subway and people running and screaming and smoke and stories of breaking out windows with their bare hands to get oxygen into the cars.

He takes the black book bag out of the closet, looks inside at the wires and the timer... He has practiced the walk to the Mosque for weeks, preparing for the strike back. The bombing in London seems to him the perfect timing for a blow at the muslim fundamentalists. It's almost a relief to be leaving the fucked up world.