Untitled, Chapter 1

 I was cold sober when I killed that sonofabitch upstairs. I’d been drinking all night (as I'm sure he must have been), just sitting there downstairs listening to him pace back and forth, in perfect time with the increasing throb of a heartbeat against the inside of my head. Whenever he reached the face of one dingy clapboard wall, I'd hear him turn on his heel and snap his feet together like he was running parade maneuvers or some god-damned thing. It was only a few hours before that I’d heard him screaming and slapping the hell out of his girl �" wife or girlfriend or common street w***e I don't know and didn't care enough to ask �" but now she was gone he was pacing the room all alone, keeping me awake late into the sticky-warm, whisky-stinking night. I would have drowned him out with the radio, but I couldn’t find anything on there but soft, hissing static and Mexican mariachi music, so I kicked the thing across the room in frustration. At the sound of my radio clattering to pieces against the wall, his pace doubled, the sound of his footfalls increasing just slightly. I drained the dregs from a fifth of Jim and hucked the empty bottle at the ceiling. It rained glass briefly and I shielded my eyes from the falling pieces. His step faltered a moment, then resumed its constant, stomping to-and-fro procession with renewed fervor. It was around four in the morning that I finally decided to go up and see him.

He was smaller than I thought he'd be, just from the sound his feet made. He wasn't small, exactly �" his build was thick, stocky but muscular, maybe ex-Army �" and wide as he was, he stood a full head shorter than me, maybe a shade above five feet with his hair combed down. As it was, he had a crop of stalk-stiff black hair brylcreemed on end, chopped flat and even as a summer wheatfield, giving him another inch or so heightwise. There was a bushy, greased mustache to match, sticking out from the shelf of his upper lip like a used-up pushbroom. His eyes were big and silly-looking behind thick, fish-eyed cokebottle glasses. From the mess of his nose I could tell he was a brawler, but couldn't fight worth a damn. He took a half-step back at the sight of me �" backing away, I thought at first �" until he made a drunken feint with his broken left hand. The fact that his hand was broken (in a peeling yellow-brown cast) and that he was so drunk gave away his intent, so I easily avoided the right cross he threw at me a full two-and-a-half seconds later. The fact of the matter was I hadn't felt like talking to the s**t-heel about his woes and troubles in the first place, and if given the chance to re-consider, I think I would have welcomed the opportunity to do it all over again.

I squared up and threw a left jab just under his right eye, which sent the lens of his spectacles splintering up and into its wet, glassy, slow-blinking surface. He reeled back screaming, stumbling over his own loud, clunky shoes. He half-fell onto his unmade bed, reaching up as if to scoop up his eye with his bad hand.