No Goodbye To Jackie
By -Sammoht Remmulp

I crumpled the note and let it drop from my hand to the floor. The day's events were starting to sink in and I quickly poured myself another drink and inhaled it as I thought about my life and all the bullshit I had to endure. I had put two men to their deaths to avenge this woman's honor and she runs off and tells me to wait. I killed the rest of the booze and while it took effect, thoughts of the past began to spawn in my mind like some slimy monster; it writhed and turned and spit fire at me.

The burning door buried in my memory would surface in this swirling mess and the redhead with the green eyes would hiss at me as she rotated long with the door into a huge snow white cathedral. There was along line of cars following a black hearse down a dusty road toward a cemetery. They stopped and the people in the cars all got out and began to sing as the two young women dressed in white carried a coffin from the hearse and opened it. There was a white Tomcat in it. The Tomcat had eight bullet holes in him ringed in his own blood; the ninth hole was just------suddenly the green eyes of one of the women flashed at me---she spat out these words,

"You murdered them for her; didn't you? ---You wouldn't have had to do that for me, I wasn't good enough for you; maybe you can tell me the reason sometime."

Her eyes turned to tears of fire and ran down her cheeks, setting her whole being on fire, then she vanished into a plume of smoke, leaving only the other woman standing there, with her eyes full of tears, trying to tell me something, but I couldn't understand what she was saying--------.

I pushed the throttles forward and began rolling down the runway at an increasingly high rate of speed. I broke into a heavy sweat such as one might normally do under high stress flight maneuvers as Mustang lifted from the runway and launched me into a period of time spanning more than twenty years of which I would have almost no contact with Marie or home. The drunken binge had steeled me for this moment and as Mustang leveled off at thirty thousand feet, a feeling of relief came over me; I was back where I belonged. I would readily give my life for my country, but I would avoid relationships with women at all costs from now on. Almost happily, I called -----