Cookie Cutter

Open yourself up she tells me with green eyes glinting in the fluorescent light and her long brown hair shining with Chinese chemicals. Open up to the world and experience life love happiness and joy! Don’t get caught up in the morose bullshit you call your home any longer. It is time to be free and clear and healthy and happy not closed and forsaken depressed forlorn and dying! Her voice is like honey sweet to hear and she smells like a Humphrey Bogart seducing femme fatale caught in a cloud of cigarettes. She is staring at me from across her polished mahogany tower and waits for me to respond. She want smile to tell her that she is right that artificial happiness is the one true emotion to feel. That happiness is the one shining path to walk upon and that all negative emotions are made of filth and leeches that coat us in sickness and drain us of every drop of calm and conformity from our blue blue veins. Sadness is the root of all evil to my cookie cutter vixen and ignorant euphoria is the one bullet that can blow its brains out on the marble floor. I want to show her my leeches. I want her to see how they have grown and how big they are. I want her to see my pride. A father’s pride. I hide them and forsake them and take from her pale thin fingers the drugs that will kill them dead. I take it with a glass of cold plastic water and feel my leeches shrivel and die. I am still now. Placid. Numb. I am as calm as the top of a tall glass of milk. I have become the same as my neighbor down the street. I am clean cut and square and ready to serve. She gives me her bill and I sign down my name: Mr. John Smith Jones Brown Doe and walk out onto the perfectly plain streets.