Not so undercover anymore.
“Every gun makes its own tune.”
— Blondie, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
“Ross” (*see disclaimer at the end) had almost been hunted down in an old hotel in Jerusalem, drank beer with a midget in Berlin, and slept on the deck of a boat on the way to Crete. He’d traveled the entirety of Route 66 and taken photos of every ghost motel and café. He nearly moved to Mexico to marry a girl. He owned an assortment of World War I rifles and vintage handguns. He’d read everything and met everyone.
(Warning: Do not read this if you have an aversion to loose, dead hair. There are graphic images.)
Every morning before I take a shower, I comb out all the loose hair on my head, as I lean over the bathroom sink, to make sure it doesn’t make a mess on the floor. I have somewhat thick and wavy hair – and I have a lot of hair. Currently, it’s just past my shoulders, so a single hair pulled straight is anywhere from six to eight inches long.
I’ve been writing since I was a little kid. That might sound cute, but I wrote because I was a lonely child with a bad case of anxiety and shyness and only one or two friends at a time, sometimes none. Or at least, that’s how it felt. I was convinced I’d be alone for the rest of my life, growing up to be a lonesome spinster with long white hair and only a garden to keep her company. Sometimes, I still feel that way.
I was married once and divorced twice.
My first marriage was prompted by a visit to Mexico with an old boyfriend – we were about twenty-three years old at the time, two years out of college. Even though we had already been living together for a couple of years, once we crossed the border, we had to sleep in separate houses. It was the proper thing to do.
According to my relatives in Mexico, “though shall not live together if unmarried” was the eleventh commandment. One of my grandmothers tried to help and urged us to get married right away – she knew a Catholic priest in town that could unite people in holy matrimony in emergency situations.
In the middle of the night, I heard the sound of shattering glass. I thought a glass had fallen from the counter or the shelf, or perhaps that the dog had toppled my tea mug off the wooden futon armrest, where I’d precariously left it the night before. But the explosion of glass was so loud and intense, it couldn’t have simply been a glass falling to the floor.