Written by Death, Welcome to My Door

In which a negro hooded in a black hoodie comes at one Roland C. Waterfield, Esq. who, walking down Bird St. mentally notes the cliché of a lawyer just one week away from making partner at Smite, O’Leary & Bellington, LLC getting stabbed and disemboweled in an alley on his way to his car by an African-American, averts his gaze downwards along the side of the curb, a tingle in the back of his neck as the negro brushes past him, the knife inserted into his bowels just as his wallet comes out easing from a V to flattened in the negro’s bloodied hands as the crisp paper presidential birds fly away as potential origami for things bought but never seen; which is why Roland C. Waterfield, Esq. quickly cuts a diagonal to the other side of the alley, unconsciously placing his hands over his stomach in a pensive choreography noticed by the negro Reggie Downs, who was only on his way to rob a convenient store, which is not however the way Audrey Belle would later describe the experience (more like the opposite of “convenient”) — the six hour hostage situation between Reggie and the clerk, one Miguel Santos, elder brother of Nina Santos-Nadelman, who red-faced the next morning after hearing the news of her brother’s death last night does not understand why KPIX Channel 5 still shows up thinking there’s still a story where there was none. “He’s dead,” Nina says. He’s dead, like all of you by the end of today, I’m telling you now. “She’s nice,” David Nadelman Jr. tells his mother Mary, who would have only been mildly upset that David started dating a Hispanic were it not for that hideous tattoo on her lower back of a white rose colored a default brown by her skin. Mary Nadelman, upon hearing of her son’s engagement to Nina, will go on to purchase an Alligator Leather Armour Stud Sling bag from BURBERRY for $14,500.00 as “retail therapy”; she will also go on to begin 4-5 mornings out of 7 each week with a bloody mary, proposing to her concerned husband at least she was getting her daily servings of vegetables out of the way. Of David Nadelman Sr., he always had a soft spot for Nina, imagining his glistening purple member inside such a spot, his comb-over conceding to the wind while asleep in front of the lake. Regarding retail therapy, it was not vanity which brought Audrey Belle to Fast n’ Go that fateful Thursday night, but interests of a more feminine sort. She witnessed the entire thing hiding behind the women’s hygiene aisle, a near death experience which would be conveyed in various versions into her phone to friends about two dozen times within 72 hours after the incident: I was getting bread n’ batteries at Fast n’ Go when this black man comes in and starts yelling nigga at the worker for the money which was confusing because the man was Muslim I think and another man also wearing a black hoodie and carrying a large scythe must have dialed 911 because then the cops all the sudden show up so the black man grabs the Muslim and points a gun to his head saying nigga bitch now mother fucker and after six hours of my silent whimpering on the floor I hear a gunshot and the Muslim was dead his ruptured face centered in a growing crown of red—which was all true except Audrey wasn’t shopping for bread n’ batteries, an understandable lie considering the aisle she was in. Of Audrey Belle’s yeast infection (otherwise known as Candidiasis, an odd name considering its first two syllables), her “system” was compromised by a golf ball sized ovarian cyst which would grow to the size of a volleyball carrying a malignant metastasis which would leak to her lymph nodes and destroy her in 8 months. She looked already like a ghost in court, as key eye-witness for the District Attorney vs. Reggie Downs, who upon his life sentence, is transferred to Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institution, where he meets his fate five months later at the tip of a shank rendered out of a mattress spring by a large 314 lb. inmate with undiagnosed Asperger’s and dandruff. David and Nina will survive this juncture, the birth of their only child, their mutual infidelities, their six month separation, their respective layoffs, but not the Audi 2008 Q7 SUV on Hwy. 5 coming back from junior partner at Smite, O’Leary & Bellington Lucas Davini’s wedding, whose destination brought them down the opposite side of Hwy. 5 just four days prior. Roland C. Waterfield, Esq. will hear the story from Lucas and try to console him, will tell him it’s not his fault for having a wedding, will talk on the phone with him each night during desperate hours for about a week until he gets a little annoyed, will end up safely in his Mercedes-Benz E350 black sedan that night, turning left off Bird Street, up Arlington Blvd., and call his girlfriend Carin Ashley Liebel to say he’s bringing over a bottle of wine and does she want an ’07 Napa Syrah or ’09 Anderson Valley Pinot, the latter which, having been selected by Carin, was to be partially emptied, accidentally, on the kitchen counter when the bottle slipped from under the weight applied by Roland while attempting to re-insert the cork halfway after the first two glasses were poured. Had the gnocchi been cooked more, its consistency might have been less of a choking hazard for Carin, who could neither swallow or hack up said potato dud while, somewhat sadly, sitting in front of AMC’s third consecutive “marathon” running of a romantic comedy in which a man socioeconomically similar to Roland and woman socioeconomically similar to Carin are ambivalently reticent, if not somewhat abrasive, about their so obvious budding love throughout the entire movie until the last 15 minutes, at which point the Roland character frantically hails a cab to the airport to declare his passionate, profound, and preeminent feelings to the Carin character, a movie the Carin person always thought was endearing and made her eyes slippery under lids, as the Roland person’s crying grows ever more hysterical, he behind her in Heimlich position platonically thrusting away at the newly realized corpse.