The thick red serpent of blood spiraled down his fair-freckled forearm like flame-melted wax.  Slithering through the valleys and nooks of his muscles, other trails of life’s cabernet coagulate at the sharpened ax’s edge.  A puddle forms from the red rain onto the gray woven industrial carpeting at William’s feet.  His eyes felt outside of his head, disconnected from the horror released without compunction, an out-of-body experience internalized from the start.  This scarlet moment cloaked in the violent dampness seeping into his white business casual shirt, bought at an outlet mall in Parnassus and always worn on Mondays to start the week off with a clean slate; who knew that the human body carries so much liquid, like water balloons bracing for impact.  He hadn’t noticed so much blood, way more than he’d imagine, until after the first guy, then it just poured and left a tinted mist and dew.

Only in action movies are heads severed with so much ease, the horror films he’d watch at Meemaw’s house after she was off to bed; he’d swiftly click from the closing credits of The Golden Girls to after prime-time programming of chainsaw executions, hacking limbs, rainbow visions of gore, and any macabre morsels not butchered by the local television affiliate censors.  Before there was cable, there was the lonely independent station filling up airtime with slasher films until signing off at 3 AM with America the Beautiful and waving flags.  That was a time when William begrudgingly lived with his grandmother; a time when his dad went to county jail for not paying child support and his grandmother begrudgingly assumed the responsibility of “mother” to William while his actual mother begrudgingly gave her son over to Billy’s “Meemaw” so that she could have a break from him.  That time was before William, Billy, Bill, Will, whatever anyone wanted to call him, knew about what child support was or what money’s really used for except that everyone around him was complaining about it.  Before he got an allowance; before he got a paper-route and his first paycheck; before working after school at McDonald’s; before he filled out his first tax form; before he signed his life away on student loans on his way to a mythical American Dream concocted by Happy Meal commercials, Happy Days, and Happy, his golden retriever taken away after only three months by his dad because “he was just too hyper and too much work” for a boy Billy’s age.  “When you’re ready to work, you can have another dog,” his father’s empty promise.