Great white hunter

 

 

The car single blinks for a left turn as my knuckles grow pale on the steering wheel, the click click click driving me crazy as I drive deep into the tangle of streets where you live.

Smog makes the city look like smoldering ruins poking up out of smoke after a devastating fire.

I am lost here, and fantasize about living some other life than the rather boring life I lead, a great white hunter seeking you out in the remote Outback or deepest jungle – urges flowing inside of me that I don’t recognize after spending all of my life in civilized company.

I want to do every imaginable thing to you that I never imagined my mind could manufacture in me. I am murderer, rapist, thief, lover all packed into these strange moments driving in this strange place.

I pant like a savage, even as I signal to make my turn, again winding along asphalt paths I have never wandered before.

For a time, the river flows along the side of the river, a muddy disaster overflowing with the outflow of chemical plants, the stench as deadly as any switch blade, and then I am dreaming again, floating along a wild river in a canoe, my rifle posed for sight of you as the current pulls me along, you hiding in the jungle somewhere on either side, waiting for me to part the leaves and take you.

But the current grows wild the more I think and I have to trade my gun for a paddle to steer my way through the rough water, all the time staring off to this side or that side for a glimpse of you between the trees, sunlight blinding me at times, strobing across my face.

Click, click, click of a turn signal I no longer recall, a truck horn blaring out at me from out of the jungle, and then a crash of metal denting not my canoe, but my car, glass and metal strewn across the wide road, leaving me – the great white hunter – stranded in this remote place with a irate truck driver waving his fist.