The Trouble With Trying to Save an Assassin

My experience of life always includes losing the things that are mine or having them forcibly taken away and being thrown away myself. I wasn’t wanted as a child, I skipped from foster home to foster home, never staying long enough to get settled, and then I aged out of the system into homelessness. I’ve never gotten to keep anything for long—not even friends or family; death has taken all of those types of people away from me—and the worry that I’m about to lose everything I’ve gained since meeting Fox has been hanging out in the back of my head, taking up space, living rent-free.

I can't tell him that I love him whenever I want. I have to make him feel it, and these little acts of service are how I do that.

That's one thing people don't really realize about homelessness—the hours of nothing to do, the never-ending, soul-sucking boredom that's only punctuated by the scramble to survive.

My combat boots are fantastic, but they’re not exactly prime no-slip material.

The phone stops ringing and someone on the other line whoops twice. Fox whoops back and hits his sticks together a couple of times before smashing one of them on one of the rocks. What comes back from the phone is barking, maybe? Some loud banging like sticks being hit together, and then a hollow echoing sound like someone is yelling through their hands.

Charlie is the one we want,” Fox insists as he taps his phone and it rings on speaker. He walks to the only table in the house he had any decor on before I came to live with him. It has two sticks and two rocks on it, and what proceeds is the most bizarre phone call I have ever witnessed.

We’ll have to go to California. Charlie lives in the Sequoia National Forest.

Jesus-fucking-Christ, people are gullible. I really don’t know how we’ve survived on this planet for so long. We’re evolution’s version of that one mistake we all make that haunts us for the rest of our lives. You know what I’m talking about. You’re going along minding your own business, and then BAM! Suddenly you’re in the middle of the biggest mistake of your life that everyone will bring up at the family Christmas dinner every year for the rest of time because it’s the funniest shit they ever heard, and it’ll embarrass you every time, but eventually you’ll be able to laugh too. That’s what humans are to evolution, I’m pretty sure. It’s embarrassing how dumb we are when we get in groups.

The things I own now haven’t yet proven themselves should the bottom fall out of the life I’m currently living. I know that I’m the adaptable one and the things are not what will make or break me, but dammit, you can’t logic away an emotional bond like the one I’ve forged with my stuff.

We save that for the people we murder.