Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Reason Andy was Incarcerated that Night


Andy’s buddy pumped a single bullet into his own face—the end result of a hard life filled with booze and drugs and everyone walking away.  A passerby found his lifeless form sprawled alongside the road at the very edge of the Elkhorn Mountains south of East Helena.
Andy, though he really did not wish to, attended the funeral services.  He did not like the weird music.  Mostly, he did not like the veil laid over the dead man’s face.  Though he knew better, Andy lifted that veil to see his dear friend. 
Some of us do not go quietly.   Some of us dance off the edge, some leap, some claw the whole way down.  And when Andy peeked under the cloth, he did not see his friend.  He saw chaos.  He saw sea ships firing shells onto burning lands.  He saw a single, rider-less horse, galloping across a smoky plain.
Andy went out drinking after that.  He went to one of those bars we direct most people away from—the sort of bar where you might make a fast deal on illegal drugs, where you can buy and hawk stolen goods openly.  He drank a lot.  He pushed people from their barstools and then swung the stools around.  He made threats to strangers.  He hugged and kissed his friends.  Hugged and kissed men.
I imagine Andy thinking his face was burning the whole time, burning hot as desert sand under the high sun; his fists burning, his mind finally grasping how life is sometimes the art of just barely hanging on.
One day, years later, Andy jumped from the cliff.
--Mitchell Hegman

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