Once, there had been thirteen of us.
Fourteen with the macaw.
Many had gone down in the godless savagery of the first attack, some of them for good. It had been the kind of violence that leapt like lightning fire on a dry hillside, wreaking its red-toothed Darwinian justice on all who ventured within its tight horrific circumference.
The quarters were cramped and the wounded moaned under the boots of the whole.
Brenda Ramsbottom, who had lost the good knee on her bad leg when a gelding quarterhorse slipped its bonds in the mayhem and stamped her like a UPS package.
The conditions were tense.
Gretchen Savory, an SWF NSND looking for an LDLTR with a CSWM ran a long ragged nail along the edge of a rare Henckels Gourmet High-Carbon stainless steel steak knife –one of perhaps five in the country- giving voice to an ominous ring as if she were playing a handsaw for an intimate gathering of like-minded sophisticates.
Brian Brianson, once a hot-shot insurance underwriter blinked tears of pure malevolence from eyes more beast than man as he shattered a depression-era blue glass plate against an Ikea end table, brandishing the shards clutched between his fingers the way they teach you to hold your keys in a womans self defense class.
Polly Sara O’Shaughnessy-Johnson squinted down possessively from atop an oak console piano, the piano that would be sold for no other currency than her own red red blood. The ancient instruments venerable timbers swayed and squeaked under her 300+ pound frame like a four-rigger sloop in a gale.
Me, I held a gym sock full buffalo-head nickels and a dead macaw in my off-hand. Somewhere in the back 40 acres of my pants pocket was the invitation to this disaster, received twelve days previous. There was an identical twin in the pockets or pouches of everyone else in the room, both the living and the dead.
We live among you, housewives, elementary school teachers and construction workers. We are garbagemen, video clerks and comic book aficionados.
We are Junkfighters.
We collect, accrue, purchase, trade, auction, fight and die for first issues, vinyl pressings, fiestaware and limited editions. We are the ones who subscribe to pay cable for the shopping network and buy a computer to get on eBay. We are dyed-in-the-wool consumers and we don’t fight to kill.
We fight to keep.
Let the collecting begin.
