Micro-fiction by Brentley Frazer

The lost art of Toad calling

He limped along the sidewalk shouting “I will treat them like animals. I will drag them through the dirt before I slit their throats.”

As I passed he looked me in the eye and momentarily, before again casting down his gaze, I could see that he was possessed.

“Secretly, you know I am, right.” He asked.

I had just left a burger joint half a block from the bridge when our paths crossed. As I left the establishment two female cops had entered, and now the agitated man was screaming that ‘they could all suck his cock, on their goddamned knees where they belong’.

Considering that this guy was bellowing this insanity, it was inevitable that those female cops would hear him.

“This I cannot resist!” I said to a guy hanging a poster on a pole, and I turned around, following the now wildly gesticulating man.

“Careful mate…he’s on something!” Poster Guy shouted after me.

The Madman saw the cops there, leaning up against the counter waiting for their order, just as he screamed ‘fucking whores’ at the very top of his raspy sounding lungs.

Looking at once shocked, amused and pleased about being able to exercise their authority (as only a cop can), both ladies in blue, in one fluid motion, slid out of the café simultaneously reaching for batons and radios.

I slowed my pace to avoid Mr. Insane Gesticulation as he, still shouting vulgarities, broke into a full sprint past me across the footpath and straight into oncoming traffic.

There was a sound like someone hitting a pillowcase of Christmas wrapping with a tennis racket, and that horrible scream of rubber biting into asphalt, followed by a ‘pop’ like when you reverse a tractor over a basketball.

Totally unsure of which way to look, at the cops reeling back in horror or at the guy decorating a Nissan with his guts, I somehow managed to split my vision, seeing both instances unfold in tandem.

I stood there with my burger and coke in awe of this great pedestrian opera unfolding before me.

If you have ever been in an accident you will know that the human mind has this unique ability to slow down in times of high stress. This is so that you are able to relive the experience in all if its minute details in nightmares, or every time you close your eyes. Another one of God’s wonderful jokes.

I saw a 65 kilo bag of meaty bones being disintegrated by a two ton Nissan Hilux. The velocity of the truck drew him down and stretched him out, so that he resembled a balloon animal made by a magician at a fair. His head hit the road at the very same moment the left front wheel ran over it. His skull exploded like a dropped watermelon. His brain slooped out and lay there, steaming. And yes, I do mean, slooped…the only way to describe it.

“There’s been a fatal accident!” I heard one of the cops shout.

“We weren’t chasing him” she said at me standing there, eating my burger.

“Looked like you were in hot pursuit to me” I said between mouthfuls, “…like a Komodo dragon chasing a toad”.

The taller of the cops eyeballed me, the shorter was looking at my shoes for some reason.

“Cleary that individual was under the influence of an illegal narcotic, did you witness the actual accident?” said the shorter, looking up from my feet.

“No…only saw you two, chasing him” I replied, watching the driver of the Hilux vomiting on his steering wheel.

“We were not chasing him!” The taller cop screamed at me as Poster Guy came upon the scene.

“Sure looked to me like they were chasing him” I said to Poster Guy.

One of the chefs from the burger joint came out with an egg flip still in his hand, a crowd of no longer hungry faces pressed up against the glass behind him.

Now here is where, as a writer of fiction who is trying to tell a true story, I have to practice restraint. I swear the following contains no embellishments, no literary device to enrich your reading experience.

Perhaps it was the horrible retching sounds of the Hilux driver as he emptied his stomach onto his dashboard. Maybe it was the flashing blue and green neon sign that said ‘Best Burgers on Earth’, or it could have been the arrival of both the Poster Guy holding a rolled up tube and the Chef holding his egg flip, which I admit did look quite sinister. That moment, which resembled an unmade Luis Bunuel film, was all it took to convince both cops that they were under attack. First the taller turned on her police issue heel and emptied a 9 millimeter Glock in to the burger Chef. As she did this the shorter, reacting instinctively to her self defense training, smashed Poster Guy in the face with her night stick. Time, as I mentioned earlier, then slowed to a grinding halt, so abruptly in fact, that the ground beneath my feet heaved, knocking me to the ground. My can of Coke rolled from my fingers across the path into the pool of blood emanating from the dead Chef. My knees landed on Poster Guys teeth and I came down on the hand holding the remains of my burger, which squished so that I slid and lay prostrate at the feet of the cops.

Both of them proceeded to kick the shit out of me, squealing like I was a spider or something.

Civicism is thankfully not entirely a corpse as several of the café patrons came to my rescue. I watched from a fetal position on the sidewalk as a group of people beat both cops unconscious.

I rescued my coke from the now congealing ocean of blood and crawled away, back toward the bridge.

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© Brentley Frazer 2010

www.brentley.com