Acephalic Bodies

(Overheard On The Go)

I went to the convenience store where I usually buy gas the other day, but it kept saying my card was unreadable and to go see the attendant inside! So I did that. I wondered aloud if my card was too scratched up (it didn't appear to be). The nice young lady said it might even be the fault of the machine needing to be cleaned. She turned on the pump and I ran some gas and went back inside to sign the Visa card.

While waiting in line, I overheard a drunk old man talking out loud to himself. Actually, he may only have been 5 or 6 years older than me, but I'm pretty old myself. At any rate he was talking aloud about a recent crime in which two cousins had decided to punish a crippled man who was behind in his rent. The cripple was renting from somebody's mother. Anyway, they went too far, and left the man for dead after they beat him. They'd thrown his prosthetic legs into the creek below and threw the man down the steep bank. The old man in the store was talking about how the injured man spent 8 or 10 hours crawling up the bank far enough for the highway patrol to see him when they passed. But the injured man died at the hospital. The drunk was outraged and couldn't stop talking about what he'd do to those young men. The law had them in custody already, of course, for they were very stupid. The kind of young men that you see on TV and you just KNOW they're stupid. Not to mention the stupid things they'd done!

"I'd cut off their fuckin' heads!" the drunk old man said.

I signed my Visa card ticket and left the store wondering what street he lived on.

---