Page 4 of Karma

Karma

Grief comes at you from all angles. From the memories that flood in when you’re all alone, to waking up thinking you’ll reach out and touch the person, believing it so hard it’s like a blow to the stomach when you realize the truth of the matter. And from doing the everyday things you used to do together. Those cases stop me dead in my tracks, unable to move until the pain passes, leaving me cold inside. Until the next time grief hits me.

There’s not much in my life that Reaper hadn’t touched. Fifteen years is a long time to spend with a person. It’s a lifetime. More than some people get. Knowing that hasn’t been much comfort to me. I would do anything, give anything, to get fifteen more years with him.

There’s also the insidious ways. The things you don’t expect. Like smelling his scent on an old piece of clothing and seeing him there before you, real as life, but nothing more than a ghost.

We got the monsters that took him from us. Tracked them down to their lair and set it ablaze while they slept. A no-name MC full of no-name members all under the age of thirty. The age of stupid. Thinking just because they got their hands on somemachine guns, they should use them to steal. And kill. They’ll never get to see thirty and we’ll never get to see Reaper again.

Most days I still don’t fully believe that.

Such a sorry end for such a great guy. He was larger than life and he made our small band of outlaws a family. Those are the kinds of things we’ve been telling each other as we scattered his ashes all over the country in all the places he loved the most—from the Gulf of Mexico to the harsh mountains of the north.

What Grim and I don’t talk about is that Reaper was the glue that held the two of us together. I always suspected and now I know. Grim, Reaper and Karma. We were quite the trio. Now the one that made us make sense is just dust. Less than that, because all his ashes are scattered.

We still try to share a bed, but it’s so empty without Reaper. We still try to love each other, but all our conversations always end with Reaper. Tonight will be no different.

That’s why I’m just sitting in an old, pockmarked armchair in the parking lot of yet another outlaw biker, hooker and drug addict friendly motel/bar. The party inside the bar is getting louder, spilling into the parking lot where I watched the sunset and then the moonrise, trying not to think. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately—trying not to think. It hasn’t worked. Even though thinking never gets me anywhere good. It just makes my mind turn blacker than it already is. More putrid. More hopeless—if I had any hope left to give.

The armchair I’m sitting in smells like someone died in it. The room we rented for the night will be the same.

I’ve been on the run for so long I don’t remember the last time I slept in a clean room, on clean sheets, with a shower that hot water came out or a tub that wasn’t brown and black with old blood and rot.

I can look out as far as the end of my life and all I see is more of the same.

All of us Forsaken Outlaws have been on the run from the law for so long, I’ve forgotten what normal life might look like. Clean rooms in clean houses that you can call home.

Home.

A word I don’t know anymore.

Home was Reaper. Home was Grim. Home was the three of us together. Home was our other brothers and sisters. Home was the open road and the freedom it gave.

But freedom isn’t something you can ever hold. It’s just something you chase. I’m beyond tired of chasing it.

“Fucking metaphorical crap,” I curse at myself, finish my bottle of beer and toss it into a pile of garbage at my feet. The stench that rises from it as I do is something I don’t want to know.

Like so many other things.

I get up and walk to the bar. Time to find Grim and once again try and get back at least a little piece of the good that used to be. Thinking is overrated. Sitting still and silent is death. Swimming like a shark, never stopping, that’s where it’s at.

As the noise suggested, the party is going strong. This bar really has it all. From a couple of stripper poles on a low stage, to pool tables, darts, and a counter wide and long enough for doing shots off people.

When I came to life after Grim and Reaper saved me, I loved places like this. Loved the raw energy, the wildness, the unbridled celebration of just being alive and doing whatever the hell you want to do. Now I just want quiet and falling asleep in my men’s arms. Well, man’s… because one’s all I have left.

My brothers and sisters don’t seem to have the same idea tonight. Psycho is dancing with a mostly naked stripper like his life depends on it, Poison and Ivy are going at it on a table in one of the darker corners of the vast space and Toxic has a perkyblonde who looks much too healthy to be in a place like this in his lap.

And Grim… he’s got his hands full too. And his mouth too. Sucking face with a guy that looks young enough to be his son, while a dazed and confused looking redhead caresses them both, one of her boobs hanging out from her dirty dress.

I stride right up to them, my thoughts black, my heart blacker. I wish I saw red, I wish my blood burned. But it’s all just ash.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I say loud enough to be heard over the thumping of the heavy metal song playing.

Grim’s eyes are like the sea. They change color with his mood. Right now, they’re black.

“What? I’m just having some fun,” he says.

I push past the redhead and pull the guy off his lap. He falls to the ground because he’s weak and they both hiss at me, but they’ve already decided not to fight me. I can see that clearly in their fuzzy, strung-out eyes. Grim is strung out too. But not badly enough to cloud his eyes. He knows what he’s doing.

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