The Man Who Gave Everything (FLASH FICTION with the sleek efficiency ofa BULLET! READ IT!)

[Author's note: Don't ask. Stream of Consciousness. Wrote it in 23 minutes.]

Johnston smelled of death. His eyes made a wet puckering noise every time he blinked. His teeth had not been brushed in ages, this in an effort to emulate the habits of ancient man, who, despite his short lifespan and pension for brutality, was believed to have been in communion with the earth. Johnston wanted communion. He wanted to feel land beneath his feet, the grind of tectonic plates, the hum of tunneling springs through hollow stone.

He’d sold all his property ages ago; shattered his clocks to diminish the trap of time; donated his finery to the Homeless Co-op and Green Farmers Rights auctions; converted his Mercedes into a birdbath; and even given a kidney to a cirrhotic philanthropist, whose work he lauded to the fullest degree.

And still.

The pain.

Of being.

The pavement of downtown Los Angeles was not forgiving. Johnston’s bare feet were covered in sores. His bowel movements came in watery rushes, ignited by the high fiber diet of greens and soy he’d read would support enlightenment. He was polite, even as a bearded vagrant, taking great care to look past the color of skin or social attire, to never mention such things, which, he was sure, were an illusion. He treated everyone as beings of a Universal Consciousness.

And still he hated them.

Each day was a nightmare. He spent his mornings feeding and clothing the Bushman drunks in Echo Park; the afternoons cutting his heels on shattered glass, as he bent to pry trash from the concrete cracks of the 405. But the evenings, standing on a stone pulpit near the Museum of Science, offering spiritual discourse to all who’d listen, was worst of all. Most of the teenagers only lined up to capture him with their iPhones. Some people threw trash, which he’d collect and deposit into its according receptacle around the time the security guards asked him to leave.

He did this because he loved humanity.

And so it was strange when he looked down one evening to see a gun in his hand. The only thing he’d never sold. A tool of darkness too vile to be released into the world. Johnston was standing on his concrete pulpit in the courtyard when the first scream split the crowd. He tried to throw the gun—at least, that’s what his brain communicated to his arm—but his hand refused submission.

Johnston watched in horror as the brushed nickel .50AE Desert Eagle winked red in the sunset light; screamed as the slide pistoned back, roaring fire from its barrel. Over and over and over. How strange that his cries sounded so much like laughter, that his outrage had the peculiar lilt of joy. There were no laughers in the crowd now. No trash-throwers. There were mothers shouting “MONSTER,” as they ran, and men looking on in disgusted terror as if he were a weak and craven thing. He, Johnston, who had labored in the art of selflessness, who had given all but the skin on his back for a taste of Eternal Wisdom.

The firing hammer gave a series of dry clicks. It sounded like a squirrel gnawing on a pinecone. He smiled at the trees, seeing them, truly seeing; turned his face to the smogchoked sky, screaming mantras he had read and reread and memorized in an effort to transcend. And there in the concrete Golgotha, listening to the echo of his voice, Johnston heard its ultimate emptiness.

Only air. Words and vapid promises.

His eyes filled with outrage, with anger, with regret beyond measure—and went wide as a hammer of fire struck his chest. One. Two-three-four. 

Seven bullets passing through muscle and bone with white hot efficiency.

Johnston slammed onto his back, choking, the sucking wounds in his chest gurgling with every pull for air. He was too shocked to cry. Too shocked to beg for mercy. For in the instant of his falling he had smelled and tasted God. A perfume unlike any other, wanting of nothing, inclusive of all. He looked everywhere, around, up, left, right … and saw only the blurred manshapes with guns drawn at the ready. He couldn’t find the smell, the beautiful Godsmell.

Johnston drew himself into a ball, weeping for the loss. Not of his life, but the scent which had briefly fulfilled it. He could not imagine living without it. It was only luck that he was bleeding to death. And as a burning spider will curl its legs into the sizzling abdomen of its exoskeleton, Johnston allowed his knees to jerk closer to his chest and his arms to wrap around them.

He was a child again. A bleeding child. The air harder to suck. The air like lead. The air so empty and ugly without the Godsmell. And hating himself for not seeing it sooner, hating the world for ignoring it, Johnston nestled his nose into the hollow between his knees, sucking his final breath, the hardest breath, pulling with every fibertwitch left sentient in his drowning lungs … and there … in the hollow …

He smelled the God he had been searching for.