Tuesday 6 April 2010

The Merc.


The place is: Six, one, three Kong and the hour: unknown. A retired mercenary rests in his favourite armchair sipping tea and gazing out of the window. The concrete towers outside beam in a dark orange hue to the otherwise unlit room. He is reminiscing about the days before he came to abide on the forth floor of a disguised church. Reminiscing about the times of upheaval that forged him and carried him on a path of short existence. Officially he died of a drug overdose at the age of 29. There was a quick and quiet funeral which he did not attend and a name put on a small stone somewhere in the middle of nowhere. He was already in Kong before any of this happened, under a new name and a few years younger. With all his new documents stamped and approved he could live out the rest of his life quietly far away from all those who once knew him.
Each evening he would sit in the dark listening to the creaks of the building and the night life outside. He thought over the standard questions people tend to ask about you and your past and formulated a work of fiction that would neither interest or intrigue. A quick brush over to make his life seem mundane and in keeping with the norms of society. The past he had lived was to be written as a story. The names of people and places would be changed letting him unveil the truth without the world knowing the realness of the events. This was the crossover of his new existence that would allow him a margin of error within conversations. If the truth slipped out he could always say it was a story he was working on for his new book. Still every night, sipping tea, he would sit and get his story right. Separating truth from fiction. Going over every detail to insure a flawless presentation of an ordinary man with a great imagination.