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<font face=""arial"">Sam Parry may mourn the loss of his left eye but he does not regret removing it.
Should he ever pluck out its replacement and show you the reason, what he?d peel back his wrinkled lid to reveal is not a normal socket. It is a metal-plated hub of living wires that have no place existing there, thin as capillaries and all reaching for a tiny microchip planted in the dead center. The chip wasn?t with him when he put his eye out?no, the metal had been his for a long while but in 1956 it was hard to come by such science. He had nothing to do with its implementation.
The matter of Sam?s lagging left side is one he dealt with himself, for the sake of his work. Perhaps not in the United States, nowhere on the sphere of the Earth but somewhere, at sometime, he underwent an operation to serve an odd request: he asked that the left half of his body be equipped with a circuit of conductive wires.
It bears no importance here to recount the exact details of that experimental surgery, or how exactly he managed to make it through alive and his body to really accept the new equipment?know only that the majority of the system of nerves on his left side has for a companion a metal circuit. Expectedly he runs up a rather heavy electrical charge on his left side, but Sam has his own peculiar ways of keeping it under control (ask his tattoos).
His left side is special in a certain other unmentionable way, best left to Sam to decide when it is the right time to discuss. There are secrets racing up and down that electric skeleton, that safe circuit that belong only to him, and wake him only in the deepest night when they are safely strapped down. For he is, in spite of his good humor, a true criminal and a danger not only to himself, but to the society he has been reluctantly allowed to re-enter. Thus far he has proven himself trustworthy and yet--
here Sam laughs and passes a joke, frames a wink;
there he thirsts to break into a bigger system, transmit violence, escape.</font>
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<center>http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../bettersam.jpg</center>
<center>An Ex-Con with a Bad Haircut</center>
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Finch's business was light enough to travel with him. It consisted of a pack of needles that rolled up for simple--but not always safe--transport. Besides needles the pack contained small bottles of ink, representing the less remarkable colors of the spectrum (commonly referred to as "muddy," "murky," or "What in the hell did you eat?"). He carried the pack over one shoulder, and always a book in his hand that served the sole purpose of keeping his current bus ticket.
When laid flat the pack unrolled to the length of a man's height and it might've been Finch's height but, as it just so happened, Finch refused to associate himself with the human race. After a certain amount of interaction, the elf had arrived at the conclusion that the man had parted ways with a troubled past. Mention of such came muttered at best whenever Sam attempted to lure it out of the fellow.
He'd spoken just once, vehemently about a war and so many years ago that the memory of it had probably slipped through the cracks in the elf's mind like so much loose change. As a customer, Sam?s duty to Finch didn?t normally extend beyond paying him for his services and practicing well-meaning, one-sided conversation whenever those services were required.
The process of summoning Finch was also an unavoidable duty: an awful bit of burning birds down to their bones. Sam performed it behind the Cottonwood building, at the cusp of night, guiltily pinning the creatures down on the cracked asphalt and later asking their ashes for forgiveness. As he struck at the wind with handfuls of those ashes, watching them burst and glide away, Sam not for the first time wondered why the man couldn?t settle for a much tidier telephone call.
The next day, Finch arrived on the 7:36 AM bus. He was a man whose posture dangled as if from long, loose strings; his limbs, once springy, had gotten stretched after so much effort making up for the slack. He emerged from the bus unbalanced, arms akimbo. Immediately, he lit a strangely sugary-smelling cigarette and turned southwest to face his own smoke blown back at him.
He shrugged up his tattered black jacket, the pack on his shoulder, and proceeded; the world inched back, cringing. It put a little bounce in his usually flimsy step.
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ July 31, 2006 08:44 PM: Message edited by: Sequence 78 ]</font>
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Sam was not at home when Finch arrived at his door. For a fellow who abided by a strict personal code of punctuality, this came as a stabbing shock; for one who selflessly observed the tradition of making house calls, it came too as an irritation that he should be greeted with empty space (and an open door, the cheeky bastard).
Finch respectfully responded. He put out his cigarette on the elf?s door, a message to the effect of: ?Hello, I called and you weren?t in. Sorry to have missed you. Do try and get back to me.? The force with which he ground the burning tip in also suggested that it might possibly be a matter of urgency. A sweet scent was left stranded there, discarded with the stub he dropped and kicked into the apartment space. He left.
In Sam?s defense, he had stepped out for the sake of assisting a friend. At the time of Finch?s arrival he himself was on his way to the abandoned Rock and Roller Skate, with a sledgehammer in tow and all the most helpful intentions. He had a brain full of dragon thoughts; comparatively miniscule mentions of tattoos, crowded out, would simply have to wait. Sam would not remember his business with Finch until he was struck in the face with it.
Likely, he would be. While the elf wore down a wall across town, his associate sat with troubling precision on the exact, sorry spot Sam had burned the birds to ashes. His legs bent, fell open like wings in their own way, and without his invisible strings to hold him up Finch slumped with his dirty hair hanging to his knees.
He muttered; he watched; he waited. The warped lines that ran down his face weren?t tattoos, either. They went to places.
