Last Flight of the Golden Condor

Last Flight of the Golden Condor
(December 2004)

It started when they told him he didn't exist. That was the beginning. Only his friend saw him, and his friend was convinced he was a giant bird most of the time anyway. Everyone else just laughed, even the man with the rubber ducky. They all said he was just another delusion, and BB was given more drugs.

The drugs never really worked. BB was nuttier than a fruitcake, which is generally considered almost impossible given the real ingredients of fruitcake. So they resorted to peer pressure, the people of the Street. They told BB over and over that he wasn't a bird, that his friend wasn't real.

It ended when got angry. It wasn't right, these people saying he didn't exist, treating these poor children like puppets and not people. So on the day BB was forced to agree, the day the broke the yellow-bellied kid for the final time, Snuffy cried. A single tear, suspended between earth and heaven.

All eyes locked on it, watching it fall. No one noticed the knife, until it was too late. In some ways, it had always been too late. The grouchy kid died first, and the "real" vampire who counted socks, and the two queer kids with the duck. Snuffy enjoyed their faces when he cut the duck apart before their eyes. The fat kid who ate all the cookies took more time, just because even Snuffy had trouble actually finding his neck.

Doctor Gina went quick, and the rest of the staff the same. They tried to run too late, not believing in him until they had no choice. Mister Hooper tried to get BB to call 911.

"You want me to use the phone Looper?"

"Hooper! It's Hooper! Hooper!" Hooper began screaming at him, for the last time as it turned out.

BB looked at the body, and at Snuffy. "You snuffed Hooper."

Snuffed nodded gravely.

"I was lying to them," BB said. "I really believed."

"Can you tell me how to get, how to get blood stains off?" Snuffy sang.

BB shook his head, his pants staining yellow. "C - cold water. C is for cold," he managed, and lashed out spastically, sending the knife flying.

Snuffy watched it fall and drew his second knife. "I have two tusks," he explained. And the it got very bad, very bad indeed.

The police found BB, curled up beside a knife, and sobbing. He wasn't dead, not yet, but cut all over, as if he'd tried to skin himself alive and failed. He was screaming about his missing feathers, the big boy, as they tried to stop the blood from flowing. He died, the killer, singing that it wasn't easy being red, and no one ever asked questions about a second knife. No one heard the laughter in the air, from the creature who wasn't there but everyone agreed the street was haunted by something that left sesame seeds everywhere.