Man, look at me re-post.

This was also from that old blog somewhere on the Interwebs. A piece of spontaneous fiction of which I’m still pretty fond. Little vignette, due to listening to ‘The Twilight Zone’ by Golden Earring far too much on repeat one evening. I’ve decided to share it with you here today.

Have fun.

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Found inside the wall of a recently demolished hostel, eastern Kosovo, 1999. The handwriting analysis returns no match on any INTERPOL database network. The paper is worn, the ink fading before disappearing completely in the light of the sun.

Spies should never fall in love.

I have intimate knowledge of this, as my mother taught me early in life. The product of aftermath-adrenaline from a firefight in Kosovo, she made the crucial mistake of falling for her asset, who would become my father some months later, only to be revealed soon enough after that, that he was really working for the other guy, and my mother and I had an even shorter time to get out of the country alive. They gave me a name, but I don’t know what it is. And I’ve had so many since then, it hardly even matters. He has one, too. I never learned it. But I agree in some respects, it’s probably better that way.

Like so many kids, I was ensnared by the family business before I really had a chance to explore life outside of it. It was just as well; if espionage is genetically-encoded, then black ops is in my blood. I tried life as a civilian, briefly, before I realised it was a luxury that only others could enjoy, and I would be forever on the outside of it, looking in. Normalcy. Medocrity. Those wealthy beyond their dreams never do realise it. Honesty. Trust. Love. These things money really can’t buy, and are more grand and engulfing to ever fit on microfiche.

I used to want them. I was even in love myself. Once. It ended in disaster, as it’s wont to do. Terribly common in this business. Occupational hazard, one might even venture to assert. Trust is the deadliest ingredient in a cocktail fashioned solely for an operative’s demise. Trust. If you trust, then you get sloppy. You place aspects of yourself, your life, your well-being — who you are — in another’s hands. And when it all goes south — and believe me, it always does — then you’re left with a lot more than heartbreak and cynicism. That’s a civilian’s pardon. They get off easy. We don’t. At all. Six feet under; or burned, disavowed, if fortune is beaming down upon you, and you somehow have an inordinate amount of blackmail material on most of the intel-com. And even then, you’re playing with something a lot more deadly than fire with consequences to match. Love. Maybe Cash understood it best; it is a burning thing. Especially when you’re the one holding the match.

Boom.

Sorry, baby. That’s just the way it goes.

Sometimes, sometimes … I allow myself to wonder, in the dead of night after a long assignment, what if … what it could be like, were it different. Even if there is no such thing as real love at all; just fodder for bedtime stories fed to us as children in hopes we might grow to become normal, functioning cogs of the greater societal machine. Tick, tock. Sometimes, I catch myself at the window, my nose pressed against the glass, the star of my own personal government spook hell, Dickens’-style. That’s when I see them all, living their lives without me ever being a part of it. A ghost of my own existence, of my own design. But I remind myself that’s dangerous. Trust, love — that gets you killed. I may not have much of a life, but I’m still living. Breathing. Into the mirror of a rented motel room, in the still darkness, the neon buzzing outside. This far from the borderline.

Where am I to go now that I’ve gone too far?

Bang.

The gun’s always warm. It never cools. That’s my job. I must be the ice to the fire of this … this career, this calling, this circumstance. Only then is there balance. Only then is there chance that I just might retire from it some day — alive.

Trust. That’s another’s treasure. Not mine. It never can be. That’s not what I am.

I’m a spy.

Tags: fictional vignettes, old blog repostings, short fiction