Death came looking for me the other night. I saw him standing over in the shadows as I was walking up the street to my apartment. So I walked over to him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” He stared back, fire burning in his coal black eyes, his cold breath in my face. He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “It’s your time,” he hissed. “Bullshit,” I answered, I had a couple of cards to play. “You haven’t got a clue. You seem to have forgotten a few things. First of all, I am nowhere near being finished working on the six hundred and twenty one photos I took last Friday for my supervisor’s publication. Now you know that he’s not going to buy me cutting out now and not getting all that work completed. Secondly, I have a gig next month. There is no way my management consortium is going to let me skip out on that contract, and you don’t want to mess with their lawyers at all. No way. And kind sir, you seem to have completely forgotten a most important detail, you know, the one concerning that little understanding we have about a certain incident in Paris last July. I mean, it certainly wasn’t my fault that I stumbled upon you cavorting with six or seven of Madame Claudel’s poules in her upper crust Pigalle bordello on that hot summer night. My goodness, there was a lot of leather and lace about. And they were such sweet young things too. You might recall that I agreed upon complete discretion. We did, if I remember correctly, have a gentleman’s agreement. We certainly wouldn’t want Mrs Death to get wind of your, how should we put it, extracurricular activities now would we. Especially when you should have been working.”
He looked again at his watch and then put it back in his pocket. For a brief moment he seemed at a loss for words. And then once again my eyes met his empty shrouded stare as he pushed out the words through clenched teeth. “Yes, a small misunderstanding on my part.” As he turned and walked away into the gloom he spat the words at me over his shoulder, “I’ll be back…”
Photo taken on Friday October 10th 2014.
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