rob.

A blank premonition taunts me with wide eyes, seeping candour by the handful into the crater of my lap.

Pause.

It holds to my lips a dripping candle, mimmicking the invented dullness of my face. It’s an obvious ruse. The quick pacing. The aching jaw. His perception drools out into the world, fickle as the lines forming pipes around my hinterland. Hinterland? Oh please, do please keep up with the narrative. Unfortunate, whim.

Part of me refuses to acknowledge the inhabitable helpless; the fatal misunderstanding I have conjured. I don’t quite know where to go, because I am trapped under the illusion of choice. I walk and he walks with me. It’s a conditional spar of bad misgiving, though the message is quite clear: We don’t like his kind.

They neither blink nor stare, agonising clarity with a dashing succulence upon the silky grace of life’s most pre-dominant lies. The pre-calculated fear. The unholy misdemeanour. Hints of perspiration capture my soul, drowning in tandem with the collapse in my thoughts.

The two men circle me in a drunken slobber, pushing against the tight fabric of adrenaline preoccupying my skin. Underneath a thick layer of a wool and centuries’ old cotton lies my sickle heart, beating wildly to a unsunken fear that is growing in leaps and bounds in a dark and unforgiving place. The lean one approaches.

“Watch yourself, buddy.”

I don’t quite know what to think of the blatant sarcasm, though perhaps it wasn’t sarcasm at all. Perhaps it was just another man with a bigger set of teeth, chomping his way through the gaping autonomy so clear in the viscious hunger of superior male physique. I take my hat off and comply. He smiles with a childish gleam, guiding me towards a more secure and uninvitingly lucrative location.

The brilliant thing about robbery is that it’s entirely voluntary. No one ever forces you to do anything other than consider the words being aggressively thrown in your direction, to be shoved and pushed into the primal fears dictating your reality. It’s almost as if my rabid guilt and self-treachery had developed a mind of its own, stamped personally by your own insufficient authority to respond.

When you think about it, there’s a certain innocence to the whole situation that begs at your feet, kicking and crying at the sensory deprivation soon characterised by a mental illness; an innocence costing you your freedom before your very eyes.

Along the brick walls of the dainty shadows ahead awaits a man with a switch blade. In a feint respiration of hope, a slither of ice trickles onto the hard concrete below, preparing my grave with the cold and deadly reminder not to look too directly into the eyes of menace above, harping with a fiery gaze.

“Come on. Hand em’ over.”

Trembling hands are an unforgiving omen, suggesting nothing of the daily bravery we all commit to in our jobs and to our families. We love with a perpetual grace, and yet crumble like passionless flowers, ending the ceremony with petals of discarded chemistry. The courage of progression is all but lost in such gone situations, conveniently destroyed for the pleasure of a few angry souls.

You know, it’s convenient how much we bring along with us to be taken by others. An old Samsung Galaxy S4 with a battered case with a lifetime worth of never-to-be-repeated applications, floating around in a digital motherboard of plastic silence and temporary function.

A series of blunted cards worth more to humans than their own lives.

Cash. Oh, how they love the cash, lying in their hands as if monopoly were a way of life. The receipts on the other hand are ignored in a timely, inconsiderate fashion. Spent money is poor money, which reminds me it’s tax time again for the non-creative.

I don’t know whether to lie or not. Is it really a four digit pin code or has my ability to process algebraic sequences gone mad? The fat one places his hand on my shoulder, gripping my flesh with a fierce intensity, bordering pain in defeated alimony.

“You should feel lucky,” one of the men tells me, flipping his switch blade back into his left pocket. He was giving me that long-lost friend look which my memories refused to acknowledge.

I just wanted to go home.