Semi-fiction is kind of like fiction.

I wake up. I hate everything. My basement bedroom gets no sunlight. There's a small window, facing the wrong direction for morning sun. That's okay, I hate the sun.

I go back to sleep, warmed by the many hours I have between me and school. I'm careful to avoid looking at the clock. Plausible deniability.

My father wakes me after minutes that feel like uprooted hours. His voice travels down the stairs he thinks he's so god damned cool. He's the "cool dad." Everyone's dad thinks they're cool. It sucks when they actually are.

My father DJs a radio show in the middle of the night. He plays jazz, old rock, new rock, street music from obscure parts of the world where the economy is still based on opium. He takes black & white photographs, or he used to. He can keep a complex rhythm going on a drum. He rode freight trains as a kid. He picks up women like pennies off the ground. Cool. I can't stand him.

It's all there, in his voice. In the timbre. All that coolness. He's got to go to work now though, so he's starting to lose it. His cool reminders that I have to go to school are becoming less indifferent, more hurried. An edge of panic.

I refuse to walk him through it again. For one thing, that would require starting my brain enough to form sentences. For another, I have explained too many times, that I am capable of existing without instruction.

My morning routine is carefully planned and executed, every day, to the minute. And it all starts after he leaves the house. He knows this. I have told him. If I try to explain it again, one of my emphatic illustrative hand-gestures will be plunging a knife into his eye without warning.

I have my alarm clock just in case, and nothing of consequence happens within the first fifteen minutes of any given school day.

Besides, I will probably drop out. If my father's an idiot; school is insufferable.

I'm waiting at a metro bus stop staring into the dead street. The wind is sharp, the sting of it on my fingers and nose makes the sky seem greyer. The air is surprisingly dry for all the clouds.

I hate this intersection. It's a mess of streets intersecting at odd angles, including a freeway offramp that means everyone drives too fast. The pavement and concrete are still, the dust and garbage are airborne in the wake of Sports Utility Vehicles.

I live near a freight train yard. I don't go there as often as I'd like. The tracks run about fifteen feet behind my bus stop. I consider hopping onto train as I hear it approach, and riding it down-town. I'd be closer to school. I'd be alone.

The bus comes, two minutes late, like clockwork. The bus driver hates me. That's comfortable, I hate him back. I am one of those delinquent youths he's heard about on the AM band. He's an ignorant old failure who believes what he hears on AM radio. We know each other.

We avoid contact as much as possible while he glances at my monthly bus pass. He must be in a mood today, he double-takes at the color-coded card, eyeing it suspiciously for the fleetingest moment. It's the same one I had yesterday, and the day before. But today he needs to make super double sure it's not counterfeit.

As I walk to the back of the bus I make up stories. His wife is a rageaholic. This morning she screamed at him about something he didn't know he'd done wrong the night before. She said awful things, calculated things, capitalizing on twelve years of research into her husband's fears, inadequacy, loneliness.

Or maybe he's not married. He lives alone and his daughters never call and he knows why. Or maybe new neighbors just moved in, and they have a teenage son. Coming and going at odd hours, long, dyed hair, torn clothes, obvious gang member. Or maybe he's the one who moved. Can't afford his old house, forced to move to an inner-city apartment, he can't adapt.

He's gone from my mind the moment my butt hits the seat. I always sit at the back of the bus. It's safe back there, because Good People won't cross the political border; the exit door halfway back. The only people who enter that country are drunks, minorities, and teenagers. Scary people.

It's a cold war, the front and the back. There's a scary iron curtain just behind the exit door. I see it in their faces whenever they're forced to exit by that door. The furtive sidelong glance towards the back of the bus. Is anyone getting up to follow me? Will I be mugged when I step off this bus? Who knows?

Who knows how they think? What they do, how they live?

Don't give me that simpering look you besuited imbecile. Nobody back here gives two fucks about you. The back of the bus is for the lower class. And the lower class have more important things to think about than the fact that your briefcase is real imported leather and valued at $2,000. Things like hunger, court-dates, impossible bills.

Not that I don't also hate the lower-class. Wilfully ignorant anti-intellectual anti-art self-defeating alcoholic apes. At the moment of this thought, as if cued by a film director, my eyes fall across a billboard. It's some ridiculous depiction of infantile cupids with the heads of a fully-grown man. They all have the same head, in fact. Before I can switch off the part of my brain that interprets the product in advertisements, I notice someone has covered the product entirely, with a large graffiti burner. It's beautiful. Thank fuck, someone is alive in this city. I am moved almost to tears by the sight, and suddenly realize happily that I am smiling a melancholy smile out the window.

I must look like an idiot, or maybe a teen in young love. The fact that this tender smile comes only due to a relief from the spite I feel for most other people causes me to smile wider. This is mine. This happiness is mine, it can't be taken by the Good People because it is my hatred of them. This happiness is because my heart is untouchable. Unmarketable, unteachable, unreprimandable. As the bus reaches my stop I wonder if I'm in a good mood today. I wonder if I know the difference.

Crowds of fellow students reach the school at roughly the same time. Many are on my bus, having collected here and there en route like morning dew. As I exit the bus last, I decide: No experiments with being social today. If I can stay away from people for the most part, the risk of someone saying something mind-meltingly stupid is reduced to a manageable level. Because I want to keep this warmth in my heart for as long as possible. I want to tend and stoke it. If I'm lucky maybe I can make it into something substantial.

I wrote this quite a while ago.

Frank was an unusual skinhead. He didn't hate anyone. But unlike Ferdinand the Bull, Frank knew how to fight. Which was good, because when other young bald men saw him on the street, there was about a 50% chance of violence ensuing.
Neo-nazis hated everyone and SHARPS hated Neo-Nazis. Frank (short for Francis) didn't hate anyone, but he was a skinhead anyway because, to him, it was the only way to grow up white trash and still respect himself.
"They don't own this," he would tell his friends when they asked why he shaved his head, "Rolled-up jeans isn't the uniform of pissants. It's just clothes, and I can wear them if I want."
Which was true, because when nazis or sharps took him to task for dressing like them, Frank could reliably hand their asses back to them humiliated. Unfortunately this meant that Frank had few friends who wanted to be seen with him in public. Chances were high that some thrice-defeated jackanape would emerge from the shadows with an engorged cadre of ne'er-do-wells to seek satisfaction.

He actually hadn't been jumped by skinheads of of any persuasion in awhile. He hadn't noticed yet, but his reputation in those circles as someone whom it is unwise to trouble had become street-knowledge.
He hadn't noticed the drop in skinhead antagonism because he still found himself fighting with some regularity.
Something else about Frank was that he had a penchant and no small skill with spray-can graffiti. He'd been designing and refining tags since he was a child in middle-school. Some of the prettiest burners in town (in his opinion) were his. While he'd been practicing for years, he'd only recently begun writing in the streets where anyone could see it. His reputation amongst other graffiti writers as a formidable combatant was not yet well known. He often found himself challenged by some spray-can veteran taking it upon himself to haze Frank as a newcomer.

Frank got the impression from the other skinheads he'd met that he was perhaps the only one who had an appreciation of the '50s and '60s New York jazz scene, so that was another thing that made him unusual. But none of these are the most unusual thing about Frank.
Frank was alive during one of the human race's most historically significant moments (but so were millions of other people, so it's not that special).

At the moment Frank was cruising a main street with no real distination but food, and listening to Herbie Hancock contemplate the amusing fact that life goes on.
A week ago Frank had been in this area of town and heard a scream. At least, he thought he'd heard it. As several newspapers had pointed out, it was amazing he'd heard anything, being several blocks away. But he must have heard something, because he pinned the accelerator to the floor of his stale yellow pinto for three blocks the wrong way up a one way street. He arrived at the wide-open downtown plaza and came to a screeching, dragging halt in time to see what had at first seemed like some kind of strange bear, about to kill someone lying on the ground before it.
Frank was aware of his thoughts only now, in retrospect. Seeing such a large and vicious creature, he had assumed that someone, help, must be on the way. There were a few observers, one of them must have a cell-phone. One of the people he'd seen fleeing would probably call the police.
So Frank had been under the assumption that all the poor man on the ground needed was time. Time for people with equipment to show up and do whatever. Frank was not, however, totally cognizantly aware of this assumption. He was running across the bricks as fast as he could, as the great hairless beast (it was hairless he could see as he got closer) reared and dropped, claws much too large for a bear falling toward the helpless man.
Frank was near enough now, and as the claws fell his moment to jump had come, but jump and do what? Some part of his mind developed the seed of a thought which unfolded only now, a week later in his car, that it was amazing how many thoughts the brain was capable of processing in an instant. For example, the choice of what to do with his momentum and how best to serve the soon-to-be-dead guy. Jump on the monster? He could see now that there was no other word for it. Jump in front of the guy on the ground? No, then they'd both die. The only reasonable thing to do was hurl himself at, and he did.

Running at top speed, Frank leapt without hesitation and grappled the huge arm, wrapping his arms around it and throwing his legs out in front. It was barely enough force to avert the strike, and claws struck the bricks next to the cowering man's head. A few bits of brick flew from the point of impact.
Still gripping the great ugly claw and lacking a new plan, Frank held on tight and felt its muscles move beneath the skin. They tensed, he tensed. The creature moved to strike at Frank with its left arm, but drew its right arm out harm's way and in so doing whipped Frank to safety as well. Reaching the end of the arm's motion, Frank felt his weight pull at him and he was nearly shaken loose. The man on the ground scrambled to safety, and Frank wished he too could get away. But he knew if he were thrown, it would take the rest of his lifespan to get to his feet.
Maybe it was a bull? It had huge horns, pointed and rough-looking. It looked as though it could have been a bull if it would quit standing on its hind legs like a bear.
It stood and tried to examine Frank by holding him up in front of its face. Frank's legs swung, a little like a ragdoll, around behind the monster's head. Eagerly he seized the opportunity to keep the arm in its disadvantageous extended position. He locked his legs around the monster's left horn and pulled, demanding of himself more strength than he thought he had.
The combination of surprise and leverage must have worked, because though it struggled against him, Frank was able to pull the huge arm into a sort of upside-down version of a police arm-lock, its elbow pointing to the sky.
The monster made a very loud, very unpleasant sound and Frank held the arm, hanging now upside-down from the creature's horn. Straining against colossal bone, muscle and tendon, he straightened his back as much as he could, pulling the badly twisted forearm down its back toward the ground.
The monster spun 'round to try and grab at Frank with its good arm, but lost its balance and landed awkwardly on its contorted shoulder which, with the tension of Frank's arm-lock, dislocated. The convulsion of pain which shook the monster's body finally threw Frank to the ground several feet away.

Though it was night, the plaza was well-lit, and Frank could see the monster's eyes. They had no animal fear. They were frighteningly hateful eyes. Even the people who picked fights with Frank had something else in their eyes. Confusion, anger. But these large , vicious eyes help only contempt.
Frank had landed near a trash can. He'd planned to run if he got the chance. He had that chance now, but seeing the eyes compelled him to a different course of action. He wanted to run and be safe from the thing. Having seen its eyes, fleeing no longer seemed safe. Frank grabbed a bottle from the top of the garbage piling out of the can, broke it on the concrete cylinder which held the receptacle in place, and charged at the beast hoping to reach it before it recovered. He was focused on its eye. If there was any shot at hurting this great awul thing, it had to be those hateful eyes.
Running towards the creature again, and again using his momentum, he struck the jagged glass at the monster's eye, hoping the eye-socket was big enough to let the bottle in. It wasn't, and the glass shattered apart lodging wedges of it in both the monster's face and eye, and Frank's arm.
Ignoring the pain shooting through his arm, Frank immediately shoved his hand into the blood and glass that now filled the eye socket. He made a claw of his hand as the monster screamed. With his free hand he grabbed the monster's right horn, the one closest to him, and pulled. Like pulling taffy, the eye came out, and again without hesitation Frank shoved his arm back into the eye socket, shoving past blood, glass, torn tissue, and into soft brain, made tough by its confinement in the skull.
Distantly noting his lack of a gag response, Frank thrust from the shoulder, working his fingers into what felt like wet dough. The creature was still moving, but not thrashing now. It was twitching in futility, with Frank's hand in its brain. He was wiggling his hand as much as he could, trying to cause as much tissue damage as possible. It stopped moving. Frank kept tearing at it's brain. It stopped breathing. Finally Frank relaxed.
When he looked around, his arm now stuck in the beast's head up to the elbow, he saw the crowd now included stunned police officers and firefighters. With effort he removed his arm from the socket and it spewed gore like uncorking a barrel of thick vomit.
Frank puked. The rescue workers whisked him away to wrap him in blankets and give him coffee like they do on television. They removed the glass and bandaged his arm.

In the week following, he'd given his accountof the event in several interviews and had learned that no one seemed to know what the animal was or where it had come from. Before Frank arrived, the witnesses at the plaza said that the monster appeared without anyone seeing it approach. It was just there, in the middle of a crowded downtown area, and it attacked the nearest person, the man Frank saved.
The weird thing, to Frank, wasn't that it had happened in the first place. Extraordinary things happen to people, it's just a fact. But that life has no choice but to continue on afterward regardless. Here he was, Francis Hunter: Monster Slayer, driving down the street like anyone else. Hungry like anyone else. Not that he wanted to be famous. Not that he was dissatisfied with it. But he thought it was kind of funny that something so life-changing could happen to you, and then it doesn't change your life.

This late at night there were few dining options. Of the three, one didn't have a reputation for cockroaches. It was also the more expensive of the three. By small margin, but enough for Frank to feel like justifying his choice.
Frank had worked at a grocery store until earlier this day, when he'd been informed of his termination for shoplifting. He suspected the real reason was that his superviser was afraid of him. Now moreso since Frank had been featured on the news for his heroic act of violence. Allowing himself a moment to indulge in petty crap, he mentally acknowledged the fact that his supervisor lifted things from the store with nearly every shift.
Then the light turned green. Frank used red lights as therapy. Until it turned green, he was free to engage the fuckers at their own level, with all the petty drama and narrowminded backstabbing he'd come to expect from his fellow working stiffs. And when the light was green, he left all the stupid vitriolic shit there at the intersection to get run over into the ground by every following car, while he drove away from it a free man.

When he arrived at the 24-hour café, Frank found it more populous than he'd expected. Several tables had been relocated to make room for the lyrical stylings of some minor local celebrity. This happened often, and sometimes Frank found it enjoyable. But tonight he wanted a seat and a table.
Fortunately, one fan didn't mind sharing his table. Frank opened his black sketchbook and laid it on the table after ordering. He uncapped his pen and studied his latest design. It was for a mid-sized throw-up tag, and it wasn't satisfying him. He'd hoped to channel some aggression into creativity. But instead of angry, the thought of last week's monster kept popping to mind, and Frank's amotional response to this was mostly awe. Not respectful awe, but more like confused wonder. The kind of feeling one associates with the phrase "what the fuck."