THE ART OF BURNING

III: DEAD WHITE GUYS IN WIGS

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ATLAS
(tw: child abuse)

            AS OF RIGHT NOW, if the opportunity ever came a-knockin', Atlas thinks he'd politely decline the offer to become a drug dealer.

            Sure, it's an honorable lifestyle. You get hella cash, hella clout, the excitement of potentially being murdered by your clients or spending the rest of your life incarcerated. Above all else, he thinks, you can give yourself a cool street name. Like Wolverine, or maybe Bartholomew.

            But if it means having to live like this, it can't be worth it.

            He looks up at the apartment building—if you could even call it that. It seems more like a biohazard zone, like something out of a sci-fi movie. Like Godzilla came and leveled the place but left the meth lab up and running.

            His sneakers sink several inches into the bubbly mud, and his jeans are splattered with something that smells suspiciously like human shit. The entire world smells like human shit, in fact, and the smell seems to be coming from the apartments. And it's not just normal human shit—it's, like, Taco Bell naked chicken chalupas human shit.

            A couple feet in front of him walks the most beautiful woman in the world, his mom. A big gray hoodie hides her curls, and she keeps flipping something small and sleek and black back and forth in her hands. A gun or a knife—Atlas can't tell. He guesses, probably, a knife. They make for a much cleaner kill: no noise, less room for error, less chances of getting caught. If you do it right, hit the vein just so, go straight for the jug, it can even be quicker.

            An amateur could do it, but Eva Alessia Villa is no amateur. Neither is her son, though he would like to be.

            His mom has no idea that he's there. If she did, she'd turn the fuck around and whip his ass to hell. Well, maybe his punishment wouldn't be as dramatic as that, but you get the point. Even though she'd be pissed to know he'd secretly tagged along, she's too sweet to so much as raise her voice at him or his siblings. She'd probably just take away his phone for a week.

            But Atlas has to stop her. He just has to.

            He can't let her do this, can't let her take someone's life for a couple extra bucks—not when they're so close to stopping. Not when they're so close to getting shut down for good. Not when the Villa Pizzeria is so close to becoming nothing more than what it should be: a pizzeria.