Vigilantes of Love Read Online Free PDF

weird and talking to yourself. I think you need to get out of here. Now.”
    I stepped wide over the place where I’d seen the blood and left the store.
    I never saw Lissa again.
    But sometimes I hear her. In the guttural screams of The Dreaming, behind the tortured bells and echoes of Filigree and Shadows. It took several visits to the store for me to believe that she was gone. I tried to go when The Master was busy and ask some of the other guys working the store where she was, but they’d look puzzled or stare at me like I was crazy. “Don’t know who you mean, man. No Lissa has worked here this semester,” they’d say and go back to alphabetizing.
    It took months until I finally learned the whole story, accidentally, during a Martial Arts class in the Phys. Ed building. The professor told it as a warning to us. Used her as a reason for us to get A’s in his class. Told us of a student from the year before named Lissa. Of how she’d been putting away the day’s cash in the safe one night when some asshole snuck up behind her and stabbed her in the back with a switchblade, took her money and left her to die on the bare wood floor of the upper room of the Record Stop on Main Street.
    I don’t know what he thought when I clenched my stomach and ran from the class.
    Sometimes I feel guilty that I made her face the scene once more. As if I killed her again.
    What did she see when she entered the room of her death? Did the memory of her murder come flooding back to her like a shot? What did she think of me for sending her there?
    I can still see her face some nights in the darkness when I can’t sleep. I picture those taut pink lips talking of soul and honesty and expression. I see her eyes like pools of endless truth and life. Sometimes I cry, knowing the girl that I missed.
    And sometimes I whisper to her. I hope she can hear. Or maybe it’s better if she can’t.
    I want so badly to hold her tight to me, but I hope, more than anything, that my foolish curiosity set her free.
    “But every night I lie in bed and I think of your face Remembering a better time in a gentler place All I know is that this is the hardest thing I’ve done and loneliness, the bitter prize I’ve won.”

–Industrial Disease, “Does It Have To End”
 
    ~*~

A TIME FOR MUSIC
     
    “No, it won’t feel normal again. It’s all your fault anyway,” Mark screamed. “You drove him away and now we’ll never be a family again. I hate you!” Mark’s face flared red with anger. His mother’s face grew pinched and turned ghostly white. Tears glistened in both their eyes as her hand rose to slap his mouth.
    Their eyes connected for one electric second and her reaction slowed.
    With a mix of guilt, satisfaction and gut-bleeding emptiness, Mark turned and ran out of the kitchen and up the back stairs.
    “And I hate this place!” he yelled over his shoulder, stomping heavily up the hardwood stairs.
    His grandparents’ house was a musty, decaying mansion tucked inconveniently away from town on a wooded hill. Mark and his mother, Marilyn Baer-Ackert – soon to be just Baer again – had moved in with them while the divorce was finalized. That meant Mark had to leave all of his friends, change schools and worst of all, live just far enough away from his new town and school that he could never go out and try to make new friends. He was a prisoner in a dying house with old, dying people. Mark felt as if he was dying himself.
    He and his mother argued constantly these days. Most of the time it felt like he’d lost both of his parents.
    And his grandparents weren’t any help. They always sided with her, patted his shoulder and said, “She’s under a lot of pressure right now, Mark, try to understand.”
    What about him? Did anybody ask him about the pressure he was under? No.
    Did anyone ask him if he want to ride an hour every day on a bus to go to a strange school with kids who all knew each other and looked at him like some kind of