BEING A PROFESSIONAL

She is waiting at the gate. Still, quiet. Her soul is filled with hatred, but her mouth is showing a smile. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It is a smile. And I can’t deal with a smile that hates me. I simply can’t.

Then she looks at me, right when I’m passing by. She stares, sort of speak, she doesn’t even know me. But she hates me anyway, she hates everybody. And I just feel it. It’s killing me, damn. Such a pretty lady, and hating me for no reason. I don’t have the time there and then for showing up my best picking up techniques. The thing is this: as I see her waiting, I know there is something wrong, something is really wrong.

I look at her from the review mirror, and that’s where I hear the noise. A flat: the steer goes crazy and I lose the grip. There is another noise that I hardly recognize, sounds like an enormous vibrating cell phone under my car. I know the shit will blow within seconds. I can still look at the pretty lady from the mirror, but she’s not smiling anymore. She’s serious and running towards my car. Towards the car that is about to go into pieces. I don’t want her to help me. I don’t want her to die. Finally I open the door to escape. It is ridiculous. Cars don’t take that much to blow, perhaps my car is just not blowing at all. Then, with a flat, I have enough time to use my very best pick up lines. She’s still running on my direction. ‘Everything’s fine’, I yell. But she just doesn’t stop.

I should have known it from the beginning. She’s Victoria. She is going to kill me. I am sure I deserve to die, but I just don’t want to. I start running but she’s faster. What is that vibrating noise under my car? Someone’s got a plan. It is a bomb, for sure, but it’s not meant to kill me. Victoria is. She never misses. The bomb will only destroy the evidence.

Being that close to die is not easy. There I am, seconds away from getting a bullet hole right in the middle of my back. It is not easy to know I’ll die, at least not that day. I hear the shot, that crazy sound that is so familiar to me. I hear it and I feel it. I am just an amateur, but I feel it real: death is real, blood is real. The warm sensation flowing down my spine is real, the concrete on my face is real, and numbness is real. I am real and I enjoy being accounted for. I never got to kill anyone, but I got close, I got very close to get the big bucks and then, Victoria gets the story.

Victoria gives me a kiss just when I’m about to pass out, just before I die. She’s just so pretty. She is a professional, and I meet her right the very last minute, but I adore her presence. It is good to go to hell smelling the perfume of the person you admire the most. It is great to be face to face with that lady.

If I don’t’ go to hell this time, and I come back to this world in a different body, I want to be like her. I am stupid; I just couldn’t handle being a serious criminal. She is. Victoria is the best criminal ever.