To Frankie

Bottles and bottles and bottles of the stuff.
It burnt your nose just to sniff them, venomous vapours streaming off their corks and caps. Each held a viscous eerie fluid, hazy and undefinable, one second it was swirling, and contained a brilliant, opalescent sheen that captured the mind's imagination and held it giddy, on the lower shelves, further away from the day-lit windows, the fluid was voluptuously dark, as exquisitely murky and mysterious as the most exotic of sins.
A rum-runners ransom in liquor,  a veritable horde of hooch, In the year 1929, it was worth it's weight in gold. But today, a year later, it was all legal.
"It's not even very good. I've nipped turpentine that tastes smoother going down." Said Henry Peaks, hidden under a hat and twice his weight in trench-coat. His ratty little mouth held a cigarette limper than the two noodles he called arms.
"Well this gut-rot won't sell itself, Henry. What about Kenny Mc...Whositsname, over on Garland Street. You know, owns the Gilded Cherub...?" Marco Geraldo. Six and a half feet of muscle, gristle, and barely restrained rage. Also, suspenders and buzz-cut.
"...McGrady? That mook won't touch the stuff. He's found a legit supplier from Chicago. Apparently they make a mean gin. Frankly, Kenny only took from us after the Darmout Brothers started overcharging him on the bourbon."
"Those assholes have their place on Northburn. The... uh, I'm pretty sure it has a fox in the title..."
"The Jazz Joint? Yeah, but only cause they muscled in on Eddy the Ear. Poor guy. Heard he can only eat his meals through a straw these days. And then only when someones holding it for him." Henry took a brown, hefty bottle off the shelves, that was labelled "TWO HUNDERED PROOF, FINEST CHOICE GARUNTEEED!" and dragged it over to the water-warped lump of furniture that they used as a table. "Marco, do you ever wonder why it all happened like it did?"
Marco was casually trying to part back his hair with an inferior brand of hair-wax, but found that the quantity and the quality of the hair belonged somewhere closer to a scrubbing brush than a human head, and so instead wiped the wax across his mammoth chest, parting his chest hair evenly across his two biceps.
"It gotta be when Frankie died. Almost six months to the day, would you believe that?"
Both the fella's quickly crossed their hearts. Marco hadn't gone to church for almost two years, and Henry was Jewish, but it was a mark of respect to a man they had called their friend, their brother and their boss.
"We was about to own this town." Said Henry with a look of awe in his beady, ragged little eyes. "The Darbouts, the Francheski's Even Bobby Blanco gave us a piece of respect when Frankie was around."
Nostalgia seemed to be catching, as Marco joined in with the commemorating. "He used to just stand there and no what to say. He never had to hit anyone to get 'em to listen to him, and he always knew how to make someone shut their traps."
"Yeah. He's give 'em a look with those great big green eyes of his. Smile that smiles of him, and every politico to pimp would be butter in his fingers."
"Yeah..." Marco looked away fondly at nothing in particular. He caught himself though, and busied himself by grabbing some glasses from the crockery cupboard.
"Hey. You remember that time with Moses Sizzles?"
The story seemed to be one that they both knew, but still one they would mind retelling to one another a million times over.
"So, Sybil Raceway gets a hot tip that Moses and his boys have something hidden from The Law out on the Docks up with those slant-eyed Celestials."
"Why'd they call her Sybil Raceway, again?" Marco could never remember the names, probably one of the reasons he could never lead a gang of his own.
"Cause you ain't never seen so many people in and out of her so quick. Now anyways, Frankie, he's the smart type, and knows the scent of something big when it's screamin' on his lap. So he says to us: '"Now you two boys go turn over the chink love-house and the opium lounge and you see who's willing to play ball."' And so we go over and snatch up a squeaky little slant eye-"
"-I remember them being some o' the slantiest eyes I've ever gone seen-" Marco chimed in.
"-And so we's brings him back to Frankie, all squirmy like, I swear someones put him in Vaseline before we got to him, and Frankie just looks at him."
"With those green ol' eye's of his. Not slanty at all"
"And this little, yella fella crumbles. Like and eagle smashes a turtle, or a turtle smashes a head, or whatever, and he spills. Tells us what Moses is hiding down on the Docks, and boy is it big."
Marco took an opportunity during the pause in the tale to pour them both a considerable sized glass of the fiery amber liquid each.
"A treasure trove of the fanciest imported spirits you could think of: A million pesos worth of genuine Mezcal, worms all crawlin' through the bottom of each bottle. Crystal clear Vodka from the proletarians over in the Motherland. Rice wine from Japan so fresh you could almost still see the husks attached. And if you remember, we almost waded in like patoots to go get it ourselves."
"Man, back then we were dumber than a sack of... Elephants."
"I hears ya. But Frankie... Frankie had a mind clearer than a kike's ledger-book. Always tickin' away. So instead of us and Two Bars Charlie going to the Docks, and bustin' heads and taking the hooch, Frankie asks the little fella where Moses Sizzles was holed up."
" So. Like Satan's teapot, we get fired up and march out to Fiddlers Junker over in New Street, and while you're holdin' a baseball bat in one hand and a snub-nose in the other-"
"-and you've got a shotgun hidden in your trench-coat. You can't even see it."
"Yeah, yeah, Marco. But you ruined the story a bit. Anyway, Two Bars has his two bars and you two rush in, breakin' faces and that pelvis, when some old barfly takes out his .22 and is about to blow you one on the brain-pan when POW! I shoot him where the sun don't shine with a shotgun I've got hidden in my trench-coat all sneaky like see."
"Very sneaky."
"So we go up to Moses' room and you kicks the door down like it's made 'a' cheap cheddar. Frankie walks in on behind us, see's Moses puffin' away on one of his stinky ol' cigar's and sippin' on his brandy. Frankie just gives him the look, then he says '"Everything you own on the Docks now is mine, capish?"'
"And Moses laughed at him, I remember that. I was about to go over across that desk and turn his scrawny little neck around." Marco started to turn kind of raddish-ish with even the distant memory of the fact.
"Yeah, but then he would'a been called Moses Turnaround, not Sizzles. Anyways, so Frankie grabs that glass of brandy of his, takes a sip of it, swirling the glass a little, cause that's the ritzy thing to do, and then he tosses it full into Moses's face. FWOOSH, it goes up in smoke and so does Moses."
"Yeah, I still don't get why that happened. Frankie musta' known some hocus pocus from the old country, I guess."
"... It was the lit cigar that Moses was smoking, Marco. It made the brandy catch."
"...Oh. Still, pretty clever of Frankie."
"Yeah, never seen anything like it. To Frankie!" Henry and Marco had both let their glasses full until the story was over as a mark of respect. At the point that it petered out, they both raised their glasses in salute to Frankie."
"To the smartest, greatest guy I ever knew."
"Hear hear." chirped in Henry from underneath his fedora.
They drained their glasses dry.
"...pity about how he died."
"Yeah, that fire just came outta nowhere while he was drinkin' some of the haul from the Docks."
"Marco... he was smokin' while he was drinkin'."
"And?"
"...Nothing. It's just, everyone seems to have moved on and found a way to go Legit. Even Two Bar Charlie is running two bars on Elworth and Nobbs. I just know that if Frankie were still here..."
Henry's eyes drifted across the tabletop where the two's glasses sat. They weren't alone.
Marco saw it too. "I'm sorry. Must of just been a force of habit. My head's a bit fuzzy today."
Henry just gave a sad little sigh, and flicked his ashes into the third glass. Where it fizzled and was drowned.
"We've had to water down everything in this cellar so much you couldn't even get a kid drunk off the stuff. We're never going to be able to shift it."
"I bet Frankie would 'a' had a plan for it." Marco added.
"Yeah... He would have. Hey, Marco pour us another one."
The slosh and splash of the watered bourbon as it poured into each glass was so refreshing, you could have gotten drunk off the sound alone.
"To Frankie. Maybe not the smartest, but definitely the best guy I ever knew." said Henry with a heart filled with pride and starting to be filled with cheap hooch.
"Hear hear." Said Marco, gazing at the shelves of opulent scotches, murky jugs of Applejack, two bit  Rum sitting next to five hundred dollar Cognac, some a little bit drunken away, all of them dusty from being on the shelves too long, and wondered how long it would take for them to drink it all from Toasts to Frankie.
Not as long as you'd think.
 

The Hollow Wing: The Man with the Red Eye

And so the haunted cells that laid between the nefarious concrete monolith known as J Block, and the Administration offices, claimed yet another soul. The bricks that made up the squat rooms smelt of poisoned blood, and they reverberated with the crying of anguished maniacs. And there was the sense of hunger there. Hunger of something colossal, abnormal and monstrous that was sated by the ecstatic release of a tortured souls. The Hollow Wing.
And so the Man with the Bloody Eye rested there for the night. Dreaming of nothing and resting completely untroubled.
The Doctors didn't understand him. He had been a normal man once , He had a wife, parents, siblings, children, pets and neighbours who loved him and filled him, nourished him with purpose. He did everything in his life for them. Laboured tirelessly to please them. And each day he fell down in bed exhausted, he always knew he hadn't done enough for them, and rent at his mind with a secret shame.
 He had tried pills to quash this festering anxiety, saw all the best specialists, reached out hopelessly to strangers in an effort to fill this abyss in him. But every night he'd hear the words not good enough over and over. It became his mantra. And he'd sing it to himself every day to himself when he was alone.
One day, after a wearisome day of work. After he had taken a handful of bitter tablets to settle his nerves, and listened to the oblivious voices of his family, he blanched in privacy, and fell into a final fit that he would never awaken from.
He started to shudder, quivering in a quiet corner of the house, gibbering the familiar phrase he always chanted at times like there. Not good enough. Round and round in circles. Unexpectedly though, his limbs began to spasm in a mangled dervish, a tornado of flailing appendages, his back arched with tempestuous agony, and he thought that he would die from the way that he felt.
In truth, it was a kind of death. But only one of certainty.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The words that were a void in his soul. Except this time, instead of trying to bury it,  or cover it up, he finally surrendered himself to it. A journey into his own abyss. And in the dark, the light of truth gleams ever bright.
He was never good enough for the people around him that made him feel so loved, so needed, so purposeful. He couldn't ever do enough or be enough to pay back the way they made him feel. Their love for him, and his own for them had somehow toxified  his own love for himself.
The Doctors said that this was a minor stroke brought on by an epileptic fit. Certain blood vessels had burst like crimson fireworks in his left, sinister, eye. It had also brought about a complete shut-down in his empathy-centre. He would never feel another emotion again in his life that wasn't about himself. A sociopath in mere seconds.
The suicides and murder-suicides that followed in the surrounding months were noted by the media and the police. His distraught parents drowning themselves in the nearby dam. Two neighbours houses yielded freshly carbon-monoxide-ed cadavers. His wife's poisoning the children's school lunches before jumping off a bridge. The newspapers said that his sister burnt herself alive and they never found his brother's body.
They even said when they came for the Man, that they found his cat starved itself to death and his goldfish suffocated by forcing themselves up out of their water.
When asked why he thought all his loved ones killed themselves, the man spoke sincerely, but briefly, "I finally made them feel the same way I felt for all those years." And when asked if he felt sad about their passing, he uttered with an upturned lip, "Do you think this eye could still shed a tear?"
No-one ever visits him, no-one ever speaks to him. The nurses only stay as quickly as they can. Guards whisper superstitious mutterings about the horrible deaths that happen to those that feel the slightest hint of emotion for him.
The Man with the Red Eye sleeps content, or at least, in peace. Feeling nothing, and hearing only silence as he falls asleep.