cooking a half steak in its milky sugar,
or the first peak at the end of three highways,
immediate and touched.
Too often it's the final serial murderer serial murder
on a lawless island,
the stakes like cooling magma at the water's edge
where the trail of cooled igneous rock smells stale and burnt.
Who, then, will hear the commuter leaving the office
to find the charred frame of her mid-sized sedan simmering
from the errant explosion,
or the villager's blood-soaked clothesline,
or the thirty-six pieces of hand-carved doubloons
suffocating in the unlocked chest behind the camera,
or the unwanted sidekick seething by the window
ready to offer a quip or his back story?
As the names climb up, shyly out of notice,
and I erase their contributions with START,
a face appears on the glass.
It's my own,
older, sober,
and it's the bystander,
and the fog of war,
and the achievement unlocked,
and the egg,
and the scenario,
and a worn, pale sedan
coasting into the reserved parking spot
as it always has
before
my modified laser rifle turns it to ash.