Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)     

Hustle Culture Reprise: Just Us, Not like us: Screw Driver   

‘Not Like Us’     

“Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, Dot, fuck ’em up     

  Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, I’ma do my stuff     

Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?     

Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor”     

-Kendrick Lamar     

  ‘My brother is a good man.” Sybil said sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the stolen car as she examined her cell phone, Dominick parked in front of the small house in the center of Inglewood while she fumbled with the back of the phone case.

“It’s stuck, let me use that screwdriver?”

Dominick pulled the flathead screwdriver from the hotwired car’s ignition and passed it back to the dark-skinned, green-eyed African girl with bubble gum pink Bantu knots sitting in the backseat. Sybil continued to tinker with the phone as she talked.

“Even after I found out you attempted to rob my family, I was willing to let you go. After all, if my brother, and my grandfather can forgive you, I have no choice but to do as they ask. She sighed resigned as Dominick, Victor, and Marvin sat in the parked car confusion growing as the diminutive black woman continued.

“I confess that I was prepared to let you all go ‘unmolested’, until I found DNA matches in the files of 7 sexual assaults of minors over the last 3 years.”      

  Sybil put her lavender bedazzled iPhone away. “I’m what you might call a bit of a hacker.” She said with a toothy grin. “Two out of the three of you are a 99.7 percent match to the evidence gathered at the ICU of the hospitals where the children were treated after you two attacked them. When I promised my brother I would make sure you all arrived home alive. I chose my words carefully.”

Sybil turned her head to the left addressing the boy sitting beside her in the backseat. “Marvin, you’re an idiot, pick a better class of friend’s dumbass. As for you two let me show you a magic trick.”

“You’re psycho bitch!” Dominick shouted. As he sat in the driver’s seat fumbling to get the clip back into the 9 mm pistol.      

  “Do you know much about human anatomy?” Sybil asked the trio, “That’s a rhetorical question you see, because personally, I find the subject fascinating, for example, did you know that if you crush the 10th vertebra like this.” Sybil said as she shoved the screwdriver through the back of the passenger seat into Victor’s back shattering his 10th vertebra with no more effort than if she were opening a coke can. “The medical term she said over his cries of agony and confusion why his body stopped working as it toppled over onto the passenger door head first. for your new condition is quadriplegic,” she explained as the other two boys attempted to escape the vehicle in vain while she controlled the car’s computerized systems.       

Sybil climbed over the seats ignoring the ragdoll slumping boy in the passenger seat, only able to control his body from the neck up staring impotently as she swung her right leg over the driver’s seat where Dominick sat, his pistol reloaded, he pressed the gun to her head as she gently sat her 5 foot 5 inch tall, slender, diminutive, 314-pound titanium plated, carbon fiber reinforced cybernetic chassis down gracefully straddling his lap, facing the rear of the car looking into his eyes. She stuck out her tongue, wrapped her lips around the barrel, and slid the length of his weapon slowly into her mouth as he pulled the trigger.

The noise of the gunshot was followed instantly by the unmistakable sound of metal striking metal. Sybil bit down on the barrel, her tungsten carbide teeth easily tearing through the 9 mm pistol. She spit the metal out, then grabbed him by the neck; twin plumes of grey-white gun smoke curled out of her nostrils in the darkness, she shoved the flathead screwdriver beneath his eyelid scraping his cerebral cortex’s prefrontal lobe. There was some minor blood vessel damage to his left eye, but other than the transorbital lobotomy he was otherwise in good health.      

Sybil looked at the boys satisfied she had done well, she warned.

“If you tell anyone what I did here tonight, I will hunt you down, and I will bite you,” she said making ridiculous chomping sounds and gnashing her bared teeth as crimson and amber glowing sparks flew from her mouth in the darkness.  The doors clicked mechanically as she released the locks and exited the vehicle.

“Goodbye, Marvin.” In the darkness with a haunting voice, she began to sing as she started the long walk across Inglewood back to the marina in Long Beach.       

“I’ve been a bad, bad girl    

I’ve been careless with a delicate man    

And it’s a sad, sad world    

When a girl will break a boy just because she can”    

  -Fionna Apple/Criminal

-About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.