Seven Demons by Aidan Truhen (best motivational books for students TXT) 📕

position is empty for that whole hour and I spend like a hundred francs during that time because I am not completely great at this.

Which is a lot until you think about how that is really not expensive to arrange a meeting like this one.

I hear the scrape as a little plastic box step is dragged along the floor and then I have a copilot or more accurately he has me. He does not try to kill me and I do not try to kill him and that is an acceptable beginning.

We play without speaking for another hour. My dime of course. I lose track of how many times we win and in all that time he does not die once. He’s like a little tiny Star Wars ninja in an ESA jacket and brown corduroys. If you had to describe him to police you would automatically call him a scamp. Then somehow it’s time and we look at one another as the stuff on the screen just blows up and there’s nothing left to do but talk or try to kill each other.

“Good game,” Evil Hansel says.

—

When we have not tried to kill each other for a few minutes I tell him what I want and he says he cannot give it to me.

So I offer him his heart’s desire because that is what I do.

It is not until we are done talking and he has gone away into the pinball and the claw machines with the little toys and out into the sunshine like an ordinary little kid that I realize what was bugging me. Whenever I got close enough to notice it, Evil Hansel smelled weird. Volodya always smelled like shoe boxes and bear grease and generic log cabin stinky and it was disturbing at a mammal level because I have read where bad diet like also possibly human ham will make you smell bad and this was not that. Evil Hansel smelled like walking through the hardware department and all the auto air fresheners are open in rows for your motoring cleanliness but that is not it because it is like—like a really bad chocolate box like rose water where there should be caramels and that really amazing praline thing and instead you get rose and orange creams and that disgusting purple one—

—he smelled—

—awful—

—but also familiar—

—and why am I thinking of sea urchins and the sound of a squeegee? Who washes sea urchins they are what they are—

And then I get it and I just stare at the air hockey for the longest time and watch the puck go back and forth and back and forth zip zap clack.

—

Quite a long time ago now in another country when I was young and foolish I did a good thing. I mean it was not a heroic thing but it was basically nice and I will tell you about it now and then we will not talk about it anymore.

I was getting a train from the city to my mama’s house up along the coast where things were not good economically speaking and little by little the old farms were turning into derelicts and from time to time I guess some guy would buy an old place and make it into a lodge where he could snort coke off his secretaries and make 8 mm pornos and then project them onto his secretaries yes Mr. Farnham I SEE YOU—

Never mind that now.

I was getting the train and there was a guy with a backpack he went for the door just as another guy pulled it closed and there was somehow one of those perfect bad moments and the latch was very sharp and it cut off his finger like BLOOP.

I swear BLOOP or maybe SCHWIPP it is hard to say but there was a tonal quality.

And then there was the guy screaming and I could not get past him to get on the train and the train was leaving with a great long smear of red across the door panel.

A bunch of people came and helped the screaming guy and a woman from the local market puts her huge thumb on his artery at the biceps and I was just left there on the platform because I did not know field medicine or whatsoever. Then there were like seven hours to the next train and I had nothing to do so I went and looked for the finger.

I looked where you would expect like at the tail end of the blood drops and it was not there and I thought did someone get it already? But then I thought maybe the wind blew and it had and there in the hard by the rail was this finger and I picked it up.

This was the first time I ever picked up a severed human appendage by the way and yeah the first time stays with you.

I went over to the concession stand to get some ice because I had this idea which is true that you got to put a severed appendage in a cold place. Concession guy would not give me ice unless I paid for a drink and also too I was not to put my gnarly severed appendage on his countertop at any time that was a code violation.

So I put the finger in my breast pocket and THAT is what those fucking things are for and I put it nail down so that it would not drip gore on me and I bought a soda and a paper towel at like a one thousand percent markup and I left the soda on the countertop and fuck you very much and I went off to the hospital to do my good thing.

When I got to the hospital with the finger wrapped in ice in a blue towel I went to the main desk and I explained the situation and the nurse practitioner said okay and she called another nurse and he called someone and la