Ordinary Handsome

Sometimes you can look into the face of insanity and not realize what it is you’re looking at until the wee hours of the morning when you wake up slicked with sweat and feel the poison in your belly and you rest uneasily for the rest of the night until the first morning cup of coffee. I’ve known – or thought I did – insanity in the eyes of cuckolded boyfriends, outraged drunks, screaming football assistant coaches… my own father… but I’ve never seen insanity so clearly defined. Cronic’s face was bland and he had the scrub beard of a teenage boy, one eye staring at the cluttered highway, not really seeing it at all but feeling it like an extension of himself. He was nuts. Not goofy nuts like a steroid-fueled guard, but nuts like a man who has been so shattered by what he is he’s apt to explode before your eyes, unmindful of what the shrapnel slices through.

Excerpt from Cronic — coming soon