His flip flops flipped-flopped down the cereal aisle, his pajamas as colorful as the Fruity Pebbles, which he passed up because he was now a grown-ass man. Quite grown he was—busted the spring in his girl’s scale.

He reached out and grabbed three boxes of what he needed and smirked smugly to himself, “Tree a day keeps the gay docta away!”

He then flipped-flopped toward the register in his psychedelic lollipop pajamas, his shaved head nicely warmed under his side-cocked Playa’s Club fitted hat.

When he had been George Martin, back in gay-ass high school, some gay guidance counselor had told him that he could get a free ride through the best colleges, that he had a perfect SAT score without even studying and blah, blah, a fucking one-hundred-and-who-gives-a-big-shit IQ.

George Martin could have cared less about school or a future wearing ties and kissing ass. He cared even less for what that neuroscientist had to say—who visited the school and spoke to him with the principal standing there about how big his fucking brain was. “Get lost, yo,” he had said, as he walked out of the chump-ass office and lit up a blunt right there in the hallway. George Martin decided right then and there that if he was that smart he would use all those brains for becoming G-Man, the drug lord of Patapsco Senior High, Magnet School for the Arts.

He could have been suffering through his first year of college just now, but was currently enjoying the life of G-Man’s successor, his new and improved identity, as the rising star in the Gray Haven/Northpoint Game, always one step ahead of the transplanted hood rats, two steps ahead of the gay county Polese, and three steps ahead of everyone else.

G-Man had evolved.

“That’s how you roll

When you is a smart mofo.”

He dropped the three family-sized boxes of Super Sugar Crisp on the register and slid his baby’s mamma’s independence card from the inside band of his hat and swiped it. He momentarily had a passing notion of what it must be like to be his baby son, and shoved the disconcerting notion deep down somewhere.

The cashier, some skinny dude who didn’t make bank and wasn’t shit, and therefore admired him, said, “See yo tomorrow, Sugar Bear.”

Sugar Bear gave him the devil-horn hand sign and sauntered out of the market flip-flopping all the way, like some giant gay-ass baby impersonating John “Dookie” Wayne. The thing was Sugar Bear was so smooth, so successful, that he made this work. What cop would think that some big fat, pajamas-wearing man-baby in flip-flops would actually be running this shit around here?

Emerging into the night, irritated by that particularly big street light messing with his eyes, Sugar Bear shook his head and then realized that that shit was the gay-ass moon—Mother-fucking-nature messing with his breakfast when she should be asleep, or blowing God, or whatever her skank-ass did when she wasn't messing with a playa's night sight. Sugar Bear ripped open a box while he tucked the other two under his arm, let the box top drop on the parking lot, and then began to feed. As he waddled and flip-flopped across the lot toward the ABC streets where he lived with his baby’s mamma’s grandmamma he fed that deep dark empty need within him, attempting to fill up that hollow place that ached somewhere beneath his mouth. But somehow, every mouthfull of Super Sugar Crisps he chewed and swallowed went into some place other than his lonely spot. He was not fool enough to endanger his moneymaker—his big-ass brain—by messing with the junk he sold. So cereal it was.

Sugar Bear reached the back of the bus stop on Wise Avenue, almost a half box deep into his sorrow. Then he heard the telltale scrape of athletic shoes on asphalt and looked around to see, BeeHop, Niglet and NewNut all muscled up and looking menacing. He had recruited these new black dudes in the area to be his muscle—had set them on his white customers as necessary and sometimes just to make a point.

Something was wrong.

He spoke to BeeHop through a mouth of mashed sugar-glazed puffed wheat, “Yo, what up?”

BeeHop just crossed his arms and sneered at him, “Three Dawg Night is what up, Yo—en fatass pajama-wearin’ whiggers be down.”

Niglet and New Nut each had something in their hands!

“Oh, shit—no yo!”

He tried to use his cereal boxes as body armor but the bullets just popped right through, a pink mist engulfing his eyes as bullet after bullet ripped into his soft gut and man-booby chest.

Finally, with the guns both clicking on empty chambers, he lay there still alive, looking up at his three hitters, the dudes he thought of as his only friends, as they looked down in amazement.

BeeHop quipped, “You muvafucas cain’t shoot—ain’t a hole in dat watamelon head.”

Niglet sounded hurt, “Yo, I hit his big-ass wit every roun', son!”

New Nut seemed be the most carefree of them all—the baby at only 16—“Look yo, yo white-ass nigga be leakin’ from da rap pipe. I put dat lass mofo in his throat. Yo ain’t snitchin.’”

BeeHop seemed mollified as Sugar Bear viewed him through a pink haze, “Still yo, dis shit be unseemly—Moby Dick en whatnot up on da beach. Nigga ate two clips en he still won’ die. A’ight—lez bounce!”

Sirens could be heard.

A stretcher clicked.

Four hands pulled on him and two of those hands let him drop, spattering more blood up in his eyes as he began to cry and the voice of the hands which had dropped him said, “This fat bastard just ruptured my back—I think I lost a nut, Bob!”

Another voice chimed in as his left side was eased back down onto the ground, “Don’t sweat it Allen, this fat fuck is ventilated—done. Come on. Let’s at least look busy when the Chief shows up! Get some more compresses.”

He was sucking on a plastic tube, looking up at some doctors with face masks, one of whom he remembered—for he was never able to forget—as the neuroscientist from the principal’s office. The bushy-browed man, with that irritating tone to his voice, seemed to smile with his eyes as muffled words came down through his face mask, “We meet again, Mister Martin. It seems you shall be of service to science after all.”

Here, in the Halls of Night, beneath a gibbous moon, the three ravens named We Who Seek, who perched in the silvery light upon the staff of addition, cawed,

“He who knows,

Up from the sacred seep

Comes He Who Serves!

Cast your gaze upon the inky deep.

See him emerge!”

The tired wooden eyes of the idol creaked within their basalt sockets as they regarded the inky deep that lapped about his feet.

From the dark waters from which he himself had emerged ages ago appeared a bedraggled apparition, a stork dragging an enormous fish-filled gullet before him. The despair-ridden stork gazed up into the carven face of the idol with sad eyes, his heavy lids seemingly dragged down by that sagging gullet of squirming sorrows.

The ravens cawed, “He Who Serves!” and took flight into the dusky, silver-hued reaches of the sky that cloaked The Land that was Night.

The sad stork then looked up at him wearily and spit out a fish. The fish then, moonlight shimmering from its scales, managed to wriggle its way up the idol, struggling like a spawning salmon, to breach the many obstacles in its path, finally making its way to the idol’s ear. The fish then, with its dying breath, gasped, “They the living, seek counsel from we who are dead.”

The fish then slid to its deathly place, to splash into the inky deep and float there against the base of the great idol, before the sad-eyed stork burdened with a gullet full of woe.