“He a fool he a liar conjurer and a thief”

-Tracy Chapman, Crossroads

Simp Collier stood before the time-painted iron burn barrel to beat all bum burn barrels, a sacred warming fire to him, who had for a year now, sought the company of its mystical keeper. He had turned his back on the menacing hood from up out of which he had toiled over a long sorrowful life, and out of which, near every nice night, his worst childhood fears merged with his manly sense of territorial integrity, to pluck his every nerve.

On the other side of this soul-warming blue flame bin of iron, Reggiemon squatted on his black throne couch like a great gaunt vulture, the color of ash, draped in a gay rose-patterned white blanket.

Simp looked to the left and saw there the empty red loveseat where he had often curled up, even in the rain, under a plastic sheet draping him in his own little hall of solitude.

The seat seemed empty, vacant of life, sending a chill up his spine as if he had just witnessed his own death.

The chill sent him looking right, and as he did, his heart sank in his already sunken chest, knowing that he was to be judged through the artifice of his story by the lounging brute drinking farseeing sea and smoking the undiminishing black joint that glowed blue on the end, who presently castigated him in a rumbling deep voice that could have narrated car insurance commercials if only the speaker could be trusted not to swear for an entire sentence, “On with your weak-ass story you little lawn jockey.”

As those words were spoken cruelly, a wind blew up from behind him, causing the myriad hanging, tortured dolls above him in the weeping willow branches to swing and clatter like the very chimes of Hell.

With a sudden wonder if he had the courage to tell his accursed tale, Simp looked into the bluish flames licking above the barrel rim and saw Reggiemon’s ashen continence limned in its lurid light and heard the thin man’s deep voice play like a gong across the camp at the Crossroads of the World, “Are you sure, monz, sure you want to wake what sleeps this nightz?”

As these words sounded dull in his hollow head and those great big hollow eyes of Otis Jackson, his onetime mugger, shown with the nimbus of unfeeling ire that they had way back in the day when the bully had taken Mister Silverstein’s bag of bank deposits with one hand, even as he held Simp by the scruff of his collar with the other hand—resulting in Simp losing his job as messenger and boss escort—then he knew that the story must be told.

With a defiant chirping of his rather small voice, gathering himself on tip toe in his toeless slippers—the footwear he possessed when evicted by his dear darling sister—Simp looked up at the dangling feet of the dread dolls and declared, “Hells yes!”

“You fellas got you a story now, the story of Simpton Collier—cursed with a dumbass mother-begotten name—bald at ten from the stress laid on his shoulders by that rancid old hen!”

Otis’ massive meaty hands clapped slowly, in tentative approval. Simp was not much of a rhyme-maker, so the story would be lacking there. He could, however, frame the tale with a poetic flourish:

“Simpton was a chyle of the hood,

Sprung from that rancid womb as if spat,

From bro en foe he learned what he could—

Commin’ up the long wrong way of the hoodrat,

Twisty en turny, he’d see through—he would.”

Otis sneered as he sipped his farseeing tea, but Reggiemon—with eyes like night, blacker than his dreadlocks—Reggiemon, sat with tense anticipation, his dark will and easy confidence buoying Simp’s slight sense of self to make of him, in this moment, a story teller bar none.