Monday is surprisingly peaceful.

        You drive out to Echo Park, as you do almost every
day, and you sit on a bench, as you almost always do, and
you stare at the water and occasionally throw pebbles into
it, as you almost always do. But today it feels different.

        It’s this strange feeling you haven’t felt in a long
time. So strange you barely recognize it.

        You know what the feeling is?

        Here’s the only other time you ever felt this feeling.

        You were ten years old and you went to the mall to see
Santa Claus, and you waited in line, staring in wonder and
total belief at elves and giant candy canes (just wishing
you could stick out your tongue and lick one). You waited
almost two hours to sit on Santa’s lap and make your
request. To you, Santa was god. About halfway through your
wait, you had to pee, but you didn’t care. You just stood
and wiggled and bounced and waited. Time dripped off the
planet like a melting crayon. And then it was your turn.
You ran up to Santa and you sat on his lap and he said,

        “What do you want for Christmas, little guy?”

        And you said, “A horse!”

        You’d just seen a movie with horses in it, and they
were so beautiful and fast and amazing to look at, and they
had wild eyes and fiery nostrils, and you’d never wanted
anything so much in your entire life.

        “Have you been a good little boy?”

        You nodded in excitement, so vehemently it probably
looked like your head was about to topple right off and
roll across the floor, like a bowling ball, knocking the
elves down like pins.

        “Well,” Santa said, glancing from you to your parents,
“then I guess I’ll have to see what I can do, won’t I?”
In your head, that meant that Santa was getting you a
horse for Christmas.

        “Thank you!” you said, and hugged his neck, and jumped
off his lap and ran to mommy and daddy.

        “He said he would get me a horse!”

        Your parents seemed disturbed.

        They were both pale.

        “It’s okay,” you said.

        “I don’t want to keep him in my room or anything. We
can keep him in the backyard. I’ll feed him and
everything!”

        Your parents were silent but you didn’t give a shit.

        They would grow to love the idea of having a horse in
the backyard as much as you did.

        You were so excited.

        On Christmas Eve you just laid in bed staring at the
ceiling with a billion tickling ants crawling around in
your stomach, so full of anticipation for the next day. So
anxious for it to be Christmas already so you could see
your new horse and name it. Ever since you talked to Santa
you had been beating your brain for good horse names.

        That anticipation, that pre-Christmas expectation you
had some twenty-six years ago, that’s the same feeling
you’re feeling now as you think of what you’re going to do
tomorrow.

        Of course, when Christmas came around and you got a
new bicycle and no horse, you were so upset you cried and
went to your room and you could hear dad yelling about how
he was gonna fucking sue the mall for that shit Santa had
done. You didn’t know what the mall had to do with Santa
breaking his promise, but dad sure was mad.

        Maybe the mall insured Santa’s promises to get him to
come out to the mall during his busy season. You weren’t
sure what insuring meant, but you thought it was important
and had almost as much to do with money as suing.

        You hope tomorrow doesn’t turn out to be as big a
disappointment as that Christmas was, because when a bank
robbery goes bad, it’s never as good as a brand new
bicycle.

        Monday night you sleep in fits.

        You roll around a little too much, so much that twice
you roll yourself right off the fucking couch and clunk to
the floor.

        When you do manage to get to sleep, the color of your
dreams is yellow.

        Tuesday morning, when you wake up, the world seems to
hold more promise. You don’t know why. You’re trying not to
think about why. Whenever you overanalyze things, they turn
to shit. In your head. You turn it over and over, brain
fondle it, play with it till even if it started out as a
good thing, you’ve effectively managed to turn it to shit.
So you’re trying not to do that. You know that in trying,
you are thinking about it, and it will probably happen
anyway, but for the time being, it’s nice to be
experiencing the other side of unhappy.

        It’s nice to see the world as crisp and full of
potential. You haven’t had eyes like that in at least seven
years, and it’s nice to have them back.

        You simply stay on the couch in a corpse-pose, staring
at the ceiling, and you almost feel that you can see right
through the ceiling to the blue skies above. And without
looking, you know they’re blue.

        They must be blue.

        After a few moments, you roll off the couch, pad
through the bedroom and into the bathroom, where you shake
out of your threadbare Fruit of the Looms and step into the
cold tub, pulling back the shower curtain and turning on
the water.

        It hits you in the face like a fist, and you jump back
and almost slip, but you manage to catch yourself.

        You manage to catch yourself.

        Today will be a good day, goddamn it.

        You must spend ten minutes in the shower, soaping up,
rinsing off, steaming up the bathroom.

        Then you spend another five masturbating. You didn’t
intend to masturbate when you stepped into the shower. What
happens is, you’re soaping up, and you’re thinking about
your wife lying asleep in bed, and your hand brushes across
your flaccid cock.

        Suddenly the image of walking up to your wife while
she sleeps, reaching under the covers, and ripping off her
panties enters your head. The way the she’d awaken with a
squeal. The scent of night-sweat and pussy that would waft
off of her. The taste of it.

        You imagine her saying, “What the hell?”

        And you not replying. Just leaning down and licking
her, tasting her, putting your tongue in her ass and
licking upward. Her arching her back, laughing and saying,
stop it, I’m too tired, but not quite meaning it.

        And you licking again.

        And her giggling.

        And you crawling up her body on the bed, tracing your
tongue over the parts you love most. The invisible seam on
the inside of her leg, where it attaches to the rest of the
body. Dipping your tongue into her belly button. Tracing
the underside of her left breast. Sucking that same nipple
into your mouth, and feeling it harden under your tongue.
Her putting her hands through your hair. Her grabbing your
hair (what’s left of it) in her fists and pulling your face
up to her face, so she can kiss you. The taste of her
morning breath. The way you would rub your cock against
her, feeling her moisten, feeling her begin to open up for
you. Her saying, I love you so much, and meaning it. Her
saying, I want you inside me. The feel of her soft breasts
pressing against your chest. The way you would push
yourself into her, slowly, so it was just the head at
first. The feel of her accepting it, of the slight spasm of
her vaginal walls as the muscles twitch. Her hot breath on
your neck. Her tonguing your earlobe. You pulling one of
her legs up over your shoulder to open her up further. You
sliding in gently and slowly, but finally putting yourself
into her all the way, to the hilt, so you can feel the itch
of her pubic hair against your belly. And then you sliding
in and out of her slowly, rhythmically, and her catching
your rhythm, grabbing your ass in her hands and pushing you
into her in time, again and again and again. The sound of
her moaning. The clamping down of her pussy on your cock as
she climaxes. The spasm of her body that runs through your
body and feels so much like your own that it becomes your
own and makes you come, deep inside her, shooting again and
again and again. And then the collapsing on top of her, and
the smell of sex that wafts off both of you.

        When you open your eyes, you’re in the shower, and you
have come dripping off your index finger, and you are out
of breath, and the water is going cold.

        You rinse the ejaculate off yourself in the rapidly
cooling water. Then you turn off the shower, draw back the
shower curtain, and grab the towel off the rod.

        When you pad back out to the bedroom, your wife is not
in bed. You hear her shuffling in the kitchen.

        You think how pathetic it is that you must fantasize
about making love with your wife because she won’t have you
anymore.

        So what do you do? You fuck the face of some bar
whore, and you regret it and feel guilty about it, but at
the same time, whatever it was, it wasn’t meaningful in any
way.

        Neither physically nor emotionally.

        You didn’t even want to do it.

        You shitsack.

        You should have done what you wanted.

        That’s your fucking problem.

        You never take action or responsibility.

        You stupid.

        Stop.

        Fucking.

        Stop.

        Piece of.

        Stop, goddamn it!

        And you do. You do stop. That kind of thinking is what
led to that happening anyway.

        You walk to the kitchen, naked.

        Your wife is standing over the counter scooping
Folger’s into the coffee filter. You walk up behind her and
kiss the back of her neck.

        “Good morning,” you say.

        “I love you,” you say.

        She turns around and looks at you.

        Her eyes are red. She looks to be on the verge of
tears. Maybe just past the verge.

        “I hate this,” she says. “I hate what’s happening
between us.”

        “I know,” you say.

        “But listen,” you say. “Things are gonna be okay. I’m
sure of it. I’m fucking sure of it.”

        And you lean down and kiss her on the mouth.

        She doesn’t kiss you back, but that’s okay.

        She’s not in a good place right now.

        But she also retracts, and that’s not okay.

        That indicates an amount of disgust that you weren’t
even aware she was capable of. Or maybe you’re reading too
much into a tiny gesture. Maybe you’re.

        Stop.

        Making a big.

        Stop.

        Deal out of.

        Nothing. It’s nothing to worry about. Nothing to even
think about. You’ve got other things to think about.

        You stroke her left arm with your right hand.

        “Everything will be okay,” you say.

        Then you turn to walk away.

        But she turns you around again, to face her, by
calling your name.

        “What?” you say.

        “It’s not gonna be okay between us,” she says.

        “Of course it is,” you say.

        “No,” she says, “because I’m moving out.”

        “What do you mean you’re moving out? We just talked
and you said you weren’t moving out, that it was just
something you said. That it didn’t mean anything. That it
didn’t mean anything.”

        “Sally got me a job,” she says. “I’m saving up. I’m
moving out the first of the month.”

        “That cunt!” you say, through gritted teeth.

        “You better finish getting ready,” she says. “You’re
gonna be late for work.”

        By the time the time you make it out of the bank, the
bullet hole in your shoulder is a screaming mouth of agony.

        Driving to the Texaco to put on your disguise, you
think about nothing but your wife. You think about her with
a new life. You think of her living in some apartment
complex downtown, some bachelor complex full of horny
college students who’d just love to fuck a hot chick in her
mid-thirties because, dude, why not. You think of her
walking home to her apartment after work, whatever that
work might be, carrying a bag of groceries from Trader
Joes, and some blonde dude walking the other direction,
heading out to the swimming pool in just his swim trunks.
And he sees her and he says,

        “Hey there.”

        And he winks, because he’s just the kind of
motherfucker that would wink at a woman.

        And she giggles a little and says, “Hi.”

        She giggles because it’s been a long time since some
college dude paid her any attention, and she likes the
attention in spite of herself.

        And the dude says, “I’m having a little barbeque at
the pool. Come on down if you want.”

        “Okay,” she says.

        And she goes inside and puts her groceries away, and
then she thinks about it, drinking a glass of white
zinfandel, which she likes for god knows why, and then
after maybe twenty minutes she decides, fuck it, I’m single
now and I’m gonna go have fun, and she walks to the
bathroom and starts prettying herself up, sipping wine the
whole time.

        And when she.

        Stop.

        Gets down there, it’s.

        Stop.

        Thirty guys and ten girls, and your wife is among the
most beautiful.

        Stop.

        And they swarm.

        Just fucking stop it, motherfucker!

        You pull the car into the parking lot at the Texaco,
telling yourself to stop the shit; you need to be thinking
about the problem at hand, and the problem at hand is
exactly how to get money out of a bank at which you have no
account. It’s time to put on your pig suit.

        You decided you couldn’t just walk into a bank and
ask politely again because that’ll never get enough to sustain
you for any amount of time, and you can’t be robbing a bank
every fucking week, so you bought a pig costume, hooves and
fat pig belly included. The costume came wearing a white t-shirt
with black lettering. The black lettering says,

on the front and

on the back. The pig mask covers your entire head, with the
exception of your eyes. And there are of course holes in
the snout through which you can breathe.

        The pig head is wearing a big baseball cap.

        On the baseball cap is the picture of a one hundred
dollar bill, but instead of a picture of Franklin, there’s
a picture of a pig, and the pig is wearing a shit-eating
grin.

        As soon as you saw the costume, you knew.

        It was perfect.

        As soon as you bought the costume, you knew you were
committing yourself. If you’re gonna rob a bank, you’re
gonna fucking rob it, not pull nine hundred dollars out to
survive for a week.

        You’re a capitalist now, and like all good
capitalists, you’re out to get as much as you can as fast
as you can.

        From today on, you are done being capitalized upon.

        You step from the Celica with a bagful of pig.

        What you leave behind in the car, because you don’t
need it here, is the gun.

        You walk to the Texaco bathroom with the bag of pig
and you try the handle. It’s locked.

        You knock.

        “Hold on,” a voice says.

        So you do.

        For three and a half minutes. You time it. You don’t
know why, but you do. So there you are, standing in front
of the Texaco bathroom, looking at your watch as the
seconds fly by, all two hundred and ten of them.

        Then the door swings opened, and it’s Nova, the same
high school punk you ran into last week.

        You look back over your shoulder, and see his Chevy
parked right next to yours -- or rather, your Celica parked
right next to his Chevy.

        “It’s all yours, man,” he says, and he doesn’t seem to
recognize you, which is good.

        You walk in as quickly as possible and slam the door
shut behind you.

        You need to be more observant.

        If you’re gonna be doing this shit for a living, you
need to start seeing everything, dumbass.

        Everything.

        Like that strange recognizing glance Nova gave you at
the last second, just before you slammed the door on his
face. Yeah, like that.

        Everything.

        You put the bag on the sink and pull out the pig
costume, which is designed a lot like the pajamas with the
footies that you wore as a child. Only instead of footies,
you slip your feet into gigantic hooves.

        In another ten minutes, you have on everything except
for the pig head itself, which you aren’t gonna put on till
just before the robbery.

        You throw the bag into the trash can, and then push
open the door.

        And then pull it shut again almost immediately.

        Nova is out there with a cigarette dangling from his
mouth and a key in his hand, scratching the living shit out
of your Celica.

        You’d love -- love -- to go out there and pound his
fucking juvenile delinquent face against the asphalt till
it turns to hamburger, but you can’t. You can’t.

        You’re wearing the costume in which you’ll soon be
robbing a bank, and the last thing you need is for that
little punk to thumb you.

        So you wait.

        Infuriatingly.

        You wait while some skinny punk keys your car.

        Who ever heard of a pig who could drive, anyway?

        It’s more difficult to walk in hooves than you would
have imagined. It’s not impossible. It’s not as bad as
walking in very high heels, as you did once as a teenager,
when you dressed up as a woman for Halloween (shaved your
legs and everything), but still, it’s pretty fucking hard.

        You do it anyway. You walk toward the bank dressed up
like a pig, with a rubber Uzi hanging from your right front
hoof -- hand.

        As soon as you see the security guard standing out
front, you point the Uzi at him and say,

        “Oink, motherfucker.”

        He reaches for the gun and you say, “Stop.”

        You say, “Put your hands in the air.”

        And he does.

        You take the gun out of his holster.

        “How many security guards?”

        “Two.”

        “Including you?”

        “Yes.”

        “Let’s head in.”

        You both walk inside, the security guard leading the
way, and then you shove him against a wall and you say,

        “Everybody lay on the ground face down with your
fucking hands behind your heads!”

        The thing about robbing a bank is that it’s so
unpredictable -- things happen that you didn’t count on.

        The thing about you is that you’re a fucking idiot who
didn’t think ahead. And that’s why you never thought of the
fact that even though you were walking into the bank with a
rubber gun, as soon as you disarmed the security guards,
you’d have a real one. Two real ones.

        But you don’t have the second one yet. You know this
because right now, out of the corner of your left eye, you
can see the second security guard, and he’s drawing like a
fucking gunslinger in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, and
the thing to do is to use the gun you took from the first
security guard, or else you’re one dead dumb fuck.

        So you do.

        You throw down the rubber Uzi (what the fuck were you
thinking walking into a bank with a rubber gun, you dumb
piece of shit?), and you spin toward the second security
guard, and you pull the trigger.

        And you miss.

        You haven’t fired a gun since you were in the Army
Reserves, some thirteen years ago, and you’ve never fired a
handgun. So you miss.

        But the guard doesn’t.

        He tags your left shoulder, and knocks you to the
ground, and for a moment you think you’re gonna die, just
fucking die, because a fire is alive inside you, burning
and burning, and it doesn’t feel like it will ever stop.

        But somehow you manage to turn toward the security
guard, who thinks he’s got you incapacitated, and you aim
your gun in his direction.

        He starts to say, “Don’t!”

        But the word is cut off by the sound of your second gunshot.

        It echoes through the bank.

        And before the sound is gone, you fire a third time.

        And a fourth.

        With the fourth shot, something wet splashes against
your mask, and into your eyes.

        Wet and warm.

        You get to your feet, your left shoulder still
burning, and you look around, trying to gather yourself
together again before moving forward with this thing.

        Blood drips off your left front hoof and splashes to
the vinyl floor.