Assassination City - Flash Fiction Glinting Glaze

An entirely different theology, but they honour the hashishi of old. Though choice being what it is, their blunt is cut with sharper chemical prongs. Adulterations of purity by these child soldiers.


For they fail to spend their day honing the blades. Or directing thrusts into imagined effigies. Not even hefting the handle from hand to hand, ambidextrous seeking after a chink of an opening.

Instead a desultory shambling around home like wraiths. The kitchen being their favoured haunt. Near the cutlery drawer. Sheffield steeling themselves. Until they get the call.

Then their reflexes reveal a razored acuity, belying the rest of their body's slouch. As each slides open a drawer and slips a knife into their waistband. Ramrodding every embraced spine to attention. Then they pull the sweatshirt sheath around it and shroud their own bowed head within its hood. Off to prayer, to heed the Street muezzins. A fibre optic mediated doxology. Yet still summoning the immemorial demand for sacrifice.

Now out on patrol. Sweeping the perimeters. The reconnaissance doesn't take long. Through the glass of a corner shop. Bedecked in pointillistic stickers, 2p a global minute, situations vacant, fireworks inside and lucky lotto. Parallax weaving their target as he moves like a puppet beyond. Time to cut his strings.

Still no name. No matching photographic likeness. But his camouflage is blown. Though he shoplifts from the same Chainstores as they, the blip of colour leaching from his back pocket coyly betrays him as he intended. Donning desert fatigues in the jungle; urban bootblack leaving tracks in the snow. The bandana ribbon binding the package in which he delivers himself up. A label bearing just a four character cipher. Ticker tape passing across their scanning cortex; SE17. May as well be wearing a high visibility jacket. With or without kevlar underneath.

In two houses, the isotopic elements of melted down nuclear families sit down to lunch. Both are without son and heirs who are absent as is Sabbath custom. But neither family can find any decent whetted blades to carve their Sunday Roasts.