Free I Will Rise by Michael Louis Calvillo

receives this, and at first I think he understands. Through the billowy white sorrow collecting at the base of his grieving deliberation I think I can see the birth of empathy. I think I can see pity. I think I can see sympathy.
    I think and that’s always my problem, for during this private, sad, stare-full moment my hand eases up and body control returns.
    I am free.
    But damn me, I think and I think and I think and here I am still thinking that this pig cop will find it in his heart to forgive me for allowing my palm to swallow and kill his dog.
    Here I am watching and thinking instead of running.
    Here I am watching sorrow turn to exasperation within Lumpy’s eyes.
    Here I am watching him jump to his feet, flush with anger.
    Here I am watching this pig pick up his gun and point it at me.
    Here I am watching his eyes loop and twist crazily.
    Here I am watching Lumpy come apart from the inside out.
    Here I am watching him pull the trigger over and over again.
    Here I am, chest, stomach and upper-right thigh exploding. Here I am white-hot as bullets tear through flesh and bone. Here I am falling backward in slow motion, the cool night air kissing my wounds and seeping through the wet, sucking bullet holes.
    Here I am spinning, climbing, brain racing through the nothing images of my nothing life.
    Here I am unborn.
    Here I am almost happy.
    Here I am getting lost in Annabelle’s crazy eye chasms.
    Here I am everything I was meant to be.
    Here I am dead.

Chapter Five
    Inklings: The Glorious Promise of Destruction

    Everything is blue, deep dark blue and angular, boxy, pixilated, like fragmented midnight. Too blue, in-my-head blue, nothing-like-it-on-earth blue, and I guess I must be dreaming, sleeping, lost inside. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get my bearings. This frustrates me to no end and I attempt to shake myself awake. Commotion ensues, the blue rolls like a digital wave, like a television screen with no vertical hold, but my body, my head, is unresponsive. I can’t seem to open my eyes.
    Out of nowhere, sound: “At last.” The words stutter, breathy, infinite.
    Annabelle?
    In affirmative response: “Char-lie?” Singsongy, slow, low sample rate, stretched to its phonetic limit.
    I try my eyes again and again and again. Nothing, save for the limitless, fractured cerulean.
    “Charles?” Annabelle’s voice continues to resound in my head.
    I decide to play along. “What?”
    “Get with it,” she commands.
    “Huh?”
    “Stop trying to wake up. You’re not sleeping.”
    “I can’t open my eyes,” I protest.
    “They’re not closed.”
    They’re not closed?
    Motherfucker, she’s right. They’re not closed. This isn’t a dream.
    All of this broken blue is real?
    I try to blink. Nothing. Ever-stare. Struggling to close my eyes.
    I try to look around and everything seems to shift as the blue surges with movement. I look up, I look down and again everything shifts. My eyes are most definitely open and they are actively obeying my commands, but it’s hard to tell because there is nothing to see, save for this endless blue. And if they are really open, how come they don’t sting or burn or dry out? If they’re really open, what happened to Officer Lumpy and Paunch’s corpse and the mini forest? If they’re really open, where the hell am I?
    Trapped.
    (Where?)
    Electric sky. A video game gone bad. An Atari universe.
    (Where?)
    I am nowhere.
    “No,” Annabelle’s voice rings out, metallic. “You are everywhere.”
    I implore my eyes to get right, to align the pixels, to compose and bring the world into focus. No dice. Fractals in motion. Nebulous swells of starlike static. But then an idea, a bit of sense, mind bloom, realization, as confused thought unfurls, opening like a flower: I am floating. I am weightless, lost, dangling blue-dead in this digitized expanse of outer space.
    But no.
    I can breathe. I feel alive.
    Annabelle giggles, “Dream on, Dead Boy.”
    I remember Lumpy’s