Futureproof by N Frank Daniels

look down to see it spilling out, darkening the comforter, and in that moment he grabs my arms and throws me hard against the outside door. He can’t see, though. He can’t finish. I fling the door open and run out into the night. He stumbles after me. I come across the side of the house, to the front yard, the headlights of passing cars momentarily lighting the lawn before it returns to darkness, a strobe light in slow motion. I start hollering. The front door opens and my mother and brothers look around for the source of the noise in the darkness. And then there we are, squared up in the passing headlights. His drunkenness cancels out his weight advantage and years of combat training. He lunges at me and I jump out of the way, turn and kick him in the ass as hard as I can. He goes down and then it’s just like skinhead Dave told me. Once you get a motherfucker down, you make sure he stays down. You kick him until he doesn’t move.
    I kick Victor hard in the ribs, hear the wind rush out of him.Then I take my boot to his face a few times for good measure. He doesn’t move anymore after that.
    Should I relish these moments? Probably not. But I do. I can’t stop kicking him. I’m dancing like Ali and destroying like Tyson. And there’s so much to kick, the fat bastard. He’s worthless and bloody and heaving. He never asks me to stop, though. He doesn’t beg. And soon I’m tired of kicking him and I can hear Aaron and Adam crying and they’re hiding their faces in my mother’s dress. I look over at Jonas and he’s clearly invigorated. I smile, bend over to catch my breath, hands on knees. Victor is moaning.
    I grab my suitcase, still packed, and my duffel bag filled with tapes and CDs, shoving my copy of Black Boy in at the last second. When I leave for the gas station to call Trizden, I’m so proud I’m beaming. I am born again.

TRANSMISSION 09:
friends lend each other helping hands
    November
    I couldn’t hack it in school anymore, dropped out with less than a semester to go after promising my mother I’d eventually take the G.E.D. For now, I’ve embarked on a career in telemarketing. Flick got me the job. We sell credit cards over the phone to college students who don’t know any better. It sounds like free money to them and it’s a totally easy sell.
    I go to work for monotonous eight-hour days, come back to Animal Mother’s and smoke up, drink a few rum and cokes. It’s an ongoing cycle of working and self-medicating after work. But there’s still the excitement of girls and the possibility of getting laid. That makes it all worthwhile. And going to shows.
    I always go to concerts with Trizden. He’s one of those guys whose life aspiration is to stay on top of the newest music. He alwaysknows more about every band than you could ever know, and six months before you know it, at that. This kind of shit is intuitive to him or something, because no matter what band you think you know about first, no matter how early you think you get in on the ground floor of liking some group, Trizden has been there first. And yet, despite this, he somehow always gets laid. Women couldn’t give a good goddam about music, I’ve found. Most of ’em only care about Led Zeppelin, dance music (but only if you’re listening to the dance music in a club), and the newest pop hits played ad infinitum on the radio. So the fact that he knows that Big Black’s Songs About Fucking is a seminal post-punk record made by the guy that produced Nirvana’s In Utero is little inducement in getting women to like him. But see, that’s the key to staying cool. You have your elitist snobbery and all, make fun of the underlings who think they know something about something when they really know shit about shit, but you don’t ever extend those same standards to the girls you’re interested in. You’ll almost always be disappointed,