Euri checked his knockoff Tag Heuer Grand Carrera for the seventeen time.

Three minutes.

Three motherfucking, never-ending, keep praying they show or its your hairy Greek ass with the rest of the spittle-and-ketchup-stained scattered-and-smothereds in the Waffle House Dumpster. Euri didn't want to be seagull food on a river barge. He also didn't want to piss his pants, but draining the last of the bitter church-pot coffee out of his kidneys meant he could miss the drop.

Euri needs to urinate. Euri the Urinator, he heard the schoolyard catcalls bounce through his brain.  Thanks a fuckload, Pops.

Pops had named him Euripides because he hoped to predestine his son to be the writer he had failed become in the old country, back before the war took Pops index fingers and a thumb while leaving in its place a dullness in his eyes and an ever-present taste of silver in his mouth.

But Euri, rather than studying his sentence diagrams, fashioned himself to be a football player. He saw himself as Rip. Rip the Greek Tragedy Maker. The centerpiece of a new Steel Curtain Defense. But then came the meniscus tears. Then the cartilage scrapings. The arthritis. Now, he was still Euri the Urinator, the first-grader crying under the slides from the taunts, but with two achy knees, a lopsided hairpiece and a need to get back in the good graces of The Sanitizer with this job.

He walked the platform, eying the local as it rattled toward him for a quick pause before heading on its way to another meaningless commuter destination. I could jump it and be gone, Euri thought, or I could jump in front of it and be gone quicker.

Instead, he lit one of the little black cigarettes his cousin had rolled for him that morning. Euri knew it wasn't to be his last one when he caught sight of the van with the twinkling blue Christmas lights in its battered grill screech across two handicapped spaces.

Comments

[Jett]

Don't make me say it. Okay, THE EURINATOR. HE VILL PEE BOCK.

[ms picket to you]

That third sentence? Um, heart just skipped a literary beat.