I don’t know where to begin.

Quick shots: A short sharp laugh into the dimly lit room. His pen tipping over while he thinks. A black ink flower blooming onto paper. By writing that he didn’t know where to begin, essentially he had already started.

But now what? What to say without, without…

without looking like a paranoid conspiracy theorist going out of his red-eyed skull raving over crazy questions & stuff drawn from thin air & between the lines

…without looking like a fool?

Sweat rolls off his eyelashes, panic weeping liquid salt.
His face collects worry. When overwhelmed to the brim, he shakes it off in big squints & shakes of his head. Every minute or so, his muscles scrunch up, no longer lithe, just tightly wound & taut. He squints, he pouts, his eyebrows plunge. A beat or two later, his neck does a second-long salsa.

Wait.

His hands dive into his pockets. They didn’t take it, right? The money maybe, but not… Wait where was it? His knees folded, fingers meeting feet. Okay. It was in his socks.
What they wanted from him was on him. What if he took himself out of the equation. What if he deleted himself. He’d take it with him. They wouldn’t find it.

This is what he’s thinking. This is why he’s writing on a piece of ornate hotel-room paper to a person he will never meet, which is good. Because everyone this man has ever met is scum, which makes him think everyone he will ever meet is scum. He has to write because they have been tapping his phone lines, all 3 hotel rooms. Maybe the entire hotel is bugged. Maybe they’ll pack mustard gas into the vents.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

He writes and writes. All the way from then till now. His skin has melted into the ground & what he has been trying to hide for so long is wrapped in bones & collided into my story. But am I a good person? Was I the right one to find his letter?

He left a small mission to the person who would find the note, a last death wish of sorts, regarding what he wanted me to do with that thing that rotted in between his ankles & his socks. I mean, I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but it’s all very fascinating really. His story kept me up nights, I think it’s worth millions.

In fact I’m about to find out. I can’t tell you what that thing is. But the movie’s opening next week. You should grab someone and go watch.