Pawns

Opening Moves

Fucking whores. It could all be boiled down to the fucking whores. Everything. Air pollution. NAFTA. Parking tickets. Kids with cancer. His downstairs neighbor’s annoying yap-yap keeping him awake at night. In one way or another, they were all connected to ‘women of  loose virtue’ as his mother had called them.

It had taken him quite a while to figure it out. He had no illusions about being a smart man, but he wasn’t dumb either. His whole life things just hadn’t gone his way. Other guys had jobs, girls, friends, nice cars.

Charlie Schmitz never had any of those. He’d been bullied as a kid till he started lifting weights. Things had seemed on the upswing, despite being kicked out of high school, till he was caught with the ‘roids. While in the pen he’d been punked out and gotten on meth. He came out with a bunch of scars, of all kinds, unable to find a job.

He’d never known his dad, and his mom was all he had. If not for her, he would have been homeless a long time ago.

Not just homeless, dead. He would have died, no doubt.
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