Chapter 11: The Falling Out of the Old Friends Who Had Just Met
Quincy and Shaquana had almost forgotten the fact that their journey began with a few gunshots in their direction. Still, so much had changed since then. The world had been rediscovered by Quincy, but the nightmare had only begun. Realizing that the world is a terrible place was the easy part. Deciding what to do with this knowledge was where the trouble started. He felt his heart telling him that he could not simply join the masses in ignoring the tragedy unfolding around him. He had to do something about it. Despite this commitment, Quincy had no idea how to do this, or where to begin even thinking about such a mission. He was sure of one thing, his first goal was to recruit an ally or two.
“Want to help me save the world?” Quincy said in a casual manner?
“I wish. Actually I need to get back to my base. If I don’t sell my stash I’m going to be in serious shit.”
“After what you just went through? Someone out there is trying to kill you! And you are just going to go back to work. Plus, I thought you had realized that what you were doing is wrong?”
“Well, I don’t have no choice. It’sa only way I gonna be able to feed my kid. I’m sorry. I wish I could help fix the problems of the world. But I don’t have the luxury of commiten to that. I gotts to take care of my kid.”
“So you are gonna go sell drugs? I can’t believe you!” Qunicy eyes betrayed his disgust for the girl before him.
“Well, I didn’t ask you to follow me in the first place, and I sure don’t need you approval! Go back ta ya lil’ bubble and piss off!”
Quincy tore off her backpack which he had realized was on his back. He threw it down into a garbage can and looked Shaquana in the eye and said, “have fun screwing the world. People like you aren’t part of the problem, you are the problem. You know how horrible this city is, and yet you don’t even try to fix it. You just join in and make it worse.”
“Well, the city is full of people like me, so get use to it. It ain’t neva gonna change!”
Quincy shook his head and then walked back to the subway. He had just been through the most traumatic day of his life and needed to get home. The subway ride back simply added detail to the nightmare that had begun. He realized that the conversations going on around him were further proof the world had gone to hell. He heard one young girl talking about her boyfriend forgetting to pull out. He heard another group of kids talking about being so drunk while another group joked about being high. Suddenly he realized that these conversations went on around him everyday. And drunk was not just the past tense of drank, and high was not code word for we went mountain climbing. He was surrounded by a moral vacuum. What was wrong with society that children were engaged in and blatantly proud of their stupidity? His answer came in the form of more conversations. He heard one woman talking about her husband getting caught selling cocaine, another woman talking about catching her man in bed with her sister, and another talking about her husband being arrested for drunken driving. It was a cycle of stupidity. The stupidity just seemed to trickle down from one generation to the next. And it didn’t matter how wealthy one was, or what race one was. The stupidity seemed equally prevalent in all creatures of the giant zoo known as Philadelphia.
Quincy arrived at his station, and made the walk home while noticing all the various flaws of his city. When he finally arrived at his apartment he was so exhausted he ran straight to his bedroom. Unfortunately he had forgot about the wall of glue traps that he had created. Having grown tired of the mice that constantly used his hallway as a racetrack, he decided he'd do something about it. Rather than live with such an annoyance, he had purchased a dozen glue traps and stretched them from one wall to the next. Remembering this would have resulted in a pleasanter end to his day. Instead, now he had a glue trap stuck to his foot, and to make it a little more exciting, a mouse had beat him to the plot of land. So his foot had now become the co-resident on a .0001 acre of glue. His first reaction was to shake his foot free of the trap. This resulted in an extremely aggravated mouse.
Quincy finally relaxed enough to pull his foot free of the trap and then sat and stared at the mouse in the glue trap. The harder it tried to pull itself free, the more it ended up getting itself stuck to the glue. It wasn’t that the mouse didn’t want to get free, his situation just didn’t allow him or her to get free without the help of a friend. Quincy decided he had to free the mouse. But before he acted on the metaphor he has just made for life, he figured he'd actually help this mouse.
At first he tried tugging at the tail of the mouse, but with each tug he noticed the mouse’s leg seemed to stay stuck in the glue and were getting yanked. Fearing he would pull the limbs clear off, Quincy reassessed the situation. Quickly he concluded that pouring water on the trap might help. But then he realized that the makers of the trap must of considered the possibility that the mouse might have to pee and so they would have installed safe guards against wetness. After long and careful thought, Quincy concluded he had only one option. He would have to cut the mouse free. No, he wasn’t going to do surgery. By god, the mouse would keep his legs. Instead, Quincy decided he would simply cut out around the mouse’s feet. Quincy dug out his old hamster cage, and got a sharp knife. After several minutes of careful use of his cutlery, the mouse was free of the trap, that is, aside from his new thick black paw-pads.
“I don’t know if you are a boy or a girl, but I will call you Shaquana.”
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