Lost Violent Souls

By Andy Nowicki

"Oswald brooded for weeks afterwards, but never told anyone about what he'd tried to do that day; not a soul in the entire world knew the significance of that window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas."

Two teenage school shooters visiting a diner. A pair of Catholic school teachers having a se

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: Oct 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951897253

Andy Nowicki

Andy Nowicki is a writer, speaker, prophet, seer, revelator, gigolo, assassin, and empath. Former co-editor of Alternative Right, Nowicki has contributed to numerous dissident online journals and has published several works of both fiction and nonfiction, including Considering Suicide, Meta-#Pizzagate, and Ruminations of a Low-Status Male. He lives (for now) in Savannah, Georgia.

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Praise for Lost Violent Souls

The way that Nowicki portrays his anti-heroes seems to suggest something like this: that these lost violent souls are striving for something to give their lives purpose, meaning, glory, even a kind of twisted beauty. For the modern world either perverts these things or makes them impossible. Religion is hollow. Political life is hollow. Sex is hollow. — Cecilia Davenport, Affirmative Right

"The word ‘sin’ was originally an archery term used to describe when the archer misses the mark. In Lost Violent Souls, we witness a cadre of characters longing to make a mark. Yet their actions are desperate and fruitless, not quite on target. History will not grant them any special place in the collective memory of our species. They will not go to Valhalla despite their efforts, yet this is the case for the vast majority of people. We live and die in obscurity, never to be remembered. In this sense, Andy Nowicki has shown us the terrible truth of the human condition. We are dust." — Nathan Leonard, Heathen Harvest

The five death-haunted stories in this collection all address the oldest and utmost question of the human mind—why live? I am aware of no writer, or at least none since Dostoyevsky, who has confronted this everlasting issue with more resolve (and more intelligence!) than this one. — Tito Perdue, author of Morning Crafts and The Node

Also by Andy Nowicki

Considering Suicide

The Columbine Pilgrim

The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories

Under the Nihil

Heart Killer

Beauty and the Least

This Malignant Mirage

Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker

Notes Before Death

Conspiracy, Compliance, Control, and Defiance

Meta-#Pizzagate

Ruminations of a Low-Status Male

Ravages of the Rough Beast

A Final Solution to the Incel Problem

Copyright © 2020 Terror House Press, LLC.

First edition published by Counter-Currents Publishing, 2013.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-951897-25-3

EDITOR

Matt Forney (mattforney.com)

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN

Matt Lawrence (mattlawrence.net)

TERROR HOUSE PRESS, LLC

terrorhousepress.com

Table of Contents

Morning in America

Oswald Takes Aim

The Poet’s Wager

The Wooden Buddha

Motel Man

Morning in America

Believe it or not, there’s life after high school. — Hall and Oates

High school never ends. — Bowling for Soup

I’ve been born, and once is enough. — T. S. Eliot, Sweeny Agonistes

All the world is a stage. This was a profound metaphor once; now it is an eye-rollingly tedious cliché. Even so, please think of the following scene as taking place upon a stage, of sorts. The characters are reading their lines, even if they think that everything has been improvised. So it goes with us all.

On the stage of the world, we are but players, it is said, meaning actors. But this notion raises a multitude of questions. The first being, who and where is our audience? Is anyone watching the show? And where is our director? And who is producing this gala theatrical event which apparently keeps running forever and ever, though we, its players, only strut and fret our hour on the stage and then are heard from no more? With what funds was this enormous set constructed, the one under our feet and above our heads wherever we go—and to what end?

These questions must go unanswered, for reasons unknown. Strangely enough, or appropriately enough (depending on how you look at it), the dramatis personae in the segment of the play with which we are here concerned will raise them shortly, in their own way. The primary characters are two young men named KIP and DOUG. It is beyond my ken to tell you too much about them; I am not the playwright, only the interpreter. I don’t know many details about their family backgrounds, but I do know that each of them is 18, that most combustible age for human males. By the time you’ve hit your 18th birthday, you’ve apparently outgrown your immaturity; you’ve emerged from puberty and its awful attendant sufferings, found your voice—now strong, deep, and resonant, no longer quavering and breaking—and impressed everyone with just how adult you look.

But look is the operative word here. Looks are ever deceiving. In fact, the 18-year-old boy only APPEARS to be grown up. Few adults know, or even intuit, the roiling sea beneath the calm surface. Adult men SHOULD know better, but they don’t; they’ve almost completely forgotten how it was to be that age; they can only glimpse, as through a glass darkly, what an 18-year-old recognizes intimately and acutely.

The adult, oblivious! Inclined, later on, to mutter things like We never saw it coming and He seemed like such a good kid… Fools! WHY do we so totally forget what we once knew by heart! HOW do we manage to remake ourselves in such a manner that we mistake the malign for the benign? Especially when we ourselves once felt exactly that same raw malignity coursing through our very hearts, jetting to every membrane of our bodies, filling every pore of our skin with its cruel black foulness?

The 18-year-old boys in our midst smirk at us for precisely this reason: we are WILLFULLY clueless. We let them fool us, and they despise us for our patent gullibility, our predictable indulgence, our refusal to see past the facade, and our stubborn insistence on making a molehill out of a mountain, on interpreting a glass dashed to bits on a hard stone floor as a glass half-full of milk, sitting on a table. Just so do the 18-year-old boys appear before us, their dark, malevolent designs barely disguised under a thin veneer of politeness and self-effacement, and we only notice the veneer, without giving their inner selves even a slightly more penetrating look.

No wonder they regard us with such scorn! The deception is accomplished all too easily. They take us for fools, and we prove to be just such.

***

No adult appears in this scene, save one. She is a waitress in a late night diner, and she now approaches Kip, who sits at a corner booth as the curtain rises upon our little play. When Kip sees her, he begins to grin and gesticulate. I picture Kip as an amusing sort of boy, a class clown, perhaps with a punk hairdo, sporting a half-unbuttoned trench coat, under which can half be glimpsed a T-shirt with some grimly ironic slogan written across the chest, which we can’t at present discern. He is the sort of kid who can’t help but make you smile and shake your head when you talk to him; he is full of sarcasm, but holds no malice in his heart, or so it would appear.

The waitress, in her standard waitress get-up, is just the sort of gravelly-voiced, tart-tongued, chain-smoking broad you’d expect to be working at such an establishment. (If this seems clichéd and unoriginal, don’t blame me, blame the playwright! He often works in cliché, in case you hadn’t noticed.) This isn’t a lady who’s inclined to see a boy like Kip in a favorable light. She’s got no time for foolishness. Kip, of course, has time for little else.

It is early in the morning, just before dawn, and dark as pitch outside of the restaurant.

What’dya need, honey? the waitress says.

Her face assumes a wary squint as she takes out her order pad. Kip, utterly unfazed by her tough, no-nonsense diner waitress’ attitude, is smiling broadly as he finishes writing something in his spiral notebook. It could be a journal entry or some impromptu composition. Still looking down, Kip says, I NEED [making air-quotes with his non-writing hand] you to hear this, darling. Actually, I don’t NEED you to, but I WANT you to. And my wants are paramount. The customer is always right. Right?

At this, he looks up and meets her glare, smile unbreaking. The waitress sighs; she’s had a bad night.

Sweetie, she mutters, her husky voice taking a lightly threatening undertone, I can get you some coffee or something to eat. I’ve got other people to serve.

Kip glances about incredulously. Who? he asks. The homeless guy over there, drooling on his table? Dude smells like a garbage dump. Probably a junkie. I don’t think what he wants is on the menu.

Halfway through Kip’s unsolicited observations, the waitress has decided that it’s probably best to ignore, rather than confront, this smart-assed kid so starved for attention. She’s got children at home, one suspects, although no wedding ring adorns her finger.

You want coffee, honey? she asks coolly. I’ve got things to do.

But Kip isn’t taking the hint. Or more likely, he’s ignoring the hint. He suddenly rises from his seat, ostentatiously clearing his throat. There is something peculiar about his state of mind, she reflects, quite taken aback. Is he high on something? Maybe—but it’s more than that, she decides. He takes a step towards her. He’s starting to freak her out. Then he smiles again.

You need to hear my poem, okay? That’s all I ask [he squints at the name tag on her chest], Phyllis. Do you mind? You don’t mind, do you? You’re so sweet. You’re my kind of woman. Hear me out, okay?

Phyllis, one gathers, is a woman rarely rendered speechless, but this is one of those rare occasions. Her bewilderment is tinged with fear, though she’s not entirely sure of what. Kip climbs up on the seat of his booth, and reading from his notebook, recites in a loud, dramatic