The police sirens are spilling shifting rainbows on the waffle house’s bare metal tables. Across the street, I can see the cops moving trolleys, carrying the nylon-wrapped grotesqueries we left behind. Something that’s definitely not gum is making my boot soles cling to the linoleum floor.

“Ever told you about my dad?” I ask Violet, who’s poring over the 12-page waffle menu, her tongue absent-mindedly tracing her lips. The way she looks now, all clean and hungry, I want her but I don’t want her to like me.

“Mhm” she mutters, leafing through the menu. From across the street, I notice Officer Jenny clearing the path among the massed crowd. The way she looks all flustered, tired and sick of it all makes me feel like I’m looking into a mirror.

“He was a war veteran. Highly decorated, think he got a Silver Heart or something. He was fucked in the head, though” I tell her and she doesn’t even glance up at me. She only taps at the menu once, licks her lips, then rings the waitress’ buzzer.

“He wasn’t always like that. He didn’t use to scream himself to sleep before he left to fight the good fight. He didn’t use to beat me either. Not when I hadn’t earned it, anyway.” Across the street, they’re rolling out a gurney, with someone screaming riding on top of it. I hadn’t noticed it in all the blood, but he’s wearing designer clothes. Expensive stuff. Not something a regular hick-town trainer would wear.

“I’ll have the raspberry triple-stack with a vanilla scoop” Violet tells the stone-faced waitress, aged before her time. Over her shoulder, there’s a documentary showing baby Kangashkans shifting through the bleached pile of their mother’s bones. They soon find skulls, placing them on top of their heads, adjusting them until they can look through the empty sockets. At once, they become Cubones: like ancient warriors, they reach adulthood by virtue of their dead fathers.

“I was a very difficult kid for her to manage. Always used to get myself in all sorts of trouble. Didn’t use to do it that much when dad was home. But after dad came back as a fucking basket case, I only got worse.” I pour my heart out to her, even as she watches the Cubones shift through their dead parents’ bones, looking for something to arm themselves with.

“He didn’t drink, he didn’t take drugs or smoke. He’d just lock himself in the basement and pump iron. Sometimes, my dad would just get in the car and drive all the way to Fuschia City and go hide in the Safari Zone. He’d let me come with and show me how to hide, how to set traps. None of the traps were made for pokemon, though” I tell Violet, as the waitress brings her the stack of waffles, soaked in syrup, coated in ice-cream. It looks downright obscene.

“He’d never talk when we were in the Safari Zone. He’d only show me how to do something and then we’d leave. Sometimes, I’d try and talk to him but he’d give me a look like I was blowing our cover. The only honest-to-God talks we’d have would be after he’d bust my lip for bullying some kid at the school. And even then he’d just shout at me before I could even get a word in.” the sight of Violet wolfing down that monstrosity of a breakfast is making my stomach turn. On the TV screen, the Cubones are ganging up on a Snorlax. The behemoth lets out a roar as it tries to fight them off but its every action is too little, too late.

“Sometimes my mom would try and stop him when my dad would get carried away during one of our talks. He had never meant to hurt her, but she got a backhand every now and then, got herself a black eye that she had to make up some shit excuse for at work. The cops always went easy on him, though. No-one wanted people to stop thinking that he was a hero.”

Across the street, Officer Jenny watches me. Don’t ask me how I can tell, but she looks familiar. I resist the urge to flash her a smile, the kind us weary old cynics share between us. So I look back at the TV, at the Cubones quartering the Snorlax, divvying up dinner among them.

“So one day, he takes it too far. He’s busy beating the everloving shit out of me because I got caught stealing some kid’s lunch money at school and my mom gets in the way. He shoves her and she hits her head on a dumbbell, cracks her skull. So what I do, is I wait. I save up my money and I buy a pokeball. Then I go and catch an Oddish, the wild kind that lives just out of Viridian and pick the stun spores it grows on its body. I grind them up, put them in his coffee.” I tell Violet, who’s picking the sugar-soaked crumbs from her plate. Across the street, Officer Jenny has already left, following the ambulance carrying the body bags and the trainer with the ruined face.

“He drinks it, but it doesn’t work the way it oughtta: see, I put too much so instead of it paralyzing him so I could scare him, it gives him brain damage. When my mom regains consciousness, she finds out that her husband, the war hero, is a goddamn vegetable.”

Violet gets up, dusts herself.

“I’m going to the ladies’ room real quick” she tells me and leaves me alone without a word, to stir my coffee and feel like scum.

The guy who sits across me and points a gun at my face would be doing me a favor if he pulled the trigger right now, really.

“You’re a hard man to find, Vince” he tells me in his best tough-guy voice. I nod, bringing the cup of coffee to my lips, looking him over: stacked like a brick shithouse, holding the gun like a man who knows how to compensate for recoil, a face that only a mother could love.

He cocks his gun, pointing it half an inch higher. He’s looking to get me right in the eye.

“Mister Fuji sends his regards” he says and I spill the hot black coffee in his face. He shoots blind but misses, even though I’m lunging at him right now, with Violet’s fork in my hand.

The waitress screams as she sees me stick the fork right under his eye, impaling it in his cheek. The tough-guy tries to claw at my face, but I’ve already grabbed grab him by the hair; I smash his face against the bare-metal table, spilling red blots all over Violet’s leftovers.

The way the tough-guy is right now, all bloodied and moaning, I could kill him in an instant, but I’m not gonna. He’s a just a dumb-ass goon, sent to shake me rather than kill me. So I lean over his ear and I tell him:

“You tell Mister Fuji that he shouldn’t send a flunkie to do a hitman’s job”

I get up just as Violet’s leaving the restroom, gun in hand.

“Who’s this guy?”

“Never mind. We’re getting the fuck out, right now.” I tell her as I toss a twenty on the table, knowing that I’m gonna regret this later.

As we’re getting in the car, speeding down the Vermillion Boulevard, Violet cracks a smile:

“Never thought you’d have to mess up a guy before you’d buy me breakfast.”