His cockiness enters the room before him and weighs up the crowd. Each face is familiar, in the way that the back of his hand after it’s slapped someone unimportant is familiar, and each heart is a friend, in the way that a bullet with the word friend scratched on its casing is a friend. It tries out his voice for him, all wind and thunder, and it jabs assertive gestures into air, chopping it down to size. It occupies space until there is no space, and it’s pressed too close to each one of the stiff little people who are compelled to be here by greed and fear. His cockiness puckers its lips, then its whole face, and it makes that expression which is both a smile and its absolute opposite. It grabs the room by its balls, and squeezes, so that by the time the small man creeps inside his blustering ego, no one will notice the fear in his rheumy eyes or observe the soft white spot where a blade could so easily slip. Not yet.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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