With a sickening twist and snap, the tooth slides out of place, followed by a gout of blood. She coughs, and a spray of red emerges. Spits. The tooth, now thoroughly dislodged from its bony socket,  soars forward, hitting him in the face. Her head tilts back, blood running down her strong white cheekbones, veiling freckles in flowing life as the estuary of blood on her brow joins the river of saliva and rich red foam leaking out of the side of her mouth. 

She smiles widely and laughs, a harsh liquidly bubbling sound, though not obscuring her apparent amusement for her attackers to witness.

“Why don’t ye untie me,” she chuckles, lazily expanding her grin, “We’ll have a real fight? This seems a little uneven from my view.”

Her original attacker snorts his disgust, lowering his face down to her. Close enough for a swift uppercut to the sharp chin jutting out of his moronic thick face, but the binding of her wrists behind her and the wooden chair back prevents it.  Tied up in her own goddamn living room. The curtains her mother had bought over 20 years ago still hung there, a light daisy pattern on white, gently moving in the breeze of the neighborhood. The kitchen table, ringed and scarred, that they’d sat around as a family until she was 8, still sat in shadows in the same place. The conversations around that table, however, were not that of a typical family.

Underground Irish freedom fighter meetings, witnessed from a young age—her and them, the children, were always seen, but not heard. See everything, hear everything-- every conspiracy, rumor, incident, anguished tears, loading of guns, building of small incendiaries.  She played jacks under that kitchen table as men and women talked of killing men and women and children in the streets, her mother hemming and hawing over the sordid details as she poured cup after cup of strong coffee, a dollop of whiskey sloshing in the mug, “to warm ye up,” she would say.

Bringing his face close to hers, the tall gaunt man who had initially ordered her suppression, speaks in a low growl, “ye  know damn well  why we can’t do that.”

“Because ye’re feckin’ afraid, dat’s why,” she spits. “What is it that ye’re afraid of then, Uncle?”

He shakes his head morosely, and turns away. She can hear him tut-tutting under his breath as he speaks a low command to the others standing in the room.  It had taken three of them, apart from her uncle, to grab her out of the pub. She’d managed to hold off the three men, no more than fifty years of age combined together, for quite a while, until her Uncle had ministered a blow to the back of her skull.

She hadn’t even seen him coming out of the darkness of the alley where she’d foolishly nipped out originally to snag a smoke and a dime bag. The black paint-chipped nightstick, now sitting on the worn kitchen table had assisted greatly from that point on, in getting her back to her old home in a lower neighborhood of Belfast in a greatly subdued fashion. Bronwen, now sporting a large lump on the back of her head imagined her scalp was sweating and crawling, but knows better than to assume she isn’t bleeding from a possible skull fracture. Shit.

Sniping the plane at F1X had been easier than I’d thought it would be. Shane had been around a little longer than I  had at that point. Godssakes, I didn’t even have a bloody contract yet. Well, not a signed one, anyways. It was only a matter of some weed and some knowing winks changing hands before the pilot agreed that a six hour flight was a walk in the park. Over the Atlantic ocean, rather, fuel sans gratis.  

“Charge it to the company,” Shane said with a laugh, running back to the luxurious interior and stretching out in one of the white leather seats surrounding a teak table next to a cabin window. He flipped open the liquor cabinet, fully stocked with Rolling Rock and some hard liquors.

Six hour trip. Feels like vodka will take care of that. I helped myself generously and threw it back, savoring the thick warmth settling in my stomach, as Shane cracked a beer.

“What do you want to do for six hours baby?” He asked, casting a suggestive glance towards me. I scowled.

“No pleasure with business. I brought a book to read.”

The plane started taxiing out onto the private runway. Looking out the window, I saw  a small figure standing on the edge of the tarmac, hands on her hips. I can only imagine the aloof disdainful expression that figure might have on her face as we gather up speed for lift-off.

 I opened my book and continued to read. Some parts of it had been intriguing, but the bulk of it seemed to be a chore to get through. I yawned and read further;  ‘It had been a eight months since that belief had been irrevocably shattered - It had been eight months since the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had declared a resumption of its pre-1940 independence and declared its status a constituent republic of the USSR illegal. The tiny Baltic Republic of some three million people had struck a blow so mighty and surprising to the West that it threatened to topple a Superpower that…’ I sighed and closed the book in frustration. The damn thing was beating around the bush when it came to conveying anything of significance or meaning.  

“Fucking Tom Clancy,” I muttered, “what rot. That man needs an editor to punch him in the face for every goddamn redundancy, vapid historical detai,l and paragraph of fluff  in all of his goddamn writing.”

 “Baby,” Shane said gently, “that’s not Tom Clancy. It’s that Annika whatsername, you know, from F1X? I grabbed that shit off her desk.”  

“Huh, go figure. It totally seems the same. Talk about a non-committal read. Whoops.”

“How can you pretend this is a joke?” Uncle asks her fiercely, shaking her shoulders until her head tilts forward, her long black hair falling into her face.

“You’re pathetic,” she shouted back. “Ye were goin’ to kill hundreds of people. For what?  So ye could be reminded that you’re still a significant presence? That you’re still important?”

Uncle laughs, and the three other men sit down around the kitchen table to have a drink from a flask being passed around.

“The beauty of it,” he chuckles, “was that it wasn’t me that was goin’ t’kill all those people…it was you.”

“Yeah, eh? Too bad about that. So sorry for fucking up your plans,” she says, sarcasm edging her voice while she flexes her legs against the restraints that are holding her ankles in place. She realizes the toes of her black Cons are flat on the ground. Well, that’s a small glimmer of hope, but it passes under an oncoming shadow as another thick slap mashes against her face.

 She can feel the upside-down wedding signet on his slab of a palm rip a slice in her cheek.  Aunt Chloe never would have stood for this, god rest her soul. After she’d died, the only one in the family to go in her sleep in over sixty years, something had snapped in Uncle, a darkness paradoxically siphoning into him, taking up cavernous voids left by his heart rending loss.

“Do we have t’beat the traitorousness out of ye than?” Her uncle bellows. “Goddamnit Bronwen, ye think I like hittin’ ye? You’re me own flesh an’ blood. I raised ye from ankle high after yer parents died, god rest ‘em. How do ye think your Da’ would be taken it if he saw this, ehn? That his brat ‘as turned her back to everything once definin’ her?”

“Shut. Up,” she growls lowly.”I’d be more concerned about him seein’ the sight of ye tying me to a chair, because I refuse to be a part of your power trip.”

“Power trip? Is tha’ what ye think this is now?” He said, a small pallour rising to his cheeks. “Have ye forgotten everything that we stand for, Bron? Everything that has happened to us, everything that happened to yer brothers, your mates? Your parents, for godssakes?”

“Enough,” Bronwen roars. Leaning forward and rising up on her toes, she launches herself towards her Uncle, hitting him square in the chest with her forehead and the momentum of the thrown chair. He gasps and stumbles back, her bound figure falling upon him. Pinned by her now gravity bound weight and the weight of the pine chair, he is gasping for air as she raises her head once more and smashes it into his chest.

The plan was simple enough to begin with. I’d even been excited at the prospect of going home, although I knew I  didn’t have much in the way of mates to return to.

“What’s the target?”  I’d asked.

“Not just one,” he’d said slyly over the phone. “Bronwen, it’s fucking brilliant, I couldn’t have thought of a better plan myself. Oh wait, I did.” He’d laughed just then; I noted a touch of the maniacal to it.

“Ok Uncle,” I replied calmly, “but don’t go all crazy here, remember you’re goin’ t’have to fund this endeavor.”

“Oh, ok—all right, so this is what I envision---“ he started quickly, giggling a little at the thought. “Ye know the Methodist Church on University road?”

“Yeah uncle,” I assented.

“And the Elim Pentacostal Church on the Donnegall Pass?”

 “Uncle, get to the point,” I’d chided tersely.

“Oh, ok ok, allright, I got it,” he said, giggling again, a little shriller this time. “Ok, so,” he coughed, “there’s another place, the Fisherwick, you know, the Presbyterian one?”

I rubbed my eyes. What the fuck?

“Uncle, what the hell is it that ye have in mind here?”  

“Oh relax Bron, they’ll be empty. They’re these big Protestant denominational eyesores, and they’re about getting’ ready to collapse on their own anyways,” he complained. “Now, envision this…the three of them, a simultaneous blast, and all while in the middle… St. Malachy’s, rising out of the dust, ashes and debris!” He laughed triumphantly.”That’ll remind the rest of these religious imposters what’s what in the Republic, ehn?”

I  could see it in my  mind’s eye. All three were old, with windows and arches reminiscent of an age old time, many already flecked with damages from years of fighting previous, but tall and towering by virtue of the marble, granite,  and concrete lovingly used to construct them. All falling to dust, with the most earthshaking roar manageable by man-made explosives.

First,  there would be the heavy roar  of air displaced, then the hissing suction of dust and debris sending huge pluming clouds rising up the sides of the falling buildings as they fell, dust clouds appearing as if they could cushion the fall, looking near to the soul of a person leaving its crumpled and crushed body in a mangled steel-girder ridden heap. The allure was strange, very nearly pornographic for me . Others appreciated the beauty of aged buildings, took photos of them, touched them, raised plaques, restored and revered them.

Contrastingly, I blew the shit out of old things for a living, making room for new structures. In a way, I preserved the posterity of the older buildings, I fathomed. Having nothing concrete to take for granted day by day, people would build stories around the most innocuous of buildings, so long as it had stood in one place for fifty years or more, much less hundreds.

Even Shane, ever unmoved by much of anything, had mentioned randomly on a trip to Missoula, “I used to go with my grand-daddy to a soda shop that used to be right where that McDonald’s was.”  

 She kicks her right foot once, then voraciously, the left as well, breaking free of the binds. Positioning her pelvis and arching her back for leverage, she gets to her feet before the three men have risen from the table. Shaking her hands from the binds on the arms of the chair, her fingers and wrists are dark red from blood and halted circulation. Feeling her fingertips tingle from the rush, she lofts the chair lightly and gestures with the improvised weapon for the men to hold their distance.

 Looking down at her uncle, she has a moment of pity. He is but an old man now, looking for one last moment to preserve what he held most meaningful in life past his departed mate.

“On the backs of hundreds of innocent lives,” she murmurs, watching him gasp to catch his breath. He looks frail to her in that moment, and she realizes how he’s changed from even five years ago.

“I taught ye everything ye know,” he chokes. “I gave you everything we had t’make ye a good soldier. Your parents—“ he coughs.

“My parents are dead. I have avenged them by taking that life which had taken theirs previously,” she says softly. “That is all I ever wanted to do. That is why I was your disciple in this now-pointless war of attrition, but will no longer be. “

 I watched Shane drain his eighth beer, and a small shiver ran down my back.  I lit up a cigarette, took a gulp off my flask. Shane shook his finger at me and winked, pointing up to the no-smoking light, fully engaged as I blazed up the smoke.

It hadn’t emerged until two days ago, after weeks of planning for materials and three illegal entries, that the planned detonation date was on a Sunday. Killing God’s people on the Holy Sabbath, all while using materials that mimicked the destructive powers of Himself. The irony was delicious, but the deaths of the pious hundreds was pointless. I had no use for religion anymore personally, other than visiting confession on rare occasion. Even so, it was the smell of the small dark wooden booth, of discarded sins and recited penitence; the comfort of the place, that’s what drew me in.