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Saturday, July 25, 2015

Settle (PART 1)

This is a work of fiction.

“Lenguh sial punggung,” complained Razak in his mind as he stood up from his chair and half stretched the lower half of his body. He had been sitting behind that desk in the small police booth in Kota Yarra for a good hour or so, playing Clash of Clans on his phone. Now that it was fully charged, he unplugged his S4 from the charger and stepped around his desk and made his way outside, just barely avoiding being tripped by his asleep colleague’s feet.

Once outside, Razak took out the last cigarette from his box of Dunhills, crumpled the empty box and chucked it to the side, not really caring about where it landed. His left hand placed the cigarette in between his lips while the other hand patted his pockets for his lighter. It wasn’t there. 

Upon remembering where, or rather, to whom he left it with, he went back inside and kicked Azrai’s feet to wake him up. “Hoi, lighter,” his voice strained more than he would have liked, cigarette still safely secured between his teeth.

Azrai took his time waking up, which ticked Razak off so much so that after the third time he asked, Razak took it upon himself to take the lighter from Azrai’s left breast pocket. Once he got the yellow Cricket in his hands, he flashed it a little too close to Azrai’s face for him to be able to see it before walking out the booth while lighting up the cig.

It was just another boring day for him at the Kota Yarra shophouse complex. It may have been called that, but 80% of the complex was dedicated to parking spaces, so what Razak and Azrai do during their 10 hour-shifts is basically ride around the floors of parking lots on their motorcycles. They’ve been on this location for three weeks now, and they were decidedly bored out of their brains since day one.

People seem to paint parking lots as a really dangerous place, where people get robbed and cars get smashed up regularly. But whatever action that people seem to be so scared about doesn’t seem to apply to this particular parking area. And Razak has all but lost all hope in him ever being able to nab a burglar here in this uppity place where parking costs six ringgit per hour. Azrai reasoned that the crooks couldn’t even afford to stake out the place, what with the exorbitant rate and not to mention the presence of a police booth smack dab in the middle of it all.

Whatever the reason, Razak still wished for somebody, anybody to be stupid enough to pull something dumb around here. A little bit of action wasn’t so much to ask, was it?

After finishing his cigarette, he crushed it under the sole of his shoe and decided to ride the motorcycle to the nearby 7-Eleven to restock on his Dunhills. Good thing he was still single. Most of his friends that have married could only afford those Indonesian contrabands that taste even cheaper than they cost. Some even quit smoking altogether, those chumps.

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2