Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.
Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity. Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp. Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.
"Kid," he says, "you're on the level." The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up. "But what level?"
The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight. Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays. It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner. I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.
"You remember that?" raps Sam. "I mean, actually remember."
"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me, "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."
"Interesting," not sounding interested at all. Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles. "Think you can help me outta this rig?" His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.
"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me. The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement. The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles. "I believe so."
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