The diary of Ashley Cole

This thread will contain posts from the Diary of Ashley Cole, the hunter also known as Red. It is intended as a place where I can post mood writing for her as she progresses through the city of Detroit and the hunter underworld.

Edmund Burke once said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t too late, I wonder if evil hasn’t already won.

There was a dream once, an American Dream, where by the sweat of his brow a man might make a home for his family, and folks could live in peace without the fear some junkie breaking into their living room and knifing their kids to steal twenty bucks, some fiend pulling their daughter into a dark ally and having his twisted fun. When was it that our dream was replaced by this nightmare?

I see them everywhere, whores and junkies, pimps and pushers slowly draining the life away from our youth, like some sort of vampiric infection drinking deep of the American soul. The book store is replaced by the smut shop; a porno theater is built in the bones of an orchestra hall. Sin devours our American spirit, and no one seems to notice, no one seems to care. A monster and his parliament sit in an oval office, giving the people a nickel with one hand and taking a dime with the other and they praise him for it.

Our land of Reason has been replaced by a culture of blissful ignorance. They stuff their fat faces with greasy burgers and gulp down soda’s big enough to drown small dogs with. Fat people with fatter children driving massive SUV’s down broken streets. They don’t see the addicts or the vagrants, their eyes are blind to the corruption that spills onto the street, a flood of foul indulgence that threatens to drown us like a biblical flood from times long forgotten. Why can’t they see this vice, why can’t they just open their eyes?

I see it, I see the pedophiles and thieves, the murders, rapists and pushers walking among us, once outcasts but now accepted members of society. Rehabilitation. In a land choking on its own gluttony, consumed by its lust and pride and greed the things that we once reviled are common place. Accepted.

Monsters move among us, blood sucking creatures of the night brush shoulders with ancient horrors, and wolves that take the skin of we mortal sheep. In a culture where murder and rape are just statistics, they wear a perfect camouflage. I wonder if they have always been here, these monsters among us, or if they are our greed, lust, hate, and envy given physical form. A contagious disease transmutable to the American populous, one against which only a few of us have immunity.

I sat at a bus stop last night, watching the tide of human filth flow past me, everyone in a hurry. Some rushing to the bar before happy hour ends; others just wanted to park their fat asses on the couch in time to catch their ‘shows. Two married men stood next to me for a while, bragging about their conquests. One was a high school teacher, his jowls shaking as he laughed about rutting in his female students, the other an accountant with some little piece on the side. I thought briefly about stabbing them both, painting the street with their gluttonous blood. But they are only just a symptom of the sickness in this city, and their deaths would contribute nothing to the cure. My knife stayed in my purse, and I mourned silently for the death of mans honor. When did adultery become something to brag about in public, when did marriage lose its sanctity. I don’t know.

After a while I left my bench, a sick feeling heavy in my gut. I wondered around the city at twilight, pulling up my hood when the drizzle started. I shared a cigarette with some tramp under the awning of one of those pay by the hour churches that save your soul a dollar at a time and listened to him tell me about his daughter, the one he hadn’t seen in twelve years. He thought she still lived in Portland, but wasn’t sure, not any more. When the rain lets up I gave him a smoke for the road and we went our separate ways. I passed beauty solons full of aging beauty queens desperately clinging to youth; to the hope their cheating husbands still loved them, I strolled past fast food joints filled with parents feeding their kids their slow death. Diabetes please, with a side of heart disease and childhood obesity. Don’t forget to super size that. Was that me once?

When did consumption stop being a disease and start being a way of life?

When did my eyes finally open?

From the Diary of Ashley Cole, on her first impressions of Detroit.

Ashley walks along the street of Detroit when she hears a man muttering at a newsstand. Glancing over, she can see that he's studying the front page- 'Local man dies- autopsy reveals both kidneys missing!'

"Third time now, ain't it." A slightly overweight woman about Ashley's age remarks, purchasing her own paper. "Last Thursday they found a man missing his liver."

"No surgery." The first man snorts. "It's Bull. Is this the news or the sensational tabloids?"
"What, you don't believe it?" The woman sounds incredulous. "Three people are dead, its all over the T.V."
"No scars?" The first replied, consulting the paper. "Weird shit.".