It’s hard being pissed with a nice car and a good job. Fed up on filet medallions and swimming in chilled martinis. We know what we think and our life here is our reward for thinking it.

After we’re feasted down to white sticks and it’s all covered in lions and trees and whatever the monkeys become prod the ground with a toe, staring down with glittering eyes at the guts of a wristwatch. After the bonfires and sun worship and they grow brains and can x-ray the ground. They can figure all this out, file it away. List my name with an asterisk after it, a footnote at the bottom phrasing my presence here in short, dull terminology.

I cried out at the sudden visitation of pain, everyone in a silent church standing in a rustle of suits and dresses to bend back their longest fingernail.