Sacrifice

Nobody released me from the can before I could do it myself. No open invitation ever came. There was a fella with me, constantly on about being someplace or other. He'd go: "Are we there yet?" every ten minutes, adding to the interruption of the next curve in the road, sharpened by the suddenness of place and the speed of the car, making me lose the dear thread of escape in my head. I didn't know what to tell him, so I grabbed him by the lapels of his worn coat that he probably had the day he laid on his bunk the first time and cast him among those who could answer his question better than I out there in the cold. I am a simple man, of simple tastes and no specific predilections. I learned to avoid those like the plague. Predilections make you want to overreact, and I've never been seen overreacting. I've learned to shed my nocturnal self. I picked this way of putting it from a pen-pusher who stabbed his wife nine times after she had tucked their kid. I have taught myself not to be surprised. There are no surprises in this thing of ours. There is only the just clutter and the unjust clutter. This is how you are brought up to handle it. Your friends help you understand and you stick to an angle. At the end of the day, you keep it to yourself, even if sometimes it's too good to be true, and when it's bad, it's just bad. You can turn it inside out, but that won’t make it better, when the seams start showing. There is reconstruction in the eye of the buzzard that comes to pick

your flesh, the pen-pusher said to me. That was his idea of purgatory, of reincarnation; but you have to decide what happens to you before it makes any sense to the pen-pusher, before he takes over.