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the standing three of frozen postures, to whom that final word had no logically given reality. As if blind to the present, all stood together in sour recognition, yielding to their own silence whilst glumly understanding the correct reasoning of Harri’s words. It could only be Ezra who spoke first, with his proclamation of “Dead!” as both hands clasped each side of his face in shock at being just barely able to say that one word alone. The diagnosis was by now obvious enough not to need repeating. Little brown babblers darted in and around surrounding bushes, their movements announcing the luck of new life still moving on. Instinctively the three dragged the body inches further into wrap-around heather and warm fawn, and there it would be hidden with very little undergrowth required to snuggle around what barely passed as human form. The sorry hayseed clump had worried its last, and now, oh so very quickly, its ordeal of insanity had ended, the woodhick sucked in by encircling and coddling blackness shaded by weeping willow, weeping ash, weeping beech and weeping life.
    â€œWhy did we do that?” asked Nails, struggling for breath and belief.
    â€œWhy nothing, let’s tear-ass as fast as we can away from this … whatever it is, whatever it was,” came Justy, suddenly the scoutmaster that he had never been. In times of strife, any leading voice will do; off-key though it might be, it belongs to a star of the first magnitude if it speaks the common aim of strong confidence. As if a starting-pistol had fired they scampered like scared rabbits taking off in a cloud, further into the woodland masterminding a birdlike swing to left and then right in unified swerve through the woebegone sticks like migratory geese following ancient winds; large chestnut and horse chestnut looked down laughing … through an old grotto rock garden fenced in by overgrown box hedges – loved by someone in 1920, now a mess of silver birch and cypress. With their natural speed it did not take long before a sharp westerly bend found them out of the woods and home-free into the clear coast of the safe-and-sound edge of a town where suddenly they were no different from those they walked amongst, and they methodically wondered if they had even been there at all, with the wretch, in hollow’s hell. Ezra’s steely clip had indeed ended a life. How we endure our own feelings having done such an act is beyond our powers to reason, and perhaps all answers are in the particles of brain unused, yet once the hammer has fallen it is not a new reality at all, even if yesterday now feels like a lifetime ago; and even if moral action is not entirely well thought out it is powerfully instinctive nonetheless. The only shock for Ezra was the ease by which the wretch became vegetation, evolved from nothing and now returned – and by such a simple shot. There then came a troubling inner glow, one which sad-sack soldiers in combat must enjoy as they lovingly assist history books with their abysmal confidence game, motivated by their own faith yet beyond the power of their own awareness. The wretch had been unknown to Ezra and had, after all, instigated the provocation and outcome, so therefore any broad view of the situation might consider the solution with a certain moral certainty that would favor Ezra. Every moment in life takes its little place, and Ezra – so full of heart and soft to the eye against the subterranean dogface of our sickly fleshed goner – held a certain unsophistication if ever to be judged as a cold-blooded killer. The wretch, too, was a man, but had positioned himself so far away from obedient society that no one who mattered was close to him, or even knew him. Worm-chow for the crops, he was dead, dead, dead. The internal infrastructure was still closing down even though the unlovable heart had pumped its final tick, or possibly tock. For what earthly reason would anyone care? Why should