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anyone care now if they hadn’t whilst his machinery continued to pump air within? Would there be a solitary fly-bait throughout the entire woodland that could fare any worse? The wretch was now cold meat with the thing he most loved: nothing. Had life continued he might have starved to death or been beaten up by the local rookies – both fair outcomes in the eyes of the yawningly law-bending law. His time had been called in mid-sentence and without one full second allowed for him to understand whatever it was that had befallen him, and time crowds in even if we think we have it under control.
    Nails, Ezra, Justy and Harri felt off-center, but nothing more. All assumed joint responsibility, or at least equal understanding, and there would be no instinctive rush to isolate Ezra since all would have acted in precisely the same way had they, and not Ezra, been zeroed in upon, because most people come to the same moral conclusions when faced with awkward moral conundrums. The syphilis-itch of the hobo’s grope would be enough to repulse the softest composure, and Ezra had no doubt that his automatic slug had been provoked, and no one who had not been present at the scene of the senicide could have any right to another view. Yes, there is judicial law, and, yes, there is natural law. Equally with the four their impulse was to acknowledge a death and to leave it alone. Something happens to the body and the corpse is whisked out of view, and your dignity urges you to move your thoughts onwards and elsewhere, knowing that the foul-smelling human corrosion had ventured too far. Urine-soaked, he could not possibly have imagined the intoxicated rash of his lips stuck to Ezra’s face. We cradle each wish in preparation of it being fulfilled, and our feelings might be so bullishly strong that we cannot imagine the object of our lust being unimpressed by the sheer voltage and force of our needs (since it obviously impresses us). But life tends to be a cold-storage schlep of mediocrity at best, and amongst the snowed-under years our theories of love and lust are almost never practiced with the vim and vigor haven so brutally immovable from our stuck imaginations, even if their demand irrationally urges its force ahead of basic hunger and intelligence. This makes the human being a pitiful creature eternally occupied with longing, longing, longing – yet animals, at least (at most?), leap as large as life when ready to cloy in ecstasy. Humans, on the other hand, require novels, films, food, labor, plays, magazines, pornography and castles in Spain in order to substitute for the urgings of the loins – and, alarmingly, they accept those substitutes. Well, what choice?
    By 8 p.m. the four boys were adequately distanced from the ever-stiffening stiff who was now lying in possibly his first ever repose of gentleness. Where he was now could not be worse than where he had been a few hours ago. You can’t let go of everything, of course, and his shattered shell remained under bush, the mouth now fallen open as if attempting one last futile call for a mercy that had never previously been on offer. Every imaginable sign of desol­ation slid him away. A ghastly almost-eaten face, he had gone to such excessive lengths to survive, but this did not matter very much after all. He was dead and he simply must stay dead, flitting about in time and space, with perhaps only a few random photographs (of the tortured-family variety) somewhere to guarantee that he once was. No prayer or fireworks could undo his fate, and any lyric poetry in passing on or passing away was not reserved for his exit. Those random photographs, not treasured but stuffed away somewhere, gave conclusive testimony to his existence, when nothing else now could. Tomorrow will happen without him and tonight will not miss him, as storms gathered as they ought to under such circumstances. How he had lived had not been deemed difficult enough, and the God to whom he