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then immediately forgot it.
    The man opened the bag and took out the shadow of an immense bird. He unfolded the shadow as if it were a pair of pants.
    "What's that?"
    "It's the shadow of a bird," the man said and walked over to where Mr. Henly was sitting and laid the shadow on the floor beside his feet.
    Then he took a strange-looking hammer and pulled the nails out of Mr. Henly's shadow, the nails that fastened it to his body. The man folded up the shadow very carefully. He laid it on a chair beside Mr. Henly.
    "What are you doing?" Mr. Henly said. He wasn't afraid. Just a little curious.
    "Putting the shadow on," the man said and nailed the bird's shadow onto his feet. At least it didn't hurt.
    "There you go," the man said. "You have 24 months to pay for the television set. When you finish paying for the set, we'll switch shadows. It looks pretty good on you."
    Mr. Henly stared down at the shadow of a bird coming off his human body. It doesn't look bad, Mr. Henly thought.
    When he left the room the beautiful girl behind the desk said, "My, how you've changed."
    Mr. Henly liked having her talk to him. During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.
    He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and discovered that he had smoked them all up. He felt very embarrassed. The girl stared at him as if he were a small child that had done something wrong.

Winter Rug
    M Y credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I've had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I've been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I've read
The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds
and my favorite
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
    I have watched men standing beside hearses in front of mortuaries directing funerals with walky-talkies as if they were officers in a metaphysical war.
    Oh, yes: I was once walking with a friend past a skid row hotel in San Francisco and they were carrying a corpse out of the hotel. The corpse was done tastefully in a white sheet with four or five Chinese extras looking on, and there was a very slow-moving ambulance parked out front that was prohibited by law from having a siren or to go any faster than thirty-seven miles an hour and from showing any aggressive action in traffic.
    My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, "Being dead is one step up from living in that hotel."
    As you can see, I am an expert on death in California. My credentials stand up to the closest inspection. I am qualified to continue with another story told to me by my friend who also works as a gardener for a very wealthy old woman in Marin County. She had a nineteen-year-old dog that she loved deeply and the dog responded to this love by dying very slowly from senility.
    Every day my friend went to work the dog would be a little more dead. It was long past the proper time for the dog to die, but the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death.
    This happens to a lot of old people in this country. They get so old and live with death so long that they lose the way when it comes time to actually die.
    Sometimes they stay lost for years. It is horrible to watch them linger on. Finally the weight of their own blood crushes them.
    Anyway, at last the woman could not stand to watch the senile suffering of her dog any longer and called up a veterinarian to come and put the dog to sleep.
    She instructed my friend to build a coffin for the dog, which he did, figuring it was one of the fringe clauses of gardening in California.
    The death doctor drove out to her estate and was soon in the house carrying a little black bag. That was a mistake. It should have been a large pastel bag. When the old woman saw the little black bag, she paled visibly. The unnecessary reality of it scared her, so she sent the veterinarian away with a generous check in his pocket.
    Alas, having the veterinarian go away did not