The Man

The Man stands in a cheap blue three-piece suit smoking his cigarettes and looking at his watch, some kind of gaudy and obviously fake Rolex knock-off. It shines too brightly: Fool's gold for a fool, who walks with brash steps towards a cab hailed by a young mother. He pushes a meaty hand into her face and tells her to shove it and sits down, his body creaking and settling into the stained and torn back seat and he mashes the cigarette into the seat, sending up acrid smoke and the smell of burning plastic and foam.

The Man takes another hit from the pipe, red eyes reeling with his brain that struggles to remain aware and alert. He's killing himself, he knows, even as he reaches for another tab. How much more can I take he wonders as the ears sizzle and the skin crawls and the colors whirl and what is reality but what I take and in a moment of lucidity he realizes that they are taking him. And he'll die or quit or come back and it will be endless until it ends.

The Man touches his child's nose and sees that it's his nose and she smiles and he wonders yet again that she is his. That she is half of him and half the other, and that she will grow and think and believe and live, and in spite of himself he gasps, knowing he will never see her whole story, but it is enough to know this much, and a wonder indeed.

The Man lies in his starched white bed under starched white sheets and gasps for another agonizing breath: this is the last; no this one. But he persists, and they come and go and talk and nothing is important but him. They will leave this place, but his only destination is a cold and stark place in the ground, and it's not so much the thought of being gone that chills him as knowing that he will be forgotten, in this age or another.

The Man walks in the forest, those tall trees weeping dried tears that have piled in crisp bunches around his feet, and he delights in stepping in them and hearing the satisfying crunch. And the smell speaks of age and permanence and the earth. He remembers coming here, ages before, and wondering then as he does now: what kind of Man would he be?