the accident
The cashier, dressed in the usual garb of the local population, looked right through me, the ever-searing sun behind my back. I was scrambling for my wallet; not because there were many people behind me - in fact, the line was surprisingly empty for a meta-theater of such fame that it even echoed through distant Canterbury - but because the sheer Vegeistigung of the habit articulated in front of me made me eerily uneasy. I counted the bills: discontent, toil, another lost evening, a surprisingly easy day, a missed birthday... of course! I dropped the wallet. Memories that I have not thought about in years exploded on the hot asphalt and disseminated in every direction, plain, for everyone to see. I tried to catch them - there, a lover's spat, a cliffside with a terrible secret, an afternoon under a tree, nothing that has ever happened, and even the damn canal; one day, I will have I will have I will have to collect them and stick them into a dusty piss-colored album where they won't- Not that the cashier with his empty eyes or the people in the queue were any help, I thought. But when my hand reached for the smell of a barbecue in childhood's spring, another hand was already there....