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| Oh happy day! |
"Arkansas Charley dragged
smoke from a Pall Mall deeply into his lungs and peered down at the telltale wisp
of smoke that leaked between the second and third buttons of his wrinkled
Paisley shirt. Shaking his head morosely, he plucked two wrinkled tidbits of flesh
from his left wrist where the metal watch band had gouged under the skin. Carefully,
he balanced the tiny fragments of himself on the shaky tip of his middle finger
and held them to the sunlight that streamed remorselessly through McDonald’s
front window. To someone watching, Charley appeared to be giving a finger to the sun.
"The fleshy remains of
himself on his finger tip were another sign of the inevitable decline all flesh
was heir to. Down into the bone of himself, Charley knew and accepted that in a
decade or so, give or take a couple of years, he would be nothing but a hank of
hair and a piece of bone. Like all of animalkind, except for those beasts
slaughtered young and rendered up for the tables of the globe, he would grow steadily
worse until his decaying body could no longer support the thoughts and
feelings, the actions that all humans called life. For now, he sighed to himself, he would have to give up
wearing watches."
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