Of the various things I don’t fully understand about my life, one is why I pay what I do for a cup of coffee.
Archive for November, 2011
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.”
I was covered in blood, but it wasn’t mine, so it was okay. Not only was it not my blood, but it was all animal blood. If the worst casualty of the night was six chickens and a goat, I could live with it, and so could everyone else. I’d raised seven corpses in one night. It was a record even for me.
When I was eight, I was convinced I could disappear.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
The first mortar round landed as the sun was rising.
My father, who died when I was five, had a reputation as a great newspaperman. I never doubted that I could be one too. “It’s a matter of destiny,” my mother would say to me with her usual drama. I believed her, and that’s where my trouble began.
Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?
