Aug. 6, 1946

I just saw a man drinking rainwater from a puddle in a driveway. He dropped down to his hands, as if doing a push-up, lowered his body down to the bricks, lowered his lips down to the puddle and drank. I saw it quickly, while I was driving past. The house is an orphanage, St Luke’s; the man was black, quite possibly homeless. Most probably homeless. He wore a jacket with a hoodie beneath that. I couldn’t see the water except as a dark-brown-black, unappetising smudge. A hole in the ground. A black hole. A pit. A wishing well. I wonder what he wished for. I couldn’t see the water, not really, but I have seen the puddles left after rains: dirty, ugly, leaf-filled earth-filled. There are no wishes in theses puddle. No dreams or hopes or aspirations.

When you drink from such a puddle your thirst only grows. Your eyes widen and your stomach drops out of your ass. Your lips pucker and the skin over your face tightens, and then loosens again as the muscles contract and atrophy. It takes four muscles to smile, but it takes only one leafy puddle to kill each of those muscles and turn your healthy, cloth-covered paunch into a cave of a belly. Your chest concaves. Your eyes convex, your eyelids droop and then pull up into your head. Your body cannot produce the moisture needed to keep your eyes wet and so your eyes dry up and it hurts when they turn to darkness. Hair falls out, teeth fall out. Hair and toenails don’t continue to grow after death, this is a myth, but when you drink from a puddle in the driveway of an orphanage, with your dreadlocks and your yellowing teeth and your hoodie and tattered trousers, your hair keeps growing and your fingernails keep growing.

You need to be careful that you don’t break them off when you push yourself up from the sidewalk of the orphanage where you are taking your drink. It hurts to have your fingernails broken like that because they break at the base. And be careful that you don’t fall down, because your muscles have died. You need to creep up carefully and defiantly, divinely even, or crawl to the house you don’t have and the wife you don’t love. Although you probably don’t have your wife either.

I drove past this man. I didn’t see him struggling to reach his feet—sparsely covered with his hole-infected boots. I didn’t see him fall down and break the hollow, glassy bones of the arms that he threw out in front of himself. I didn’t see his mouth contorted in universal pain. I did hear the cry though.

Feeble. Death-like. I imagine his rotten-lipped always-smile pulling even further up his purple-and-black gums to scream the scream of ages. The scream of an infant being born. The scream of a mother giving birth. The scream of every Penelope watching a bomb drop on Ulysses’ base from the safety of her tapestry-filled living room, the scream coming from the TV as it loses signal and the calm face of a newsreader returns, broad-shouldered, blue-suited, objective, demonic: we apologise for the shocking nature of the images. The screams of Hiroshima: first, the word screamed through a headset which sent a nuke dropping, then the scream of a dying piece of metal, the scream of kamikaze, the Divine Wind; and lastly the scream of a horse dying in the flames, rearing, flesh-burning, hoof-pounding: it is that scream, and not the bomb that killed the inhabitants of a Japanese city on August 6th, 1945.

But, I didn’t see that. And I didn’t see the man falling down, rain-water in his belly, and shattering his arms. I didn’t see his face turned to the sky, nor his lips drawn back in a whinny of pain, nor did I see his night-filled eyes trying to look for help. I drove past and when I got home I started to write this. I said hello to no one. I walked to my room, past my parents’ room where my mother was watching some melodramatic soap-opera, and began to write this. I heard the ridiculous lives of too-happy characters from the TV in my parents’ room, I heard the groaning of my keyboard—not all the keys work—and I heard the faint, whispering scream of a man wearing a hoody covered by a jacket, lying in a puddle of drinkable water, broken-legged, waiting to be shot. Between the eyes. That’s how they do it. That’s how they shoot horses. Humanely.

-Can I have one of your beers? My dad asked, pulling me away from it all. Mine are still warm, he explained.

-No, I only have one left and I’m going to drink it later.

-That’s fine. I’ll put six in the deep-freeze.

The gun should be positioned perpendicular to the head, in the middle of an imaginary X. Take a line from the left ear to right eye, and another from the right ear to left eye, and where the two imaginary lines intersect... this won’t work on a human.

Death should be instantaneous. Death should always be instantaneous.

There are also intravenous methods. Barbiturates. An overdose. The animal is rendered unconscious and pain-free immediately.

I have pills in my cupboard. Well, right now, they’re in my hand, but they were in my cupboard. I took them out and walked out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone. How many pills are needed for an overdose? Humane euthanasia.

I drove back to St Luke’s and the puddle was still there, but there was no tortured form lying on the pavement with pain in his eyes, broken arms at his sides, a scream on his tightened lips, a small collection of hair and teeth near his head. There was no one there. The puddle was undisturbed, though probably slightly smaller than when I first drove past, still filled with leaves, still dirty-black-brown.

I’m sitting at my computer again hearing the scream of a dying man lying with his not-wife, in his not-home; it is a scream pregnant with time. But I am writing a story about myself.