The Fire That Ate

“Oh shit baby are you okay?”   Jacob choked out through the fire that ate at him from the inside and the out.  

“No.”  He could hear the tears in her voice and could tell she was close, probably only three meters away.  But he could not open his eyes to see.

“What happened daddy?”

“Think the safety switch slipped off.  Must have fired it accidentally when I stood up.”

His mind reeled.  Miles from another person.  Deep in bear country, it was why he carried the spray.  Blind and burning from the accidental firing, all the horror stories that he’d dismissed earlier, the stories from the newspapers he’d decried as sensationalism about the man getting eaten in Yosemite, or the family getting attacked in their tent, all the stories came back to him now painted in the stark new color of defenselessness.  

He tried to be still; quiet the sick burning allergy of the spray, and think.  He and Sarah had both been hit with bear spray.  It had fired off as he stood up from a few minutes rest.  They were probably only a mile from where they had intended to camp.  There was no way they’d make it to the site now.  He had never felt a pain like this before, as bad...no, worse than the leg he had broken playing football in high school.  And this time no ambulance was in route.  And this time his daughter was crying so close to him he felt like he could touch her, but his hands burnt as if they had been dipped in napalm.

‘I shouldn’t touch her, it will just burn her worse.‘  Taylor thought.

“Baby,” he began, “I know how bad it hurts.  You’ve just got to stay still and whatever you do don’t touch your eyes.”

“Daddy it hurts.”

“I know baby.”  Jacob’s words were drowned out in her wail.

“I touched them Daddy!”  Sarah screeched.  Her words were followed by a high piercing scream of pain that tore through his heart with all the ferociousness of...of, of a hungry bear.

“Baby I know it hurts but you’ve got to be quiet.”  It was too late though the pain in his own: eyes, hands, mouth, lips, nose was bad enough, but his daughter’s pain was so much more.  As he dissolved into tears his being gave up the last vestige of hope and whatever courage he masqueraded vanished along with it.

“Come here baby.”  He said even as he crawled towards the sound of her wails.  He pulled her to his chest and for a time they just sat, the pain worse for touching, and eased by the touching too.  Somewhere in the back of Jacob’s mind he knew he had to wash their eyes out, in just a moment, he thought, when this pain passes a little.  But for a long time it didn’t pass.

-

Horrid.  I am an awful person.  Despicable.  Jacob tried to think every awful thought he could of himself.  Still he couldn’t blind himself to his irritation, that selfish little voice deep beneath the covers of his own self-respect, 

I hurt as bad as you Sarah, I’m not wailing, just be quiet Sarah, please shut up Sarah, Shut up Sarah!  

But she didn’t shut up, and perhaps there was some vestige of courage left in Jacob, because he found the strength to hold that demon beneath its cover.

“Baby...”  She just wailed.  “Sarah, I need you to listen to me now.  Sarah please.”

“It still hurts Daddy.”  Even as she said it though her sobs were cut by hiccuping breaths and the attempt to gather herself.

“I know baby.”  He petted her hair.  “I’ve got to do something to make this better and I can’t do anything until I can see.”  They had only been twenty meters from the deep swift waters, cold as the snow it was melting from.  He remembered that they had rested here because it was beautiful, because there was a gentle grassy slope that led to a slower bend in the river.  Jacob knew he had to crawl down there.  Blindly he felt out every new spot where placed his hand, continually hurting himself by not being patient enough in his probing searches.  Sarah’s sobs had softened and as he neared the water he could not hear her over the rush.  He shredded his hands on rocks and gravel, the pepper spray found its way into the scratches.  But, hurry was all he could think.

Jacob felt the muddy edge.  It lasted longer than he expected.  He was in a hurry, so he should be forgiven.  Jacob hurried too quick to the edge of the water; the bank of mud crumbled.  Head, neck, shoulders, arms, chest, all plunged into the water.  It was so cold it burned.  Jacob was sure he would be swept away; drowning in the current.  But his hands shot out, as if under a volition of self preservation all their own, and found purchase on the rock strewn bottom.  He did a push-up and came up out of the water, took a deep breath, and realized that the pain of the spray had - if only for a second - been neutralized.  Despite the numbing pain in his hands Jacob dunked his head again.  This time he forced his eyes open.  He came back up for a breath, trying to judge how long his arms would hold out against the cold and current, he dunked his head again and forced his eyes open one more time.  That was it, he had to inch back out of the water, grateful that the bank had not crumbled so completely that his whole body had fallen in.  But now he was aware for the first time that much time had passed.  The sun was not so warm as it had been when they stopped.  Night was coming.  

“Sarah!”  Jacob screamed not sure if he would hear her over the water.  “Sarah!”

“Daddy!”  He could hear her, but just barely.

“I’m coming for you baby.”

“Daddy I think I hear something.”  At least that is what Jacob thought he heard.  But he could not be sure, the roar of the water was still there.  As he crawled, horrors of the worst flashed in his mind, he rose shakily to his feet, stumbled, fell, rose again - he heard the worst.  It was low guttural and exactly what he would have imagined a bear to sound like.  He forced his eyes open again - it was like brimstone in his eyes, but for a moment he caught a glimpse.

Jacob and Sarah were on a narrow strip of trail leading into heart of the Grand Tetons, below them the mountain slipped into the river Jacob had just fallen into.  Above them was a step grass and wildflower covered rise, beautiful, bucolic, and the home of a huge brown shape, Jacob could not clearly see, rising up on its back legs.

“Sarah!”  Jacob screamed.  He crawled forward into a run, his legs churning towards his daughter through every scrap and fall.  A roar like rumbling thunder shook the very earth.

Jacob stopped knowing he was close to his daughter now, he felt the challenge of the roar.  The savage nature of the beast inherent to every animal, even the men who have tried so hard to civilize it out of themselves, rose up in Jacob and he screamed a dry ragged roar of his own.

“Daddy.”  Sarah whimpered softly next to him.  Jacob cracked his eyes open and it was a little easier this time.  He saw up the side of the mountain a beast more than big enough in and of itself, looking all the bigger because of the mountain’s steep rise.  And next to this huge brown bear, a smaller cub.  The pain became to great and Jacobs eyes closed involuntarily.

A frantic search was taking place inside Jacob’s mind.  Where was the bear spray?  The pain in his own eyes was enough to convince him that it might work, if only he could get to it quickly enough.  But he had stripped it off his belt in such haste when it had sprayed un-intentionally that he couldn’t guess where it had landed.  He opened his eyes.  The bear huffed as she pawed the ground, her head shaking back and forth.  Another great roar and its echo against the mountains.

“Fuck you!”  Jacob roared back.

The bear charged.  Jacob didn’t waver.  He took two strong steps forward placing himself between his daughter and the bear.     

1000

She pressed her lips against mine.  I breathed in through my nose, softly, hoping she wouldn’t take note of this momentary distraction: life.  The night, and day’s, events danced through my mind in images not words.  The warmth of hospitality, a B.B.Q.’ed feast.  A simple show, a simple town, the fireworks of a centennial celebration, and the electric clouds of a prairie storm capable of making centennials seem small.

I have kissed her a thousand times.  One thousand.  No more, no less.  Enough kisses to have imagined other lips when it was hers pressed against mine.  Enough kisses that the mingled drama of anticipation and excitement had shifted into expectation and stagnation.

What is love, besides the central question of my life?

Is it the moments of first attraction, the zest, soul, and flow that seem to stem from skipping through nine clouds?  Or is love the stolid act of holding hands after so much time, understanding, appreciation and non-appreciation that young girls coyishly cling to their young beau’s arm, whispering into his ear, “That will be us some day.”

If there is meaning in the subtle acts of randomness that have woven this universe together, then perhaps there is meaning in the fact that I put a question-mark at the end of the first sentence and a period on the second.  

She pressed her lips to mine, and I pressed my lips back.  I thought of the show, a man finding himself by untethering himself amidst an unknown sea.  In the movie fresh new love, always changing, always yearning, always searching, was the incarnation of happiness.  

I considered stagnation.

I kissed her.  For now, a kiss is good enough.

Frustration With Faith

When you consider the question of God should you consider Him/Her/It purely out of the logic of your own mind or are you going to take a systematic approach to understanding all the different aspects of His (for simplicities sake) creation?  

If your answer is yes, and if you did answer yes you would find me in agreement with you, Biology becomes the most sensible Theology possible.  Yet no one has taken a systematic approach to translating the body of knowledge the science of Biology has generated so far into Theological framework.  

Of course, to a certain extent science is unsuited to be placed in a Theological frame work.  Science simply states what it knows while carefully (sometimes obnoxiously carefully) not making assumptions about what it does not know.  For theology when data runs out, parable steps in.  

Thus making a theology out of biology would be difficult because the doctrine would have to be in a constant state of flux.  It would not give its adherents the rock solid foundation of commandments written in stone or those works handed down from on high.

Still because of the transient nature of a scientific appreciation for God’s glory it would be very difficult to convince the masses, who typically want a neatly bulleted religion with all of the mysteries cordoned off behind velvet curtains with serious looking men standing by to assure them that everything is fine, please don’t look behind the curtain.  No, the masses would be very hard to convince that a realistic approach to the divine - though harder in general, would pay dividends orders of magnitude greater than those which we reap from current yet ancient religions.

I would ask those masses if a farmer would plant his crop in the same way that a pre-agricultural revolution farmer plant his crop?  Would a farmer plant his crop as a pre-industrial revolution farmer?  Does an engineer build in the same exploratory manner of the men of the middle ages, or even the great feats of the Ancient Egyptians?  Would you go to the library and search through mountains of micro-film when you could just do a Google search instead?

Yet so many follow doctrines, good enough in their times, yet thousands of years old.  Updates more drastic than modern translations are needed.  The journey into a spiritual life is as necessary today as it was a hundred, thousand, or ten thousand years ago.  Science and the language that it has generated carefully calculated to not overstate its own data is the gateway into a modern spirituality beyond that of new age.  I know I’m not the first to say, though I hope throughout my life time to develop the base of knowledge necessary to lay the foundation of this ambitious goal.

Things I'm Not Smart Enough For

So let me see if I can gauge this correctly.  Heisenberg basically states that inside of an arena where the observer can know nothing about the contents (if for no other reason than you will disrupt the workings of the item of observation by the observation) the most you can ever know is a percentage of chance.  

The cat is dead.  The cat is alive.  Flip a coin, 49.9%, 49.9%  (it’s always bothered me that no one ever gives any chance to the coin landing on one of its edges.)

But aren’t there really an infinity of choices inside that box?  Is that cat laying down?  Is it licking its paw and cleaning its ear?  Awake, asleep, purring, hissing.  Infinity.  And all of that infinity is only reasonably explained by a multitude of universes, an infinity really, where all those options are correct.

After all if Einstein is to be correct and God is not in fact playing dice with the universe, then the only answer that we can come to is that for God all the rolls of the dice are equal and they all happen together.  Multiple universes for us could be a single creation to Him.

Pasturized

Homogenization, truly a curse word in this 22^nd century, yet it’s a curse that our globalized world is succumbing to more deeply with each passing day.  Is that necessarily a bad thing?  Losing your individuality is most definitely a bad thing, and strip malls, Starbucks, and Home Depots are a part of that lost sense of community.  One community on the outskirts of Barcelona used to be as different from one on the outskirts of Seville as Miami is from Chicago.  They all had cultural identity.  Now everyone knows what happened in Paris...Hilton. 

I’m going to miss that cultural identity, probably more than the next guy.  But as the worldwide homogenization slowly consumes the cultural identities of the world we will still have cultural markers.  

As barriers of distance are removed and baring a complete retrogression of society, there is no way to wall off the world seeping in through cable, internet, and wireless connections.  If you can’t beat them, join them...right?  Technology will never stay hidden, the Chinese won’t horde gunpowder to themselves for a thousand years just as we can’t keep the Chinese from hacking into an iphone today.  

People naturally want to improve their condition and define themselves as unique.  So as we stand on the shoulders of giants who are going to be ever closer to us (just think the giant whose shoulders you stand on tomorrow might be uploading his genius today) and cultural differences get washed into the malaise of consumerism, people will search harder for the unique souls able to stay afloat in the mire...THE CREAM SHALL RISE.

Just for Today

Get over yourself.  That is what I am thinking.  Everyday I think about how I am going to write my next post.  Thoughts run through my head ranging from grandiose to bland.  I've been wanting to relate the story of Frodo the Hobbit and his trip up to Rivendale before taking his daring journey to Mordor.  But I had to dismiss that notion because the whole Lord of the Rings series has been tainted.  It used to be that a discerning reader could classify someone by their knowledge of Lord of the Rings.

"Oh, you have read Lord of the Rings?"  And suddenly you knew that this person was, or fashioned themselves as a geek, nerd, or possible D&D aficionado.  But not simply a run-of-the-mill geek.  A Lord of the Rings fan had a heroic heart even if the spine that backed it up was a touch brittle.

Now you say Lord of the Rings and people talk about what a great movie it was.  My own girlfriend has never read the books...only seen the movies.  I am ashamed.

Other times I think about relating each one of my days through some invented hero who can stand tall in the face of the trivialities that arise from my lazy methods of travel.  It is hard to have a heroic journey when you don't even a time table  Who ever heard of the hero sauntering along to save the day?

And so I get to wherever it is I am heading each day and the night steals the light and I think about all these things I am going to write to those of you who would like to stay updated on my journey (thanks for reading Mom) and all of it seems less than huge, smaller than real.  And I don't write.

So when you read about my faux-hero...don't laugh.  Just read between the lines and know my day.

That is it.  For today, I wrote.

Waterboy 2nd post

Waterboy 2nd post

“There’s something going on between this girl and I.”  I said to Nancy.  Nancy, of course, was the shrink my parents had found for me.  They insisted I go every week.  They liked being able to remind me how much money it cost to send me to her. 

“Really?  And what sort of thing are we talking about?”  

“Well, I guess I should begin by saying that no matter what I say about her.  Or how I end up feeling about her.  I don’t trust her.”

“From what you’ve told me about your history, trust is going to come a little hard.”

“Yeah…hard, that’s one way of putting it.  Another would be that my history makes me totally fucking limp.”

She raised her eyebrows, one at a time.  

“That seems a little sexual.”  She said.  “Aren’t you wound up a little tight about this?”  She said.  “Didn’t you just meet this girl?”

“Sex is always a possibility.  I mean, well, maybe it’s different for a man but orgasms are as necessary as any other bodily function.  You can’t go a week without taking a piss can you?  The same holds true for sex.  I mean if a man goes long enough he’ll do it involuntarily, just like a baby wets his pants.  But you’re right in a way too, I’m jumping the gun a little.  It’s just all I think about.  Every woman I meet the thought runs through my head.  I need sex.  Yet this other part of me wants it to be holy, like a Disney movie or something.  Then there’s the danger.”

“Sex is dangerous?”

“Yes - no, I don’t know.  What would I know?  I mean theoretically sex with a woman you trust shouldn’t be dangerous.  If you’ve figured out some reliable form of birth control, and you can count on your partner not to bring any weird diseases home with them, then sex is kosher.  But what makes me think I can trust they don’t have any weird diseases?  

-

“Hey Melinda.”

“Oh, hey Bernie.  Are you done too?”  We were standing around the corner from school.  Melinda looked around, checking to see if anyone saw us.  It was all clear.  

“Yeah, all done.”  I said.  It was the end of fifth period.  We only had to take five periods of class.  Then one period of study session.  But if you scheduled the study session at the end of the day you could just go home a period early.  

“That’s cool.”  She said, I could feel the conversation dying.  There was so much I wanted to say, but how much of it would be redundant to her.  How much of what I said had Network already shown her?  

So I said something without thinking, just words to fill the void.  “Hey are you on facebook?”  A question as obvious as, ‘do you have a boyfriend.’  On facebook we become intimate without touching, an arms length friendship that, nevertheless, is advertised to all.  And I knew, just like ‘do you have a boyfriend’, I had turned her off with my words.  She didn’t want to lie to me.  She didn’t want to cause me pain.  Nor did she want her list of friends, the real ones, the ones she actually talked to, to question her about why she had accepted my friendship.  I just wanted her to like me, and yet her opinion was already formed.  I was a loser, nerd, outcast. My head spun with all the different things she might be thinking of me.  Were any of those things influenced by Network if so what were the possibilities?  What were the odds that anything to do with Network was idiotic?  If so what does she know from the limited bit she’d actually seen of me?  

I always reminded myself that Network had never really shown up until the doctors had made me start questioning my sanity.  

“Not that it matters,” I added hastily, “I’m not even on it.”  A lie.  “How was class?”  I asked caught in the avalanche of words I’d let loose.  I worried that my voice would betray the underlying plea,‘you’ve been nice to me, don’t leave.  You’ve looked at me and I construed that look as interest.  Please, I know Network has stamped all the unattractive labels on me.  Or do you not know anything, is all of this just make believe?  I do not know.  Just please, please – my heart begged – hang out with me long enough to get past this awkward stage.’  

“Fine I guess.  Mrs. Warner is a bitch.”  

“Yeah.”  I agreed.  

Everything went real quiet between us then.  Not so awkward anymore, just quiet.  We walked home.  She let me lead.  I took odd twists and turns, not wanting anyone to see us.  I wasn’t completely sure if I was doing this to hide and protect her reputation, or if I wanted this to be a moment only she and I shared.  Either way she never questioned my route.  

When we got to my house my parents weren’t home.  My Dad worked as a chemist for some lab they’d just opened up.  My mom was an engineer.  They never got home from work until late.  Melinda and I sat down and started studying, we didn’t talk much.     

“Do you want to have dinner with me tonight?”  As soon as I said it I knew I shouldn’t have.  I’d broken the natural flow of the conversation with a plea to head off some place more intimate.   

“Hey, you know what…never mind.  I’m sorry.  Just forget I said anything.”  I back peddled.

She looked at me and smiled.  It was the most depressing smile I’d ever seen.  It was the smile a person would give to another persons small child as they wailed for a small plastic toy in the check-out isle.  

“I can’t.  My parents are expecting me at home.”

-

“She gives me some measure of hope.  Hope that I won’t spend the rest of my life having to play the politician.  And maybe, one day, I might get to the point where I can say what I want to say about things and have the respect of the people listening to me.”

“What makes you think no one respects you now?”

“Nancy, I’m a kid.  Not a little kid, but still I’m a kid.  I don’t have a license.  I don’t have a car.  I can’t get a credit card.  I’m nothing, and don’t give me some bull crap line that I am something.”  I’d come in to Nancy’s office talking.  I didn’t want to give her the chance to ask about Melinda.  I wanted to direct the conversation away from it.  I was scared of the way I was feeling, it was too big.  

“No one respects kids.”  I continued.  “Why should they?  I mean just because I know more math than nine out of ten adults, just because I’ve read more books than my English teacher, and I take naps in history and still ace the tests - why should adults respect me?  I’ve never accomplished anything but a few good grades.  And I get it, I really do, the real world respects those grades but they’re still just grades.  It’s not like I’ve invented anything new.  Or even done something new for that matter.  I’ve just digested what they told me to digest and spit it back out to them.”  

“I don’t think that’s true.”  I couldn’t tell if she was being genuine or was using a bit of politic speak of her own.

“True or not I can’t wait until I’m an adult to earn some respect.”

And how do you plan on doing that?

“For now I’m going to write.”

“Writing?”

“Yeah, I mean it doesn’t take any great expertise to write.  You just sit down and put pen to paper.  Or fingers to keyboard, as the case is.  Anybody can make up a yarn.  Then later when I’m older and I’ve gotten some respect as an author maybe that will open the doors up for me to do something real with my life - actually create something, instead of just giving voice to the stories in my head.”

Nancy smiled and shook her head.  “You really think it will be that easy to write, do you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

A little piece of my brain whispered to me that Network was watching me right now.  And all those people out there watching me through Network were listening.  And they would all buy my book when the time came.  When the time came.      

“Besides it gives me hope,”  I continued, purely for Network’s sake, “and…its not like I can stop.  I need to write.  Something goes crazy inside of me when I don’t sit down and write.  I don’t always feel that craziness at night when I’m tired and all I really want to do is go to bed.  But its there waiting for me when I wake up.  And it only takes one or two days of penance to make up for it.”  If I just kept this up the whole world would appreciate my suicide attempt as the eccentricities of an artist, instead of the ravings of a lunatic.    

“Penance?”  Nancy asked.  

“Sort of yeah.  I mean where does a story come from anyway?  The logical answer is the imagination.  But what’s logical about imagination?  Maybe stories are just like fishing nets tossed out into some big communal pool.  And storytellers are just the guys doing the fishing.  That’s what I feel like.  A fisherman.  And if I don’t toss my nets out everyday – I guess its superstitious, but – it’s like I owe Neptune some payment for not being out there doing my job.”  I’d paraphrased that line of bull from some Stephen King books.

“So writing is a job not an art?”

“What’s the difference between a writer and a dreamer, or even a storyteller?”

“I’ll bite, what?”

“The difference is writing.”

We both sat with that last statement for a few moments.

“Bernie, may I ask you a question?”

I looked at her in the eyes for a few moments.  Something in the tone of her voice said that I wasn’t going to like the question.  And somehow I knew it was going to be a major change of gears for our conversation.

“Do you still think about suicide?”

I let the question hang there.

“It is the simplest solution to an over complicated life.”  I finally whispered.  

-

“You’re problems with Network remind me of a fight.”  Nancy said.

“A fight?  I don’t follow, what’d you mean?”

“Karl Jung talked about going through a dark period in his life.  He was at once searching out what made the mentally insane different by exploring insanity with-in himself and a lot of the time - he was in this state for ten years - he wasn’t sure if he was sane or not.  When he talked about it later he talked about fighting with Angels and Demons...to him there wasn’t really a difference since one was just the fallen form of the other.  But what he really described was the frantic energy he spent fighting these celestial battles.  It was all in his mind, and he developed an understanding that in these battles he wasn’t constrained by his physical form, yet it seemed impossible to strike the Angel.  No matter how fast he moved, no matter how many inconceivable blows he struck the Angel always blocked him, seemingly without effort.

“It was the fight of his life, yet there was never anything solid to strike.”

“Network.”  I whispered.

“Network.”  She confirmed.  

-

Looking back I can’t quite tell where or how Network began.  It was out in California.  I was home alone a lot.  I had friends and I felt like I knew all about them yet, I didn’t know them.  Loneliness was probably the biggest factor.   Loneliness and too much time to think.  Mix all that up with a healthy imagination and you’ve got yourself a delusion and I’m the proof in the pudding.  So I don’t really know if I was being followed.  No logical reason would lead me to believe that I was being tailed.  But if Network ever existed anywhere besides my imagination then all the evidence washed away in The Flood.

-  

The world was asleep in the depth of night when dawn is still far enough away to seem impossible.  I stepped softly out of the house and eased the door closed behind me.  Florida never really gets cold, in the depths of winter when the states north of the Mason-Dixon line are swathed in snow and places south of that line are frosted with ice, Southern Florida sports balmy spring-like days.  

Yet tonight was different.  My breath rose up in smokey plums from my mouth.  Supposedly below some invisible line near Tampa nothing ever freezes.  Supposedly.  The night before tonight old man winter had placed his icy fingers as far south as Naples.  It wasn’t freezing as I stepped outside, but blood gets thin in the tropics.

Creeping down the stairs to the main street, my head swiveling back and forth searching for any sign of anyone, everyone - Network - watching me.  I ran.

I didn’t sprint, keeping a steady pace my ancestors hunting antelope on the plains would have appreciated.  My final destination was the local Kinkos.  MapQuest had informed me it was five point two miles away, roughly six minutes by car.  There was no car.  My improvised route turned my trek into a seven mile jaunt.  Twists and turns that the aforementioned antelope might just take.  This was no practice for the hunt though.  I was the prey, sniffing the chilled air for instinctual smells of the hunter.  Signs I wouldn’t have recognized even if I had smelled something.  As far as I could tell Network was no where in sight.  Still, fences were hopped, backyards ran through, yapping little dogs and frightening big dogs avoided.  The tiny flash-drive on my keychain was my proverbial torch.

Because of Melinda, I’d been writing every night.  

Walking into the bright lights of Kinkos out of the cold night my face was flushed and sweaty, I drew a stare from the bleary eyed woman behind the counter.  She shook her head and blinked several times, probably thinking I was just some mind addled hallucination.  I wondered if she was right.

No one had followed me.  At least no one I had seen.  

I printed my story.  One hundred and twenty-two single spaced pages.  I asked the woman behind the counter to package it twice.  Once in SASE.  Second in an envelope addressed to a woman just a few miles north of me in Sarasota.  She agented books in Florida. I was submitting my novel.

As I ran home I realized Network probably had a tracking device installed in my flash-drive.  My legs had been wheeling against the pavement in a rhythmic motion that seemed like it would carry me blindly into infinity.  Now they slowed as my flash-drive grew heavy.  I pulled my keys out of my pocket and looked at the small plastic case.  For some reason I held it up to the sky, the moon became my backdrop and the insignificant little piece of plastic did not cover the man in the moon’s smile.  

“Fuck you.”  I whispered.  And I threw the it against the pavement.  There was no satisfying shatter.  The little piece of electronic wizardry was more robust than I had suspected.  In the dark from where I was standing I couldn’t even be sure I had cracked.  It didn’t matter.  The flash-drive had served its purpose and if Network was tracking me through it, it was gone now.  As I walked home my legs grew tight and heavy.