. . .

There is lightning among the hats. It bursts a vein of drum-hats with a great repeating boom.

The wind whips at Tom Friedman. He stands and he nearly falls.

It is hurting in him. Need is choking him. Need and snot are choking him. Need and snot and the vapors of the rotting hats are choking him. He slips on the slippery slope of dead hats and comes down three feet further towards the ground. He clutches at rotten felt but the hats offer him no purchase, he is only sliding, covered in the mucilage of moist dead.

It is there with his face down among them that he sees it.

It is there that he understands it.

For a confused moment when he sees the blackness of piled hats it is like a shadow passing over his future; it is like a void opening to consume his head; his vision opens not into the hat pressed against his eyes but onto a dizzying immensity.

He is suffocating on it.

<< – 8 –

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