I first met Neil not long after my father died. I was living in a big old red-brick Victorian semi in north London with my mother and her vicious cat Sparky, trying and failing to finish a long, learned novel packed tight with the obscure literary allusions and authentic multicultural credentials that the publishers loved in those days, when out of nowhere Neil rode into town, all bravado and muscles and shaved head and mad, staring eyes. He was just a boy, really, but a boy with an ASBO at fourteen, a caution at fifteen, a spell in junior detention centre at sixteen and a boy of his own by seventeen. He was a boy who was wild and dangerous and soft-hearted, a boy who wanted to live more badly than anyone else I knew at that time. Compared to my own sad, shambling existence in the shadows of life, his was a kaleidoscope. I peeped from behind my mother's curtains at the world outside and wrote about people like Neil. I never believed that he really existed until I met him.

Here's how it happened. It was one of those long, cold winter evenings in London, when the streets are slick with a rain you don't recall having fallen and the lights are an orange ball above you in the damp, black chill, fighting feebly against the night. Water hangs in the air with nowhere to go. You brush against these tiny cold needles and they stab your face, making you draw your hood closer about you. Long, dark alleyways harbour thieves and villains, furtive drug-dealers and nervous knife-wielders and young drunk couples rutting. Through it all runs the Holloway Road, a long straight road with dismal shuttered shops on either side, the gloom punctuated at infrequent intervals by the bright lights of a pub, a kebab shop, a curry house, a burger joint. One or two of the old fish and chip shops remain, but they are relics of a time fast being forgotten. A younger crowd roams the streets on these nights, ravenous for real red meat, big slabs of it slathered in ketchup and hot chili sauce. Fish seems strangely genteel for such a crowd. Even an inch of grease and a side order of thick, stodgy chips cannot hide the slight effeminacy of the tender white fish that melts away at the first bite. The crowd on the Holloway Road these days wants meat that you can bite into, gristle that you can chew on, blood that you can wipe off your lower lip. It wants its beer cold, its curry hot, its lights bright and its music loud. Nothing luke-warm, nothing ambiguous for this crowd.

If you follow the long, straight Holloway Road far beyond the neon horizon, you'll end up in Scotland. It's hard to believe, but this drab parade of tawdriness is the Great North Road by another name. Before too long, the Holloway Road becomes Archway Road, then Aylmer Road, Lyttelton Road, Falloden Way, then the Barnet Bypass, and then you're out of the suburbs and into open countryside, speeding up the A1, sometimes calling itself the Great North Road, other times the London Road, depending on the perspective of the locals, and the green fields and hedgerows flash past as you tick off the towns - Stevenage, Letchworth, Peterborough, Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, Darlington, Durham. Fight your way through the huge smoky grey sprawl of Newcastle and you find yourself speeding up along quiet open roads now, close enough to the sea to smell the salt in the air and hear the seagulls cawing but never quite close enough to see that big grey frigid North Sea until suddenly you're past Berwick-upon Tweed and hopping over the border into Scotland without even realising it, and there is the sea in front of you all craggy crumbling cliffs and white-topped waves, freezing and forbidding, so that after just a few minutes the road turns away in disappointment and heads inland, cutting across open countryside to grand, regal old Edinburgh, with its magical castle suspended in the clouds above the city. You skirt over the top of ancient Holyrood Park, and for the last few hundred yards of its existence the A1 takes on the name of Waterloo Place, as if trying to reassert its Englishness one last time, reminding the burghers of this proud town that this road, the A1, begins on Newgate Street in London, where Rob Roy himself was held in chains.

I was dreaming all these unconnected vague drunken dreams as I sat in a plastic box of light and sound and blood, Donna's Kebabs I think it was called, taking refuge from the oppressive damp mist outside which had, after some time spent walking up and down the Holloway Road looking for some friends I'd misplaced earlier in the evening, pierced the protective film of alcohol and got to my joints, making my elbows and knees ache arthritically. So I sat huddled over a white foam box filled with grey-brown, glistening slices of meat encased in pita bread and doused in hot sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, red onion, white onion, cucumber, gherkins and olives. By the time Neil walked in I had left magical castles and folk heroes far behind and was pondering on the olives, a nice touch but not right. I admired the originality, but originality is not what you expect from a kebab house at midnight on the Holloway Road in the middle of November. You want something to fill your stomach with the expected greasy-sweet flavours. The sourness of the olives was unexpected, and left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Donna did not have any other customers that night, either: perhaps others felt the same about olives in a kebab. So I was surprised when this big, shaven-headed hulk of a man ignored all the empty tables and eased himself creaking into the little red plastic chair opposite me, his gruff "dja mind?" uttered far too late to admit any response but an impotent shrug.

For long minutes he said nothing, just attacking his extra large kebab as if he hadn't eaten for a month. I sat saying nothing, eating nothing. I couldn't. I got the sensation that was strange to me at the time but would soon become familiar: that Neil was doing enough living for the two of us, and there was nothing left for me to do but watch. Soon he had ketchup and chili sauce all over his stubbly chin, and bits of lettuce had flown all over the table, the floor, his jeans, his T-shirt. Whereas I had been eating my kebab using a small folded piece of pita bread as an ersatz fork, Neil just shoved the whole bundle of meat, salad and sauce into his face and began chomping with his huge strong jaws, slashing the food to pieces and somehow ending up with most of it in his mouth, where he chewed only perfunctorily before gulping it loudly down and setting those chomping blades immediately to work on a new mouthful. The noise was astonishing. The dull beat of the radio, the squealing roar of the traffic on the Holloway Road and the underlying buzz of the slowly rotating lump of grizzly meat in the window were all drowned out by the sound of Neil's bones crashing against each other, his saliva washing around among the sauce and ketchup and meat, his muscles working so hard that his temples pulsed furiously with each pincer-like motion of those powerful jaws. His face, already blood-red, became redder with each mouthful, and just as I was beginning to fear that he would choke, he put the remains of the kebab down, took a big slurp of Coke and belched softly.

"So whatcha doing tonight?" he asked. He looked like a child suddenly, all eager energy and bright eyes, waiting for the next amazing thing to come his way.

"I was looking for my friends," I replied. "I lost them somewhere back there." I gestured vaguely over my shoulder into the misty wet darkness, and Neil's eyes followed my arm faithfully, searching the night for people he'd never seen before.

"Can't you call them?" he asked. "Text them? Page them? Email them? IM them? Photograph yourself holding up a sign saying ‘Where the f--- are you?' and send it to them? I mean, who loses people these days?"

I looked down at my kebab, and picked up a small mouthful with my piece of pita bread. "I don't have a mobile," I said awkwardly. Usually it was a sentence I pronounced with pride, as it comprised one of my few truly distinguishing features. People would draw in their breaths and regard me with awe, as one who had asserted his individuality and resisted the siren call of technology. But suddenly tonight my lack of a mobile phone felt like what it really was, a phoney affectation. To my relief and astonishment, Neil did not pass judgement one way or the other, just accepting it baldly as one more simple fact to add to his growing store of knowledge about the world around him.

"Well, if you can't find them, they've either gone home or gone to a club in the West End or they just don't want to be found," he said after a moment of intense concentration. "So here is what I propose. We'll finish our food here and then go around the corner to the Nag's Head and talk to as many people as we can until we find someone who's going to a party afterwards, and then we tag along and have the time of our lives. How's that sound? By the way, I'm Neil Blake."

"Jack Maertens," I replied, and Neil took that for assent to his plan of action, for he then began attacking the rest of his kebab and motioned for me to do the same, which I did, feeling a little sick as I lurched back out into the dark wet Holloway night and followed Neil to the Nag's Head, a dive of the worst kind, so bad that I didn't want to go in until he told me patiently and seriously, as if talking to a slow child, that he had chosen it precisely for the very reason of its awfulness, which would make anyone in it naturally keen to get out and on to somewhere better. He was soon proved right, too, as after just a half hour or so of working that tight-packed smelly old crowd, he hit upon a group of students who were heading on to a party up in Highgate, and all he had to do was tell them a few jokes and buy a couple of rounds of drinks, which he left me to pay for, and suddenly we were on the night bus chugging up Highgate Hill, where a few hundred years ago Dick Whittington had heard the Bow Bells calling him back to fame and fortune in London, and where today middle-class families drove their huge snorting Landrovers up to huddle together in expensive refuge from the pulsating violent ugliness below. For Neil and me that night, Highgate Hill was a place of cheap wine in plastic cups, vodka in jelly, cheap cigarettes, expensive hashish from a reputable dealer on the Edgware Road, tequila slammers, half-grabbed kisses with a girl on a sofa, loud music and shouting and some attempts to dance.

By the time we left it was already morning and people in suits and raincoats were climbing sourly onto buses. The sun was still not up, though, and neither was my mother when I sneaked in quietly through the sleeping house to my room. Where Neil went after that I don't know, but I know that he must have followed me home because the next day when I woke up, although I hadn't given him my address or phone number and was caught between relief and regret over it, I went downstairs and found him back again, sitting in my mother's living room sipping a cup of tea and chatting amiably with her about the beautiful bright yellow winter jasmine climbing across the walls of her garden. Soon we were out again onto the Holloway Road, dodging cars and buses and mingling with the crazy throngs of shoppers as we hopped from pub to pub, our talk becoming crazier at each place until the orange glow of evening took hold and the shoppers on the street became drunks like us, and after we had hopped from pub to pub for a while Neil was able to finagle us into another party, this time in Hackney.

Almost every night and every day passed this way in the new period of my life in which the morose brooding behind my mother's curtains suddenly gave way to a riotous drunken haze of colour and noise. If I felt any regret it was only because my novel was sitting unwritten on my laptop and by the time I woke up each afternoon it was time to go out again. As well, there was a slight lingering feeling of being a hanger-on. At the parties we went to I knew nobody, and usually Neil didn't either. Yet soon he was virtually playing host, while I felt myself merely being suffered as a necessary side effect of Neil's irrepressible presence. I tried to introduce him to some of my friends, but he quickly tired of them, while they thought he was mad, and we left early from whatever soiree we had ruined. As for his friends, he said he had none. Since leaving Feltham Young Offenders Institution he had drifted from town to town, making deep and intimate connections but not lasting ones. He had more phone numbers than his mobile phone's memory could handle, but each of them was accompanied by a long and extravagant story about why he couldn't call it because he owed the person money or a favour or had slept with his wife or stolen his car. So we sloped around north London from pub to pub and invited ourselves to parties with strangers.

Then, one day, Neil was gone. For several weeks I heard nothing until, just before Christmas, a battered postcard smudged with rain informed me that Cornwall in December was a truly beautiful place, full of crags and rocks and monuments to people and gods nobody can remember any more. He was staying in a friend's old cottage working his way quickly through a dusty old Cornish dictionary, he told me, seeming to remember the ancient words rather than having to learn them anew. He had got as far as "gwreg" (wife), but couldn't find anyone to teach him the correct pronunciations. So he was fumbling through, making up his own sounds as he went on and planning to get all the way through to z by New Year. He signed off "Dha weles" without even putting his name, although who else could it be? The friends with whom I now spent my time, the collection of failed writers and "mature students" who only a few weeks ago had been in my naïve young eyes the height of wit and erudition and wisdom, seemed like shades. None of them could have composed something so spontaneous and true as that smudged, creased old postcard with its spidery black script streaking across the page, winding its way between the lines of the address and spilling over onto the bright yellow sands and blue sea on the other side. I was gripped, and wanted to jump into my old blue-green Nissan Figaro and burn down the M4 to spend Christmas with Neil learning Cornish and drinking whisky in the rickety old fisherman's cottage with the fire crackling and the treacherous winds lashing the windowpanes. But I lacked the heart for it, and instead toasted Christmas with sherry in my mother's living room with some relatives who always made me feel dead.

New Year's Eve came around and I was feeling as lonely as the grave. I had been invited to a couple of parties but knew exactly what they would be like and had no interest in going. I fully intended to see the New Year in with my mother, using my desire for solitude as a pretext to be a good son for once and help her through what my vapid relatives had sententiously predicted would be a ‘difficult time' for her. By ten o'clock, however, the canned laughter from the television was making me perfectly suicidal and I knew that my mother could see it because she offered to turn it off and I hastily declined and she looked relieved as I sped out of the door and into the cold dark night full of animal yelps and whoops. I pulled the top down on my Figaro so that I could hear it all and perhaps let some of it rub off on my lonely soul. I drove down the Hornsey Road into the dark madness of Holloway and all was as I expected but it did nothing for me. After driving up and down for some time looking for something, I parked in a side street and did something truly absurd. I went to Donna's Kebabs, ordered an extra large kebab with hot sauce and chomped down on it, watching the clock tick down to midnight and all the time fully expecting Neil to come crashing in full of ideas and enthusiasm and dragging me out of my solitude into some pulsating pit of desperate young drinkers trying to live just a little more before the end of the year. Of course, nothing happened. Neil was buried in his Cornish dictionary, probably halfway through ‘y' and feverishly fighting his way to the end, and I was left with myself. It was another slow night for Donna's Kebabs: everyone with anywhere to go was somewhere else. Around midnight the spotty young man who had been left in charge shuffled out from behind the counter with two cans of beer and set one before me, saying, "Don't tell anyone, yeah?"

Midnight came and went. We clinked cans. For the kebab boy, the fear of getting caught seemed to outweigh the pleasure of rebelling against Donna, and he looked constantly out of the window for the police, hardly talking to me all the time, and about ten minutes later, with his can still half-full, he went back behind the counter. I was bad company anyway, and to avoid getting Donna's Kebabs closed down over the worst, smallest and most dismal and depressing New Year's party in history, I took my beer out into the street. People were cheering as they swayed past in flush-cheeked groups, arms around each other, and several tried to gather me up and carry me along in their tide of celebration, but I resisted and broke free. Everything felt wrong, and all I could think about was that one more year had passed with my great literary novel still unwritten. I had wasted too many nights on the Holloway Road and too many mornings lying in bed too sick and confused to do anything. My laptop brimmed with half-finished thoughts. Abandoned chapters littered the dark corners of its hard drive. It was taking longer and longer to start up in the mornings, evidence, the shop said, of a virus, but to me it was a symptom of the weight of hackneyed, cliché-ridden prose clogging its arteries. The more I wrote, the slower it ran, as if in protest at the poverty of my writing. A few days later, in a grand New Year experiment, I tried taking a notebook to a café and writing there, as I had on long dreamy university days, but the process now felt foreign. My hand ached quickly, the dull characters in the café distracted me too easily, and writing even the simplest sentence seemed to require far too much effort. I realised that I could never have churned out so many megabytes of dross had I been forced to write longhand, or even to feed paper through an old-fashioned typewriter. At some point my body would have rebelled against the wasted effort, as it rebelled now in those cafés at every trite sentence that my tired brain formed. I went back to my room and let my fingers glide swiftly over the keys. Better to produce garbage than to produce nothing at all, the writing books always said. So for two months I cluttered my hard drive with more megabytes of ponderous, inelegant, pretentiously sententious prose, all the while feeling like more of a fool.

When Neil came racing into my mother's house one bright March morning, then, I embraced him as my saviour. He did look curiously messianic, standing there in the hallway with the bright orange sun flooding in through the open door at his back and making him almost glow around the edges, as his bright brown eyes shone childlike and his thick face smiled broadly but serenely at me. He looked at once like a man who had discovered some important secret and like a child eager to discover a new one. Probably all this was in my head, a product of the months of despair and their sudden end in a blaze of glorious spring light. We hugged like old brothers, and my mother stood watching us in bemusement. She liked Neil for his polite talk of winter jasmine and for the simplicity and kindness that lay beneath all that loud masculine youth and laughter and energy, but she could sense that he was dangerous too. She knew I would leave with him soon and that she couldn't stop me, but she warned me before I left not to follow him everywhere he went.

"Keep your own mind, Jack," she said. "Don't let yourself be led anywhere you don't want to go."

I kissed her and said I'd be fine, and indeed at that time I felt stronger and more independent than at any time in my life, and the idea of going anywhere I didn't want to was ridiculous and slightly hurtful. By that time Neil and I had spent a week or two exploring every pub and bar and club and kebab shop and curry house and chicken shack and burger joint on the Holloway Road, and were thoroughly sick of London and all its grey grimy misery. We'd even taken to trying the pubs around my mother's house in sedate little Crouch End, disturbing the faithful old dogs at the feet of the old men with their crossword in one hand and pipe in the other and their pint of bitter half-drunk on the table in front of them. We decided to cause some havoc in those places just to shake them out of their dead filmy-eyed smiling expressions and get them to put down their pipes and papers and express something, if only anger. But the first place we tried it, a tiny little place with net curtains on the window and a crackling fire and a leafy beer garden out back, nobody rose to the bait. We cursed loudly and danced and shouted and even took a swig of one old man's beer. But nobody said a word. The barman stared at us with an ambiguous expression on his face, and the customers just buried themselves in their crosswords and waited for us to go away and leave them alone, which we soon did, feeling so ashamed of the whole thing that we bought a round of beers for everyone. After that we got a bottle of whisky from an off-licence on the Hornsey Road and went down the hill to dark dirty old Elthorne Park to sit among the sad old winos and drink and smoke. Neither of us said very much, not even Neil, who usually only seemed to stop speaking to eat, sleep or kiss someone. I don't know what he was thinking about, but I was thinking of my father, who had worked all his life in a government office up in the city and travelled home on the same train every night, always stopping on his way back from the station for a quick pint and a chat with his friends before coming home to dinner. I imagined how he would have looked at Neil and me if we'd interrupted his quiet pint one tired evening with foolish attempts to goad him, how he would have told the story later over dinner with a sad shake of his head.

"We must leave tomorrow," Neil said into the night. A couple of winos looked over: we'd been silent so long that they must have forgotten we were there.

###################################################################################

AND THE ROAD GOES ON FOREVER

A Life On Two Wheels

By Gerald O. Ryan

Glance past handlebar hands that grasp the long faint shadow cast in front of your bicycle in the early morning sunlight. See that gray silhouette transform from the gaunt Giacometti form on two wheels to a squatter combination of spinning circles and frame triangles as the sun rises higher in the sky. The shadow condenses, disappears as the sun reaches its zenith, now follows behind like a faithful dog for the rest of the day.

Look down and watch fading asphalt flow under rolling wheels. See knees and top tube and handlebar and arms joined in curious stasis and continuous revolution. The arms belong to the rider who belongs to the road that never ends. They’ve changed from smooth strong forearms to tauter drawn limbs, from the smooth skin of youth to the complex alligator map of wrinkles that so absorbed a young boy as he studied his father’s arms as a child. See the knees now scarred from surgeon’s knives, protesting as the road continues, but still faithful to the rider who knows them well.

Look up and see parallel lines ever retreating toward the teasing horizon or the next hill, down tree-lined paths and corn-filled country roads, always approaching the next town or rest stop, always receding into thin memories as you rejoin the road.

Roll past far-spaced farms, neat boxes of white houses and rickety red barns and see newborn sows and calves, smell hogs and fertilizer. Hear the sounds of tractors turning the soil for the fresh planting of crops, the sound of harvesters at season’s end as that bounty is reaped. Wave and be waved at by the solitary occupants of huge farm combines as they rumble down that same shared road.

Pedal down stretches of towering green pines that coolly exude rich resin aromas. Coast and hear the tick of the freewheel in the oddly quiet calm and stately forest silence. Hear the tap of woodpecker and watch the sudden flit of the cardinal. See the squirrel as it darts from tree to tree in never-ending, nut-carrying mission. Ride by the river and peer through early morning mists and rough stalked reeds to see fish jump and fowl preen. Smell the curious, rich odor of decay where water meets bank in marshy confluence. Inadvertently inhale and swallow swarms of bugs that dance at the river’s edge.

Careen down city streets, ever alert, always surprised at the car-bus-truck that leaps in front of you with no warning. Immerse yourself in traffic sounds and diesel smells, in potholes and pedestrians, in stoplights and swung-open car doors. Hear the constant

honk and roar. Feel your hands grip the brake levers in sudden stop.

Places may change, but the road goes on forever. Feel the seasons roll by, the never ending wheel of spring, summer, autumn, winter, the forever cycle of years that will continue long after bicycle wheels cease their spin.

Pedal through new buds and the creeping green seen only from the corner of the eye until spring bursts forth in sudden surprise all around you. Creatures court and birds build nests among blossoms and slowly warming air that caresses and calls you back to the road after a long lonely winter.

Immerse yourself in endless green which waves in summer winds. Watch black asphalt shimmer and dance in distant mirage. Feel the sweat drop from forehead to top tube as you cycle, heat making skin glisten, sun’s rays darkening arms and legs in that curious cyclist’s tan. Taste the lukewarm water as it wets dry lips and somehow satisfies parched mouth. Sway in the saddle with Tiger Lillies and Queen Anne’s Lace that roadside bow in constant courtesy. Hear the whirr of locust chorus that sing their familiar song, rising and falling in Doppler mystery as you pedal past.

Tilt your head at the hint of the first dropped leaf and be amazed at the sudden autumn riot of orange, red, yellow, and brown. Arms and hands hide under jackets and gloves as you pedal through dimly lit mornings and frosty air. Watch your breath condense in moisture-filled exhalation. Hear ducks and geese honk over your shoulder as they make their way south. Worship at the window while winter snows blow and hide the road as it disappears outside in swirling fury, leaving you with only well-worn maps and fading photographs of remembered rides. Sleeping legs will phantom pedal, twitching curiously like a dog’s in rabbit-chasing dreams.

The seasons change but the road goes on forever. The road is a constant that’s ever different but always the same, somehow new and somehow not. It’s a way through life with limbs moving in continuous revolution, endlessly approaching but never arriving. Because whenever you look up from handlebar hands and spinning legs, from burning muscles and labored breath, from sudden thought or bittersweet memory, you always see the road that goes on forever.

***********************************************************************

Meditation on Meditation

by Adrian S. Potter

Night has dropped its black cloak onto the city

and there’s no decent restaurant open anywhere

so I’m sitting alone in a small, decrepit diner

with a couple arguing in the back booth

and my eggs greasy, bacon undercooked,

trying to write a poem about my late father,

shamelessly redrawing him in my mind as a different person

but being careful, because we must speak gently of the dead

knowing that they listen for their names to be mentioned.

It all makes me wonder how God, in his omnipotent glory,

can bear to remember everything at once:

the unsung desire of the check-out clerk,

the relentless twang of traffic on the turnpike,

the nightly news and its numbing parade of human suffering,

the requests by the dirtiest of souls in need of cleansing.

Soon I stop trying to list my dad’s faults in verse,

realizing there are things we’re simply meant to forget,

moments that are supposed to rinse off

like the guilt of a one-night stand.

This is how reality falls apart,

disintegrates to dust, and starts up again

within the course of an ordinary hour,

while people like me keep searching

for a blessed peace that seems final, but isn’t.

********************************************************************

Breaking Glass

by Justin Gold

The old man pressed his callused fingertips to the white label. He carefully eased away the air bubbles and wrote the number in black ink.

“There are so many types of stamps, Jeffrey. There’s commemorative, definitive, and special ones. We very much want to collect some special ones.” The old man could feel the v in the pronunciation of his w’s. It was the toughest part of speaking English. His grandson Jeffrey, who had turned five the day before, was flipping through channels on the television. Jeffrey asked what “kahmemative” meant. The old man admired the boy’s yellow hair and perfectly blue eyes.

“Commemorative are the ones printed larger. They are very colorful. They show pictures of historical people and events. I don’t make collection of those. I have many animal stamps in these glassine envelopes…not like real glass…” but Jeffrey was lost in cartoons. The boy giggled as a coyote ran off a cliff and was suspended in the air.

Our children…they are naïve, they buy into anything…

The old man turned back to his collection, applying another label. Five hundred and forty-three stamps, seemingly anonymous, were now named and numbered.

“Opa, can you fix this?”

The old man closed his collection and retrieved a new set of batteries from the closet. Rarely using the television himself, he cautiously tugged on the back of the remote. Jeffrey clapped when his grandfather handed it back in working condition. On the television, a newscaster with dark wavy hair announced the station’s interview with director Steven Spielberg.

“He has a big nose, Opa. He looks like a clown.” A boyish giggle.

Speak through flowers, Jeffrey.

Guessing the boy would go to the garden and use a dandelion as a microphone, the old man kept the expression to himself. He grunted and returned to his stamps. Through a magnifying glass, he admired the tiny details of his favorite square. A baby panda looked up at him, gnawing on a green leaf that faded towards the perforated edges.

“Dad, I’m back!” the baritone voice sounded throughout the small home. Alex Hermann’s shoes squeaked across the tile as he headed towards the kitchen. He greeted the old man with a handshake. Jeffrey jumped on his father’s lap and hugged him.

“Thanks for taking care of him. I'm sorry the meeting went so long. I’ve gotta drop this kid off at home and get back to the office. I’ll be working late again.”

The old man watched a mouse in a sombrero speed across the screen. The coyote was catching up. Jeffrey was clapping.

“Dad, that black and white is a piece of shit. It’s the seventies and half the country is watching in color. Actually, let me see what I can find tomorrow. I’ve got a few people in the office that can get you a new one for wholesale price.”

The old man grunted absently.

After his son and grandson had said goodbye, he decided he would cook himself a sausage dinner, possibly with strudel for dessert. The old man couldn’t recall the last time he sat down for a traditional meal, usually settling on microwave dinners and frozen vegetables. As he looked through the refrigerator, he thought of his grandson.

He has a big nose, Opa. He looks like a clown.

The old man tended to the sizzling sausage, recalling Jeffrey’s excitement as he watched the television, how the boy laughed hysterically when the cartoon mouse aimed a pistol at the coyote. The old man reached for a knife to open the links and see how well they had cooked.

Burn them until they’re black as the night.

A stinging sensation shot up his arm. He looked down to see red drops on the white tile. Even while he pressed the washcloth against his finger, the throbbing grew stronger. He turned off the stove and walked to his bedroom to get a bandage.

The medicine cabinet was a mess of bottles. He took one down and found the Band-Aids on the top shelf. After swallowing four pills and a full glass of water, he reapplied force to his finger and looked into the mirror.

That’s a strong Roman nose you got there, boy. Powerful features, perfect measurements all the way around. A soldier’s skull.

Although he showered daily, he never spent more than a moment’s time with his reflection. There was no one left to impress. But looking closer, it seemed that the scar across his cheek had healed considerably. The indentations appeared shallow under wrinkled skin. He ran his fingers over the wound and could feel the cold of Berlin in the winter.

Mama! Papa! Mama! Pa...A young voice. Two gunshots. The old man hastily left the bedroom.

Scrambling to a seat at the kitchen table, he could feel the medicine take hold. His finger went numb but he was too dizzy to notice the red stream that dripped to the floor. The old man found his stamp collection, its colors more vibrant now. An eagle soared against the backdrop of an American flag as a turtle crawled out of its stamp to bite a rabbit in the next one. His favorite panda still looked up innocently.

Jeffrey will be old enough to join us soon. Our Leader would be proud of his features. You should be proud too.

The thoughts knotted in his stomach. More pills would silence them, but he dared not go there again.

Triple dose and you’ll be forgetting the alphabet, old man. Gimme fifty for em.

The old man kicked violently against the legs of the table. Before him, Jeffrey stood upright, neatly dressed in the black uniform. The boy’s right arm was raised to the sky. In the middle of Jeffrey’s chest was the hooked cross, an emblem more powerful than any stars or stripes. The old man reached out, trying to grab his grandson’s hand. But as he reached closer, Jeffrey’s face became cloudy, the contours of his profile dissipating. The old man knocked over an open juice bottle that poured over the stamp collection.

Forgiveness is not an option for them.

Relentlessly kicking now.

Our plight. . . total eradication. . . now is the time. . .

The old man found the hammer inside the closet, exactly where he had left it. He mounted the stack of encyclopedias that Alex had given him for Christmas. Using both arms, he hoisted the hammer to the top shelf. The nails up there had rusted, making it easier to pry them from the wooden panel. As he pulled, a layer of white webbing coated the hammer in a shimmering glaze. A group of spiders crawled frantically back into the wall, back towards the silver lockbox.

The old man swung the hammer and splinters flew like sparks.

Just stand guard. It’s all you have to do. They’re only boys…

He swung harder and eventually the panel fell. The old man felt electricity in his bones as he reached inside and touched the container. He held it cautiously as if it were some magical box, all the miseries of mankind waiting to be released. A voice echoed inside the metal.

Mama! Mama! Ma…

The old man could still see the fire in the boy’s eyes as he rounded the corner. With a fork stolen from the feeding quarters, the small Italian carved deep into the old man’s cheek. Even as a young soldier, he had never felt such pain. He rose from the crimson snow and walked over to the naked boy. Skinny fists were pounding into the wooden door. The boy’s cries grew louder and caused commotion inside the women’s barracks.

Mama! Mama!

Like penned animals, the women huddled near the voice. It was nothing the Luger couldn’t silence. His left arm jolted with recoil - his right held the jacket against his cheek. He remembered how the boy’s body was so thin that he could hear the bullet as it broke through bone. How the small frame twitched in the snow. Mama! Ma… A second shot and the body lay still.

Now, the old man looked out his bedroom window. What had seemed like an endless snowfall was slowing, the chorus of winter growing calm. When he returned to the closet, he saw a spider dangling from the top shelf. Six legs were spinning silk for a new home. The old man watched, admiring the airborne ballet.

Two empty casings rattled inside the box as he eased it back into the wall.

THE END