Twenty years before he stepped out of the university and the speeding Yamaha propelled his soul with velocity, he came home one day all shook up.  He said what he heard cannot be undone.  The scream as the motorcycle hit the man, that they all stood motionless, even if there were flames.  The unnatural angle.  I remember him telling us I swear.  The phone rang.  I hate that thing.  Don’t worry.  There’s been an accident, but your mother will explain.  The first thing she said was that he’s gone.  We often get an echo of our death.  A skipped beat, an intimation of fall when we expect it the least.

Since we’re talking about premonitions, I must confess that I woke up.  I was initiated after all.  I woke up and saw a dark spot, nebulous, with tentacles, at the corner of the ceiling.  Like a helium balloon with a spider-like life.  I said to myself this cannot be, for a holy man.  Unless it is me, the way my mind interprets the unknown, with fear.  Maybe it’s just a goodbye, with tear.  Yet the uneasy feeling remained.  It was prescient as the events came to unwind.  But hey, who are we to judge? Each in a situation of our own, there will be a long line of plaintiffs in the various states of undress, or duress, pointing to our lack of empathy, when in reality it ought to be a lack of experience, an inability to grasp the severity of the deal, our lives so linear that we must skip to a particular day, at an early enough age that we would plead not guilty in any juvenile court.  Yet, now with enough elan, we cannot say not guilty.  A fog is no defense in the Egyptian age of adulthood at semen.  Not with Anubis and not with a beating heart.  I try to be precise but it comes out as regret.  Even if, if time did not exist, the past and the future frozen, the present an illusion at best, and religious bullshit at worse, free will sounding like the Freedom with a capital F, that is without meaning, even if we could tell how we should tilt the bar based on a code of conduct so regional in intent. Yes, maybe we’ve done wrong, but nothing compared to this monstrous machinery of vice built in into each tiny cell.  Each microscopic soul a little puff of lighter air in a corner of an organ. Inconsequential in the grand scheme.  But then again, even grand means nothing if there is no upper bound.