Sheep Meat

Look at them all. Dummies. That guy, waving the gun around. He doesn't know. None of them do. The people diving for cover, fear infecting them.

Where I am now, it's like dreaming. I don't have to walk anyplace. Or hop a bus. Or bum a ride. I just go. And I'm there. I think, like, space doesn't exist anymore or something. Actually, I think it never did. The whole thing down there is fake. None of it's real. But they don't know it.

Those dummies are running around. Sheep. That's what they are: bags of sheep meat. Things have been like this forever, I think. Time's another one. Time doesn't mean anything either, and I think now that it was always a little hinky.

The one with the gun, the one with the eyes lit up with anger. (Anger—another one.) That one looks familiar. Names are gone now. Identity stopped making sense when I left. Clouds don't have identity. Water doesn't. Same thing. So The Gun down there, he's chasing all the other sheep away into the corner, yelling at them for their stuff. (Oh, man, that's the biggest bullshit of all.)

Those people are bargaining. You can see it on their faces. You could hear them thinking about hiding some of their stuff, offering one thing to satisfy The Gun. "Anything but my wedding ring," one of them's thinking. The fat lady in the ugly red dress. She looked like an apple. "Don't look in my sock—I keep all my bills in my sock," a young guy's thinking.

A kid is looking away from The Gun, looking over by the door. What the hell, I shift over that way. Two more of them, crumpled like trash in ponds of blood. One of them was a cop. All that shiny hardware on him, the badge, the buttons, the gun, the smooth leather holster. The other one, I guess, was me.