Our Times

I just couldn't be held to account any longer. The days were intermidable. He spat out story after story and the tragedies merged together, the dead person roundsman. The pink and blue coffins of the kids and the parents, the mother who killed them. The crowded Catholic cathedral suddenly silent with the shocking tragedy of it. Not a dry eye. The Catholics do death well. My half brother, 17, my father had a very long breeding cycle, shot himself a year ago; took a rifle out into the orchard at 2am and pulled the trigger.

There wasn't too much mess, the man who owned the property said. I thought your old man was going to have a heart attack. There amongst the macadamia nut trees. Once avacados; and before that passionfruit; way back in the sixties when he bought the 80 acres for $10,000. The old man sold it after he had a heart attack, and it's since doubled in value to more than two million while he lives on their, where their youngest son killed himself. The grieving mother, wrung out with grief, acting in pecular ways; clasping a framed picture of him; flashing it at me over the coffin; see, he even looked like you.

But I hadn't been successful. I had walked along the beach and waited to die from 24 aspirin; but ending up with nothing but a bad stomach. The utter forlorn melancholy of the waves. But it didn't happen, he happened, in the orchard in the early morning, after being on the internet to his friends; who didn't bother to tell their parents. That would be an invasion of privacy. They lived every moment and the gut wrenching tragedy of it all; they would never be the same. Many of the people he dealt with would never be the same again.