Last Train Home

But we sing if we're going nowhere
Yeah we sing if it's not enough
And we sing
Sing without a reason to ever fall in love

-- "Last Train Home" by Lostprophets

The ground was still wet this morning. The slick black asphalt, wrung out by cars huddled in their morning commute, hissed with the spray of rainwater. The flowering trees had already shed their petals before the storm; I never did figure out if the blossoms were pear or cherry or plum. I tried not to step on the writhing earthworms, though they covered nearly every inch of the concrete sidewalk--some with half their bodies squashed flat by the fresh imprint of a shoe, others doomed prey to the robins or the rising sun. Fiddling with my headphones, I shuddered as I caught sight of a flattened frog, limbs splayed out beside the pinkish translucent worms that looked almost like intestines. Forty paces further, I saw black feathered wings shrouded in a funeral veil of crinkled brown leaves. The little bird looked so peaceful, lying on its side in that bed of brush with eyes closed shut, that it took me a moment to realize that it was dead.

I killed two crickets today. It wasn't on purpose, I swear. I was in the bathroom and about to take a piss, when I saw the two huddling in the corner by the bathtub. I didn't want to kill them. Not like my roommate, who took a wild swing at one that appeared above her bed last Sunday. I had grabbed the first container I found in the kitchen and swept them in before closing the lid. I didn't think they would die in the unwashed container, still slick with chili oil, did I? Find a cricket in the house and good luck has come. Kill the cricket in your house and bad luck will befall. They came to bring you good luck and you killed them the first instant you saw them? she teased when I called. Superstition had always been just a plaything. I had read those Feng-Shui books for fun as a child until she confiscated them. She didn't want my mind warped with such things. She didn't want me to observe death all around and wonder if something were about to happen.