How the Man Waits for Death

“The trouble with life,” he says, “is that the day’s just too long.”

He does his best to alter this.

He always sleeps until two or three in the afternoon.

He wakes up and makes a pot of coffee and drinks cup after cup and sits on his front porch and watches all the neighborhood kids and their goonish parents going off to their ultra-important jobs. He smokes cigarette after cigarette.

Then he goes back into his house and drinks a bottle of cheap red wine and watches a movie or reads a book, where days pass very quickly.

After the sun finally sets, he goes back to bed.

He hates to dream because it makes the day seem even longer.

“I want to go to sleep,” he often thinks, “and then I want to wake up.”

This is how the man waits for death to come in and envelope him in its fat black spiderbelly fold.