There were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper, recognizable. This is stupid, I thought, with a sudden rush of panic. How did this happen? Traffic washed past up on the expressway. The grave was almost unspeakably horrible. I had never seen one before. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family teetering on one side and raw dirt heaped on the other. My God, I thought. I was starting to see everything, all at once, with a blistering clarity. Why bother with the coffin, the awning or any of it if they were just going to dump him, shovel the dirt in, go home? Was
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