The mushroom soufflé at the restaurant by the sea was more gray than chanterelle, but if I closed your eyes it tasted dreamier than ashes. This will be short, because I am forgetting how to spell and my elbow is becoming raveled. Welcome to the end of everything, right where we began. A man named after his own story crawls across a devastated landscape, a desert. Caution: collision with vehicle will release entropy. That white truck said it. It was there. And then it was more than there. As always, I almost wept. This specimen I lifted from the church dirt sparkles here in front of me. I walked by it without noticing, hundreds of times. Now I put the gold Dunhill in my pocket and slip on the diamond pinkie ring. It is identical to the revolver in my face, the train on my forehead, to playing brain, to the anniversary someone stole from my bottle, published in a famous magazine, and bragged about in front of me at a gathering. I said, as per usual, nothing until later, where in my room I invented a hundred devastating comebacks. You know the story. It’s how everything ends. The best things come long after they’ve ceased to be the only things. Yes, what would it be like if this was going to be the last time? In your dream, we all huddled together somewhere, the dogs were trembling, the baby was playing with books, and the four adults were not talking much, because they knew, we knew, what was coming, just not when.