Sea of Humanity

Hemingway's Last Shot

My veins have thinned like my hair, parting my head like a massive wound left without applied pressure. The contents have been allowed to spill onto the floor and dry into a red grey crust to be picked at like dry wax. I sit in front of my window. A breeze finds its way into my cavernous cranium and blows away what little energy I have to blink. It disappears through the window screen. Sirens sing in the distance. They get louder as they come to the rescue.

My blink ends on their grills, only to fall under their wheels and lie smashed in asphalt. The sirens are not for my condition, but for the aging, who can no longer eat or breathe on their own. My head tilts. What is left rolls to the side and bumps like a marble looking for the exit out. I have played this game with little success. The marble always remains. I vaguely remember my friend Hemingway. He is now a ghost created from the lion and lioness. Upon his last shot they all asked, "Why?" His cadmium-plated, second-hand Merkel over-and-under shotgun answers, "I have been to Spain. I have watched the bull die."