Everson

I Wrote This a While Ago:

The death of Everson was expected. His father died the same way. Sleepless nights and half conscious days, he drifted along until his death caught up with him—nothing dramatic. He was standing on a dirty side street, with Coke cans and cigarette butts choking up the sewer drains. Greasy uneven bricks surrounded him, and the recesses of the broken tenement house windows made him feel like he was in a soggy bird-cage. An immigrant boy sat on a green knoll behind a waist-high chain-link fence in front of one such house. With his drippy nose and scant clothing, the boy was like a fixture—more like the bricks than like me Everson thought. As he admired the boy’s head with its crew cut and sanguine unknowing expression, Everson began to die. The pain itself was not all that great. It was rather like feeling his body go to sleep—like a creeping nothingness. The pop which could have rendered him unconscious, instead greatly distorted his sight. The boys head blew up like some repugnant circus balloon. Confusion at this sight together with a diminished sense of equilibrium caused him to crash instinctively to the ground whaling like a stabbed animal. The man tried abortively to escape his confusion, as if waking up from all nightmares was practice for this moment. Slipping into his coma, he began to give up and make peace with the nothingness, as all dying things must do—in this regard Everson was certainly a pragmatist: if going with the flow meant less pain for him, then why fight it?
Everson was not an important man. His life was middling