Change in the Weather

“Better call someone,” I say to my wife, who is standing beside me at the window, peering up at the sky with a worried expression. By the time the emergency vehicles start arriving, the clouds look even more like what the painter Magritte long claimed clouds look like – insipid thoughts. Is the change in the weather responsible for this or vice versa? All the commotion has drawn half the neighborhood out into the street. An upstairs neighbor I barely know tells me in a gravelly two-packs-a-day voice that he has a titanium plate in his head. I give him a nervous smile. Death, when it finally comes, will have his phlegmy eyes.

-Howie Good