Rolling down Sommerset, past Third Street, when I landed spiral like underneath my second Huffy, sonar edition, light green. This, I think, was the result of first, a small abscess in third, and me, all downhill felt the Huffy's tire slide right over it like alcohol on a teenage boy, very well, and the ground came up and at once we were down. I roll over, this could have been much bloodier, save for the petunia bed perpetually covering that street corner.

The damn thing curled up and lodged itself, a soldier, heroic yet mortally grounded—I cursed, felt the heft of enemy fire, swerved, panting, "fucking…" with effort, "…bug" and smashed my ankle on a sewer grate. And when all I wanted was to get you home girl, the world had turned against us and even, the animals. I tried the brakes but from the squelching sound I figured we couldn't navigate that bloody Sommerset hill.

And I lost my balance there, there in the ventilated whiteness of a nearly shadowed 5 1/2 St.; I know because I watched with my good eye in somewhat misdistanced dismay.

But in the midst, this scene it flashed, the suburban spinning out Mrs. Winchester's deaf/blind cat swishing her head to the grain of the wind. And my brother and I had put her in front of the rotational sprinkler too many times. The last day he spent with her, Mr. Fishyguts, had been long and she launched it onto the birdbath full where the albino squirrel squealed into a rage; and so I shoved my brother against the garage door and withdrew some, three, of the raisins I'd been chewing from the muffin in my mouth and mashed them into his left ear. "You" I seethed "rotard." I had been at camp and learned many things. This was all wrong.

And there it was down the hill the fury of a grate and a newly pesticized grass plot, met with our frames was the hardest grit of cement this side of Janesville.

And this, I think, friends, because I was, watching that man walk his damn kitty.