Bond is tired and ailing. Bond is a jigsaw puzzle of sexually transmitted disease and organ failure. Bond is exhausted.

On his death bed, an old man asked for paper and a pencil and in bold strokes wrote “EITHER” before he died. “Ether,” his wife cried to his older son, “he needs ether.” The older son shook his head and responded, “Ma, it’s the twenty-first century. No one uses ether. Maybe he meant Oscar Wilde.” “Why?” Asked the younger son from the corner where he sat in an ashen cloth-covered chair. “Why would Dad refer to Oscar Wilde? He’s never read Oscar Wilde.” “You don’t know that,” the wife said. “He could have gotten it from a trivia card,” said the older son. The younger son sighed. The older son and the wife stood on either side of the bed looking down on the dead man while the younger son sat in the corner on the ashen colored chair. The room felt smaller to all of them.

My words were put into your very words before the machine shop was even conceived. The machine shop was conceived one evening some weeks ago, the computer after that. My words came before that by some days (undated). My words were your words but before you said them: my computer put a machine shop inside yours. It was in fact my words before they were your words that put machine shops inside machine shops using computers.

She touched up my eye and I saw her in a mirror. One of the mirrors on the ground. I looked like I was much older than I thought I could possibly be: all those mirrors compounding my barely painted face. And then I looked away into the long shadows of the afternoon as she applied more make-up, pulling me a little closer because I started to fall away under the pressure of the cotton, under the surprise of the cotton on my eyelid becoming bluer with each wipe. We would have to leave soon, I was sure. All the reflections of my life lay in the grass shining back up at me. All the cotton swabs of my life, applied and worn off, thrown in the back of the truck or strangely littered among the mirrors.