I am lost, cursed, displaced. This I know as I sit on the park bench and watch the sky and the perfect green grass and the smiling faces in my stupor. I am an old man; I suppose now I am a broken man. But I am a simple man, and I am the only sort of man I know how to be. So of course, my heart should burn as it burns now. I wouldn’t trust myself, suppose I wouldn’t know I was alive any longer, if it didn’t. But all my pain is fairness, only a rightful punishment. Nothing in this world is given freely.

​

Since I was a boy, I was bred to work. In school we worked with our hands and our minds, and we beat them and battered them but always had time off just enough to never fully break. Such is life, with no time to waste and, thus, rest to be rationed. Those who argue otherwise have never felt the breath of the landlord down their neck. But in the end, even money becomes irrelevant. We are here for a reason; we are here to work. Then they tell you the ride can only last so long, and it’s your turn to get off. But by then there is not another way.

​

I’m not an emotional man, having lived too many years for that, but I can still grow jealous. I struck a boy just a few days ago and here my life has come apart. Yes, in the office I forgot my role and I struck a boy of just twenty-one as he stood at the water cooler and complained. Oh, he had said his head hurt and his eyes burned, and his back could never quite straighten out. He had been a month on the job, and I struck him with the back of my hand. He was a proud boy, a boy to whom things were given freely. When I struck him, he staggered and he gasped but he was alright. I never meant to break, only batter. It was with love that I did so. But I suppose the young have never been known to recognize true love and so my fate was sealed, and I condemned.  I am the ugly workhorse. In the end I am disposable.

 

I will never be the same. Scars are forever and so are memories, waves across the ocean of my mind, no longer navigable. I have lived through sleepless nights and endless days and still do; it is too late for only a firing to change that. But I was always fairly compensated.

 

Before me, I see a man lying in the grass as if he were dead. He lies on his back, and his eyes are blank yet open, serving no purpose but an empty stare. He rests on a blanket, and he breathes slowly and deeply, and his fingers did not move, and his toes did not tap the dirt. He is more object than being, so detached from life and all its movement, lying whole and physical and breathing yet without any signs of motion in this most unnatural state. As he smiles in the face of his own uselessness, I cannot help but stare and wonder at this thing, this creature, this corpse with its limbs paralyzed yet its heart beating.

I rise from my bench, and the man does not stir as I approach him. He takes in my sound but only listens, lying like an infant, action uninterrupted by my movement. I cannot help but think of this creature in the wild, so without his animal instinct, starving and thirsting without any drive of his own. The man is someone to be cared for, to be watched over and never left to his own devices, and in a flash of anger I begin to hate him for it. I stare at the man and once again my role is forgotten.

           

I do not know this man and yet I cannot stand to look upon him any longer. I cannot stand to watch him lie still, to breathe, to exist in his dormant state. When he looks at the sky, he is only a body. I am a man, I am a machine, I am a greater being. When I was born my father told me the way to live. He had worked hard all his years, had been a good man, had raised children. He had provided and fulfilled his duty. I had never seen him read, but I had seen him sleep and seen him eat and I had seen him drive away.

           

I am a working man. I was a working man. The body in the grass is a corpse, and yet now I have become the body. I have become it. I turn to control my rage and again I see the bench. It is so cold, so solid, so sure in its purpose, the perfect object, and I cannot stand to see it any longer just as much as I cannot stand to see the body. In my motion I gasp, as my back aches and my lungs burn, and I could kill the thing behind me, and I could run away or curl up. But of course, I really couldn’t. If only I could have stricken the boy a second time. I am lost, cursed, displaced. But really, I am simply dead, just another corpse in a sea of the damned below the ship of those who still hold on to meaning.