He looked too long once, once too long, with a longing to look for the solution, and received a straight punch in the face from a thickset trucker he didn’t know was a trucker, why would he, he just didn’t respond in the correct way he supposed, but he responded in the way he wanted to respond. He was mopping his nose with a piece of old tissue from his pocket that was not enough to cope with the steady flow of the red stuff. It didn’t hurt and his reply to the question, ‘what do you think you’re looking at?’ came, without pause, from his mouth.

‘Your cunt of a face.’

An understandable reaction: trucker or no trucker. He had no memory of why, but he was lying, with disappointment, on the concrete sidewalk outside, shaking his head to clear the stars, to bring back function, a function to which he had no desire to return.

Is this how he might feel after putting a bullet in the head of the man who stole his father’s spirit? Who did steal his father’s spirit? Who was it? He shook his head again to clear the thoughts.

Here he could say sorry, sorry cunt face, and move on: but with a gun there was no need for the word. The word ‘sorry’ would be redundant. It was not changeable, he would have committed an irreversible act.

All acts are irreversible. That’s the problem.

Now thrown out and on the ground, he desperately tried to hold onto the thought of what it would be like after the shot.

Would his father feel better?

Would his work be better after the disposal of the man who got it wrong?

Would Ever be better?

Would Ever be forgiven?

By whom and for what?

Everyone would know. Everyone would know. Everyone would know.

He rolled on the pavement, to get more comfortable, and was happy to stay rolling. There was a man asking him for money, with the flap of a piece of paper.

The check. The twenty-five-dollar check.

‘Fuck you.’

A kick.

‘Fuck off.’

Another kick.

‘Here’s forty.’

‘Fuck off, jerk.’

The man said taking the dollars.

Ever’s dad could never go there again.

It was a shame; he enjoyed having a drink with his dad in Chez Jay’s. He started the walk to the pier, the Santa Monica Pier, not just any old pier, virtually opposite. The sun was down and at the end of the pier he looked at the water. The water, the ocean that contained his father’s ashes. He threw his bloodied tissue into the sea as a kind of communion with his father: pointless but with the right sentiment. Blood and burnt body mix.

Alive and dead.

Crumbling and crumbled.