The mice, as they died off, I buried in little toilet-paper tubes. They have a life expectancy of three years. I didn’t replace them. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What I did was pretty unconscionable. Absolute power, as they say. I’m not proud of my behavior. I had been living without checks and balances. The crap I pulled makes me think of what the space invaders will do to us if they conquer the world. Make slaves of us, eat us, flay us alive and torture us, do every kind of sinister thing in the book. There’s a dark side to intelligent beings, an irrational craving for war, personal defilement, and reckless destruction, even if we know better. So if aliens are out there and they do come down I don’t expect good things. Aliens aren’t out there flying around on errands of mercy or benevolence. To them, we’re just so much protein. We’re calories. When the space invaders take over, it’s the end of the human era. Before that happens, I want to get in a few good times—travel to Ireland, learn how to dance, take tuba lessons, who knows. Happiness is like the gold in the Yukon mines, found only now and then, as it were, by the caprices of chance. It comes rarely in chunks or boulders but most often in the tiniest of grains. I’m a free-floater now, happy to take what little comes my way. A grain here, a grain there. What more can you ask for?

Daddy’s Girl