A little under a gram of crushed-up bud, enough for a pretty fat joint. I hope it’s good, not that crap cut with parsley or whatever the kids sell downtown. It smells all right, if pretty mild. A far cry from Gus’s industrial-strength shit.

Lying on my stomach on my bed, I flip through the blue notebook. I have to laugh. I’ve dug up the CD that was playing yesterday. I knew I had it somewhere. The weed is good. The notebook, not so much. It’s full of designs for tattoos and songs I suspect of being the rapist’s original compositions. Disappointing. No revelations, just the run-of-the-mill platitudes of a lowdown bastard. The guy was a waste of air. He didn’t deserve the oxygen produced by a single dandelion.

I take the battery out of the smoke detector. Open the kitchen window. Burn the notebook slowly in the sink.

I decide it’s time to go for a walk, enjoy my new-found freedom, and figure out what to do next. I try out a new suburb named after one of the Apostles, farther to the south and to the west. It’s hemmed in by three railroad tracks and two highways. I haven’t spent much time there up to now since getting there on foot is an ordeal. You have to take a tunnel after walking along the side of busy road that passes over the viaduct supporting the railroad. The noise is deafening and the place smells like pigeon shit. Forty metres in a dark, humid tunnel along a path strewn with garbage floating in little puddles of water that never fully evaporate. The place is also full of little strawberry-sized snails. I smell them more than I hear them as I crush their shells under my boots. Sorry, but there’s just too many to walk around.

I emerge from the tunnel and keep walking. I can still hear a regular vibration that must terrorize the poor earthworms. Two thin, dirty little boys are playing in a back alley. The older of the two is banging on the asphalt with a hammer. They’re brothers. They have the same sneakers and the same faces. It’s the older one busting up the pavement while the younger one watches him with that particular adulation of young boys watching their older brothers.

Slow, muffled blows, tock, tock, tock, stripping away the asphalt around a ragweed plant.

“Guys! You have to pull out the plant by the roots.” I’m trying to be helpful.

“But look, it’s about to flower! Look at the buds.”