A: I wasn’t paying attention.
The oldest of the living freight convulses in the corner. He spent his whole life looking for a girl to be fucked up over. Posed as still as the position we’re all forced into, nervously recalling the faces attached to the why-nots, hoping he had her once and maybe just missed it. Even in a death rattle, he knew he couldn’t have missed it.
None of their salt tasted right. No matter how much he ate.
So that man, like most men, died dried up of all the water they expel waiting out never. Sniffing their way through the species looking for the answer to a question no one can verbalize.
The oldest of the living freight convulses in the corner looking up at all the other skinny cattle. Too weak to be put through the grinders or cleaved in a meat locker somewhere in the midwest.
In the old days, they were allowed drink at their designated bars, smoke sad cigarettes, and watch daytime television between trips to the bathroom.
On the last shake, he looked through the legs of his brethren, through the crack in the sliding door of the refrigerated box car, and saw grey Illinois farmland pass at an unimaginable rate of speed. He’d been traveling for five whole years and all he could remember were nondescript faces and landscapes.
