garbage.

“Very good choice, Sir,” I heard the guy across the counter say.

And I knew, immediately, that I had made the wrong choice.

Not because the product that I had selected was, in any way,

inferior to the other products serving the same purpose—

or—because I had paid a price superior

to the actual economic value

of the item I had selected.

And clearly not

because both my biological parents were dying

—simultaneously—

a duly expected and

reasonably deserved,

if somewhat premature, death—

miles and miles away from

my point of purchase,

of an item I did not particularly need.

No, the impropriety of the sale

lay elsewhere.

It was more the definitiveness

of the transaction, the

irreversibility of what had passed before.

The lies and the deceptions

that had been around

for so long.