Dave’s tenant, George, died in the basement apartment. Nobody seemed to be emotionally affected. ‘Take some food from the fridge if you want.’ Dave told me in his halting, unsure way. Taking food from a dead man felt weird to me, but I snuck down and peeked inside the chest refrigerator and decided to come back later to take a jar of peanut butter, canned vegetables, and chipotle dip. George asked me to stay for a bit of pot roast the last, and only, time I was at the ranch. He was a little drunk but easy going, not sloppy. ‘Sure, that sounds great!’ I was in the basement to use the shower before taking off for Dave’s fruit stand in Bonsall. Before I started the water, through the bathroom door he offered soap and aftershave; I declined. By the time I exited the shower he had gone into his room and shut the door. Earlier in the day, when we met, he had been cleaning out his bedroom because the two family goats, Trudy and the kid Ed, had made their way in through the screen door and shit and pissed on his bed. After I washed and shaved, I went into the open kitchen, the roast smelled great, but instead I turned and quietly walked out of the basement, into the garage where Dave’s stepson, a thirty-four year old red-bearded, soft-spoken man also named Dave had coaxed a Mojave Red into a big plastic water jug where the serpent stared fiercely but never rattled at me, even as I put my face nose to nose with hers; and slowly trudged my way up the steep hill to my truck. I had forgotten soap and have never worn aftershave, but I wished I had borrowed both from George. When they were going through his effects to try and find his information they uncovered his heroin kit. He was slumped, sitting on his bed, Dave’s middle son found him: he was cold. If there was a funeral I would have liked to go. He had that pale hardness in him from hard living, and guilt in the corner of his eyes and on his scabbed forearms which hung tiredly by his sides, as if they would pop off his shoulders and crumple onto the linoleum like dead fish. One thing is for certain: nobody deserves to die feeling alone. I should have shared a roast with George.

‘I hope he had his wits about him when he went.’ I emitted in the calm and subtle, unintentionally patronizing tone I had adopted for Dave. ‘My worst fear is dying when I’m piss drunk, worse, blackout. I want to be cognisant of the death experience. We’re born without being fully conscious of the birth. We’re brand new, only developed over nine-months inside our mothers. We don’t know.’ My brain struggled to work through these thoughts, to Dave; to this gaunt man who stared at me with his narrow blue eyes and nearly toothless mouth slightly agape, his tattered straw hat pushed back on his shoulder-length, silver hair. ‘All this living we’ve done, now, since being born. I have seen beautiful things. I’ve watched the snowfall through the window while I’m sitting next to a wood-stove. I’ve watched tadpoles in a shallow eddy in the Santa Margarita River. A snake snatched from a patch of ticklegrass in Mendocino hill-country by a hawk, and the blood, or venom, or bile fell with the snake after it bit the hawk, and another hawk came from below the ridge and hung in the updraft breaking the air with their mate shaking its frustrated wings in the draft behind. I’ve seen awful things. A cement factory lit fluorescent, ashen with gray skies hovering, and rain and dust shrouding its occupants. The betrayed and sad eyes of people I have hurt. A man on a ledge in Penobscot Bay, Maine who had drowned by becoming tangled in his lobster gear but come loose in the current and drifted to rest on a ledge in the ebbtide, his eyes bulged and uneven, his face wrung up like a damp rag and one white rubberboot half on, twisted in the seaweed. But all this. All these things are what I have seen and emotions I alone have felt. I expect death to be an entirely different event for everyone. Only the result is the same. Ultimately, we all share in the impact of death. I just want to experience it with clarity, not muffled or eliminated by being too drunk or distracted. Once, I fell out of a bar and hit the ground face first. Somehow the girl I was pursuing still took me to her place. On her big, granite front steps I fell backward and broke a couple ribs. I mean. I mean, I have a vague recollection of breaking my ribs, but otherwise this was all recounted by the girl when we woke up the next morning and I had pissed the bed. After I went to a laundromat, I came back with the sheets and clumsily knocked a frame off her wall as I stumbled in, breaking it on the floor. I don’t remember her name or what picture was in the frame. Then I left to go back to my girlfriend’s apartment and lie about why I was beat up and in pain. I don’t care about dying by falling down some steps but I do not want to be blackout drunk. I want to…’ ‘So that it’s a clean transition.’ Dave observed. ‘Yeah.’ Even though he meant the transition to Heaven and I meant the transition from alive to dead. ‘We’re born, we die. I don’t consciously remember my birth but I want to be conscious when I go.’ I reiterated, forcing out the words. I was finished. I had been half-turned to walk down the hill toward the river to resume cutting down a big eucalyptus tree. ‘That’s a really good observation.’ He mumbled earnestly, but I felt like a generalizing debutante trying to explain myself with ideas I didn’t really understand or believe. And did he hear me? Did I actually say all those things out-loud? I cracked a wry grin. ‘Anyway, I guess I will head down the way and get after the cutting.’ ‘Okay.’ He said in the quick, nervous way he says ‘Okay’, like a mouse if mice spoke like Dave and Dave spoke like mice. I grabbed my fishing spear, the saw, my boots, and water; and started down the hill to needlessly cut up a tree with a dull chainsaw and silently wondered what it would feel like to be bit, mid-air, on my index finger by a rattlesnake.

Like many children Rob had personified inanimate objects: toasters, blankets, radios, lamps, vacuums. Rob and his younger brother played a game called 'pretend'. They would sit or run in their sunny family living room or luscious, green yard, their universe, and pretend their family appliances could talk, could think, could feel. While scurrying about they would make voices for the toaster and create surprisingly intimate and detailed relationships between the toaster and other household items. The toaster was always considered the ringleader and the most desired appliance by Rob and his brother. Rob, the eldest, would often give life to the toaster with impassioned monologues and quiet but victorious humming as the silver Toastmaster bravely overcame great obstacles in the dark forests of the kitchen and front lawn.

There was a dreary, gray day when Rob was pretending as the character of the courageous toaster and his brother as the enthusiastic but innocent blanket. Rob was struggling to adhere to the enlivened scenes he and his sibling had been so naturally acting throughout his childhood. He had difficulty submersing in the game of pretend. Confused, he made a desperate adjustment to the game. He was at the age when his parents considered him old enough to care for his brother, three years younger, while they went to socialize for the afternoon with the neighbors. Shortly after they left, he brought the toaster, the blanket, the radio, the lamp, and the vacuum into the yard and proceeded to move them about the grass in an attempt to revive them as the friendly appliances he and his brother had once adored. Unfortunately, the effect was contrary to what Rob was looking for and as he looked out at the mottled yard, browning from the drought, and his brother crouching amongst the scattered objects, all he saw was an array of stuff. He didn't feel lively, he felt abandoned. The late afternoon sun had burst through the encompassing gray, and was hot and he recalled the math homework he had to do for the next day. He turned toward the front porch and walked up the first step. He turned once more hoping to see a forest alive with adventure and smiling appliances but still only heard the chattering of his brother, saw the worn glimmer of aged house-ware, and the felt the heat of the sun. Rob opened the screen door and went inside to answer the phone, which was ringing, and to do his math homework, which was calling. After a few minutes, with his number two pencil behind his ear, he returned to the yard to retrieve the toaster, the blanket, the radio, the lamp, and the vacuum before his parents came home. 

The tires were bald but the small red pickup truck drove purposefully through the night and the snow in the north Nevada Hills. She paid $30 for a hotel room attached to a casino in Battle Mountain. The neon signs were well maintained and lit up the otherwise dark town with a red aura. She backed into the parking space that had the start to a sinkhole and retrieved her suitcase from the bed of the truck. In the hotel room she quickly checked the beds for bedbugs. Her shoulders ached from thousands of miles in the cramped cab. Her companion, she nearly forgot he was present, walked softly through the door. "Do you..." She cut him off with a not unkind look but an authoritative glance before she slung the suitcase onto the bed nearest the door and popped the latches. "Don't worry about it." She said with a cough to clear the burning cobwebs of tobacco smoke out of her chest. He shrugged his shoulders lightly, dropped his arms to his side then clasped his hands below his belt buckle forming a cup; a slight movement, nearly a pleading gesture, that left her disgusted. "Fuck you, Gabe." His head turned to the mirror hanging above the bureau and noticed the lamp between the beds was missing a shade which created an unusual glare off the mirror. She pulled a pack of Pall Malls out of the breast pocket of her loose fitting flannel and flicked off the light then walked to the door. "I am going to drink in the casino. Would you like to come?" He nodded, his eyes still adjusting to the darkened room. 

They walked into the casino which had a similar glow as the sidewalk outside. Gabe walked in the double doors while she finished her cigarette. Gabe looked to the bar and had a difficult time seeing the faces of the people through the cigarette smoke and red light. She walked by him making sure to not brush shoulders. He watched as the smoke curled back behind her like wings following her sure-footed strides toward the faceless bartender at the far end of the bar. There was no music inside and he felt sad. She looked down the length of the bar at him standing in the entry-way and felt like spitting, but this was not her place so she put her foot on the step below, her elbows on the bar-top, and slowly drank the double of cheap whisky. It was hot in there and the whiskey had become warm on the shelf. She liked the burn even though it nearly made her puke. She ordered another and took it quickly. She ordered another, lit a cigarette, turned slightly to look at Gabe and angled her head enough to spit onto the ragged carpet beneath the stools. She heard the rocks glass set onto the bar in-front of her and turned to the bartender who had seen her spit and merely curled the corner of her tight lips down a bit more; not in disapproval but indifference. She took the shot and let this one go down even slower the first, allowing the whiskey to sit in the gutters of her lower jaw before rolling her head back for the liquid to run down her throat. She knocked the bar twice to signal for another double and looked back for Gabe. He had turned and was walking out the door. The sun was rising and it was bright outside. She pulled out another Pall Mall and before she reached for her Bic the bartender, eyes averted, flicked a match to life and lit her cigarette. She shrugged and straightened her shoulders, which didn't ache anymore.