Everything that his life had been was reduced to this. Every sinew in his body burned,  every joint grated in such a way as to send sharp pains shooting through the very fibre of his being, like glass slicing relentlessly through skin and bone. His mind was fading, just as his body was weakening, but as long as he kept moving towards his goal he knew that he would be fine. His legs had been failing for years and so he had an increasing reliance on his walking canes, which had become like a second pair of legs throughout his daily trip to the shop.

Every day at 12pm he started out on this long, torturous hike. It was only half a mile from his house to the shop but to him, with the effort he had to exert to get there, it could have been Mt Everest. Never could there be an endurance athlete who exercised such willpower as this old man. Such was his focus, that he barely acknowledged the greetings of passersby that saluted him, not that there were many of those these days. Most people he had ever known had already perished in the relentless fires of existence. Many of them had rotted away, forgotten, in front of televisions in old folks homes, drugged up to their eyeballs so as not to be too much of a nuisance to the staff who cared for them; treated like children by these people who knew nothing and cared less about the lives of the empty decaying shells of those who used to be regarded as people. Continue reading “Die Standing” →