Reflections of Mortality

"Can you actually hear it? It's like a rumbling, like distant thunder."

The old man sitting across from me at the bar had been skulking around the tavern all evening. He'd taken a table in the darkest corner of the room and nursed a pint of ale while he watched the other patrons. I'd been trying to ignore him as best I could, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I joined him. Now he was looking straight at me with his watery blue eyes and speaking in a soft, quavering voice.

"I'm sorry?" I said. My head was pounding and it wasn't easy to focus on his words. He took another sip of ale, then held his glass up to the light and stared into it as if he were searching for an answer to some great mystery written there on its bottom.

"I said, can you hear it? That sound? Like distant thunder?"

"No," I answered, "I don't think so." The thundering rumble that he heard probably wasn't anything real at all; just a by-product of how drunk I was. That or my hangover was already kicking in. It was only six o'clock in the morning, but I'd been drinking hard for hours after arriving at work at four thirty. There were several bodies to prepare before lunchtime, including two dogs for Mr. Suggs, who owned half the town. Normally I wouldn't have touched something like that with a ten foot pole because you never know what might be found inside a dog's stomach when they're not eating their master's food; but today I didn't care much what Mr. Suggs did with his own shit once it left his body and went into his pet's mouth. Hell, let him eat it himself if he wanted.

The old man drained his glass again, then set it down on the bar with a thud that made me jump. "You know," he said with a sigh, "it's funny how people always seem to be dying when you're drinking."

That wasn't exactly what I'd expected him to say next, but it made sense in a strange way because that's exactly what had happened all day yesterday too--people dying while I was drinking--and now some smartass part of my brain started to go off about how every single time anybody ever dies anywhere on earth they're either getting born or they're getting buried while someone else is having a drink somewhere nearby... But then that part of my brain fell silent because even though what it was saying sounded right it didn't really make any sense at all... And then for no reason at all that I could figure out I found myself thinking about how last Sunday morning when we finally closed up shop there were five dead bodies in the back room--four men and one little girl who couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old--and how each one of them had died for different reasons: one guy pissed off somebody bigger than him and paid for it with his life; another guy got himself shot by accident; another guy killed himself; another guy got sick from something bad he ate; and then there was that little girl who put her hand on one of those electrical wires sticking up from the sidewalk where they were supposed to be hidden underground so she could ride her bicycle without touching the ground and without falling over but she didn't know that they hadn't buried those wires deep enough under the concrete so she thought she could still ride along on them without falling down but instead she touched those wires and touched them so hard that she ended up dead before her mom even knew she was gone... And then just as quickly as these thoughts came into my head they disappeared again until there was just that dull hammering inside my head again... Drums beating in time with a rhythm only they could hear...