My friend the Cabby found himself in a middle-sized city in the middle of the country after a middle-life bender that left him two friends down and no money to his name.

He took to driving drunk folks from the bars to the suburbs and that kept a dollar or two in his pockets.

His first friend, the Cabby told me and The Trolley Man on a ride across town, was a man named Wizard who killed himself in an unremarkable fashion, and so The Cabby bought anything with a wizard on it to remember him.

The second friend, a man named Bandit, is still alive, but The Cabby didn’t know that at the time. He mourned them both the same.

Bandit drove through a neighborhood at 107 mph without once touching his brakes and rolled his two-and-a-half ton pick-up through a reasonable used sedan, killing a woman and her pregnant friend instantly.

Bandit didn’t feel like sticking around after that. He made some friends who agreed that he would be declared dead in exchange for a couple of favors he’s never going to be able to pay off, and now he slips just a little bit of concentrated nicotine into every cup of coffee he serves two-and-a-half states away.

Not enough to kill you, just enough for you to know that something’s wrong.

And you know something’s wrong, don’t you?

The Cabby wore a bandana to remember Bandit. He told every part of the story that he knew to a nice young couple in the back of his car and, turning around in his seat to show a picture of the sign Bandit once stole from a dive bar bath room, holding his phone in both hands with tears in his eyes, he slowly veered into oncoming traffic.

This world is a broken facsimile of
What is to come.