Such a pretty bus ride at first. We rode together, all of us paying patrons, through a wealthy and extravagant and rich old person’s sprawling green estate, with our fancy silver tour bus trundling slowly up and down every hill and meekly, cautiously around each curve that was winding, and also wealthily in the pricey, pleasant sunshine, and also peacefully along for an hour surrounded by gorgeous, many-splendored, multihued foliage and geraniums and violets and petunia begonias and inheritance marble statues and flowerbeds and tall, gesticulating ferns and pretty sunlight that poured hot gold over us like we were all beautiful. Some kind of flutist or harp player sweetly harped (or flute-played) the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn in the background of our tour; we could hear that genteel and sugary classical song out the windows of the bus and that’s when right then a huge chunk of all pungent hell broke loose: the old man in the back of the bus, the one who had been wearing that stupid fedora and bowtie, he’d had some kind of medical attack and fell over, he had some kind of bio attack and keeled over off of his seat, this old man had some kind of elderly man attack and tumbled off his bus seat and crumpled over, strangling and making bicycle motions with his legs and trying to get a scream out and that’s when he shat himself. The world ended forever for a little while when we all realized what he’d done. Now, I paid sixty dollars for this tour and since this guy ruined my afternoon and the afternoon of the others and the afternoon of history and the afternoon of love and the afternoon of good taste and manners and since the tour company said they wouldn’t give refunds and since all sales were final I had to get revenge and satisfaction and so I did it. I’m the one who did it; it was me. I leveled my lovely Uzi towards the old man’s head and emptied my clip into him because once a person shits themselves on a bus where other people have no way to escape from it, that person must be euthanized. The other people on the bus acted all shocked and all afraid like they’d never seen a mercy killing before, even though every single one of them has at least one time in their life witnessed the slow, unmerciful murder of life in the eyes of the cashier who is being exsanguinated by retail life itself. I am reminded (and you are also) of a time when I was sitting on one of those benches at the mall many years ago. A Europeanly attractive mother (think Ava Gardner; think Tina Louise; think Hedy Lamarr) in a majestically tight pink sweater was sitting across from me on a nearby bench, and she had this little baby with her. While the mother was looking at her phone and while I was looking at the mother, this little creature of hers looked straight at me and told me with a snarl that life was not easy. I didn’t know that until the baby told me. Life is not easy. Sometimes you have to euthanize someone who makes the bus smell worse than it normally does.