“And with the early dawn

Moving right along

I couldn't buy an eyeful of sleep

And in the aching night under satellites

I was not received

Built with stolen parts

A telephone in my heart…”

-Show Me How To Live, Audio Slave

The deep, ringing tune of the cane made its resonant way up the fog-swallowed street ahead of its bearer’s increasingly strident gait. Tom Jones grew younger in bone with every taken step, even as the cane grew deeper in tone. Tom had a distinct sense of symbiosis, though he would scarcely be able to define the word, other than by citing his relationship with the Gift Cane. Seeming to recoil, as if pierced, the groveling cloud made way, opening a crevice of vaporless gloom for the man whose cane sang its commanding tune.

Tom knew the route well in his mind’s eye, two miles by back ways and brick and mortar defiles, where hope had long since turned to a burrowing resignation. Soon he was striding by what he knew to be the old Holy Redeemer Cemetery to his left, around which he would walk to make his way home to Betty. Within sounded machinery, a bobcat, perhaps even a backhoe, the heavy clang of a dump truck for certain.

As he passed the East Gate he caught a glimpse of robed men within, scimitars on their backs and shovels in their hands. At the gate stood two Sharia militiamen with assault rifles, regarding him and the overhead drone lights with equal concern. Unlike the BLM, Sharia militia were recognized in the law enforcement database as auxiliary police, which gave them special status and helped in court, but also meant they could not take out drones on penalty of losing their “most favored faction” status. As he stopped to peer at them, a lane in the fog opened as if to make way, exposing the fog-shrouded Sharia men under the light of the moon, which seemed to beam down only in this one place, as if it were a broken, grinning sliver of a spotlight.

Troubled by what he saw, but of a firm mind to get home to Betty, Tom Jones tipped his hat to the men, which, by coincidence, was accompanied by the blinding of the moon once again. The faces of these men became frantic with a building panic, so he decided to make haste lest they risk drone strike and ventilate him like they did to Father Okimbu, when he protested their taking of the church stone.

As Tom’s cane struck the road the cemetery gate was covered again in thick fog and the way opened ahead. Off to his left and increasingly behind, he heard the low, choking sobs of the Sharia men, the poor, superstitious fools, so addled of wit they sounded as if they were dying for lack of air.

How could such sissies as these take our city, men that will cry and gasp over an anomaly of the weather?

Tom Picked up his pace and made good time, the ground-crawling cloud getting the Hell out of his way as he lost patience for this wretched, fallen city, rotting from within. The mist hung thickly back across the house faces, wetly encasing the cars and wrecks lining the streets. As he circled the cemetery on Moravia he heard heavy equipment at work within. This oppressed him, the thought that his great granddaddy and grandmother and his stillborn brother might be having their tombstones taken for the foundations of that damned Mosque down on Moravia Park Drive, where the old Shasta Bottling Plant used to be—that place of soda pop manufacture which he and his school class had toured in the late 1970s, in his bright, lie-lit boyhood.

He turned up Simms to get away from the sound, which was thankfully soon heavily muffled under increasing cloud. This was one of those rare places he had enjoyed walking before the BLM-Sharia feud had erupted, for the Mormon Mission, in the form of an old frame house on the corner of Marx and Simms, housed pleasant young fellows who had befriended him in a generational sort of way. Two who knew him would bring their replacements to his door, to discuss their fascinating books with him. He seemed something of an adopted cause to these teenage “elders.” They were fascinated by his boxing stories and had sought his advice on safe travel routes through the City. A warm glow covered him as he stopped before their group home, tears of sentimental journeying streaking his creased face as he stood and wondered at this tiny island of sanity, of this weird Christian cult which he had no real understanding of, feeding local people on their lawn and journeying out, two-by-two, unarmed, across this war zone…

How long he stood, he could not tell, how long his cane had failed to ring, unguessed and unwondered at. But the scene was increasingly picturesque, a wonder of its own, as the thickening cloud above and all around rolled up over the roof of the Mission House like a vault of white, framing the entire residential outpost like a Santa house in a Christmas globe. The normal two sentries were there, armed with their books and swords. He remembered, in differed amazement, the closing of The Knights of Columbus after the civil rights ruckus over Crusading being an affront to Muslims, and the fact that these Mormon boys had inherited the swords of the order when they helped the old Catholic men clean out their halls…

Old Sal was a Knight, and had taught Tom how to box at the Police Athletic League—that was so long ago it brought a hallow pang of loss, a loss specifically unknown but implicitly known.

He came to his senses as the fog rolled heavily all about, except for the house, the yard of which was occupied by the whole bunch of teenage elders and the—whatever the man was called that ran herd over them, the man he had never met, but had only heard tell of by the boys that he sent to make friends with Tom, the neighborhood guide…or was he charity case?

Tom looked up from his crooked, soggy reverie and saw them, their eyes full of something worse than pity, not having the heart, he supposed, to voice their opinion that he had gone insane, had dressed up like some damned pimp from the year of his birth…

He could think of nothing more appropriate than to tip his Gift Hat and walk off, the fog inexplicably parting as the metallic ring of his feel-good cane sounded through the cloud-hung night

Before him stood the old African Priest, the badly-spoken Nigerian man, who had been chased from his homeland by the Muslims, eventually to be executed by the Sharia while in police custody in the nation where he had sought refuge, a nation no longer its own and thereby incapable of providing such refuge—a sore spot in Tom’s memory—no, it was a light pole, plastered with the life-size likeness of a missing boy with the same big, white smile.

The cane played a harsher tune as he fairly marched home, glad that the fog no longer parted so queerly for his passage, but hugged him in its wet folds as he walked home in its white gloom by memory, seeing nothing but the death of his city in his suddenly acute mind’s eye.

Came Death.

The death of memory.

The theft of their everything.

The death of even their cemetery.