"Through the station's public announcement system the lady with the ringing voice announces in her frozen emotion that it's twenty-five past eleven and she adds that your last night has just begun. So, unwillingly, you set your feet in motion. Just a few minutes away, a few beers later, the bad breath kiss of back streets and dirty alleys swallows you whole. Those interdimensional doors you so well know are wide open in every single corner and bridge right before you but you fear crossing them and who can blame you? You've already been there, gone to hell and back dozens of times. You wish you were back in your hole. You wish you had never left but it's too late for that and too late for everything else too, as much as it hurts to acknowledge it. So you rehearse your words once and again, as if they actually could be of any use. But your throat is dry and your tongue is sore and your teeth are missing. Your hesitating shadow will only give in to following your steps if you keep your path within the walls of deep sewers where no stone has ever seen the daylight and no rat has ever been a man. Where no shadow is needed anyway. Your gut warns of someone stalking, of hissing snakes and howling wolves, while an old girlfriend walks by proudly, raised eyebrow but unnoticed by you to her dismay and thereby hoping you drown yourself in misery and self pity. Nevertheless you can't help but focusing solely on the sound of dripping taps and far away windows crashing. Close to your head, up above you listen to a crying dove. Someone's childhood somebody else dropped consumes itself in a load of burning rubbish. The junk is the city and the city is the junk. In your head the slow drum whose sound now it's clear never went away is hammering out loud again for the first time in months, maybe years. It's the rythm of the forgotten days, the payoff, the retribution you always knew you'd have to suffer some day. This very day, as it's turned out to be. The fire returns to you like a bad dream, undeleted nightmare, unforgiving, punishing your weakness and minding your own business because it's its own too and it even has a life of its own. And it's right when the pain reaches an unbearable level, when Death turns up wearing a sweet and sincere smile and then you, and then you, and then you finally articulate your confused thoughts and ask if it's all over, if you can at last lay down and rest. But she comes up to you, discovering your uglyness hidden in the twilight and she mutters

and she goes away, shaking her head and twisting her mouth in explicit disgust and without having done her job. You try to call her back, desperately. But you realize your contract has just been renewed."