What Can I Do Now?

I asked questions.

I asked questions I have asked before.

I asked questions I have never asked before.

I asked questions I did not even want the answers to.

Always finding a new motivation when there came a sticky point that the man felt he had a right to refrain from answering. As if his answers were his property .. to give or keep as he saw fit. I quickly taught him differently. His answers were mine .. to demand and expect whenever I asked. Not before .. or until ... always when I asked.

It was not an easy thing. To follow a thread. One thread through a maze of a million .. without knowing the color of the thread you are looking for. It was exhausting.

Did this have something to do with what had happened to Tarra? I did not even know what happened to Tarra. I knew from the whispered voices at the Fires that something serious had indeed happened and that she was not doing well. But there had been no official word. No one spoke of it to me.. no one spoke of it out loud. They would tell me when they wanted me to know.

Would be Convenient if this did have to do with Tarra if someone filled me in .. but that would be ... Convenient. Convenient just did not seem to be one of those shadows that followed me around. More is the pity. I would have liked to make Convenient my friend. We could hang out and get drunk together swapping stories. The only time Convenient seemed to stop by for a chat it was his cousin Too-Convenient. Which usually did not bode well for my comfort level.

So here I was with not much of a man left and a whole lot of answers I had no idea how to piece together to make any kind of useful sense of. Seemed unfair I was left with all the hard parts. And by now the poor fellow was cause-and-effect trained enough to need to give me answers .. he asked me ..

"What can I do now?"

And I replied .. "There is left only .. to bleed."