Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.

So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.

If the bears don't get you, it's home.

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.

When your teeth are gone, learn to like mush.

After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?