Protagonist

A crow drops its yearly pebble down the crappy old well. A clerk changes the price of broccoli. A man stares at a broom at midnight. Stars bust up. Two blind people, sprinting through a forest on a pitch black night, knock each other into comas. Two crows swoon. Hannibal looks back at the Alps angrily. A plumber flies in his sleep. People lie and are deceived. Two crows fall dead simultaneously. Two ravens, laughing at the crows, also fall dead. A chipmunk, seeing this, chokes on a huckleberry. Alas, says the only witness, a man who prays on it and receives no salvation and much later, having forgotten the incident, also dies. Finally, amidst the storm, the protagonist appears. His lantern bobs like a fairy drunk on fog. He runs. He is in search of something or someone. He has had too much beer and his breaths are interrupted now and then by rancid gurgled half-burps. He does not speak. His eyes are like steel beads pressed into an antimacassar. He pauses — what does he sense ahead? what scent has he caught whiff of? how can one replicate the knife-like thrust of his resolve? — and then rushes on, but as he passes, as his face swims precisely into view, we notice in the wind of his right nostril one lone booger shudders.