Corpse Money

1.

They've found six dead children about twenty blocks from my house.

I'm not waking up to this so I hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. Seven minutes later, some kind of personnel carrier is involved in a major accident that has one of the local bridges shut down. I assume bodies are strewn all over the roadway, so I hit the snooze button again and go back to sleep. I plan to stay in bed until the newscaster inside my bedside clock-radio delivers some happy news.

After another seven minutes some more rationing orders are proclaimed, but it's only butter and I could care less. Snooze.

A handful more seven minutes' roll by and I am eventually rewarded for my patience by a cute little human interest story about a boy and a dog and a rowboat. As I reach across my bedside table to turn on the electric kettle, I realise that this is going to be a bad day. I'm down to my corpse money and the rent is due.


2.

The corpse money is sixty dollars. I found it some months ago in the jacket pocket of the first casualty in my neighbourhood. The guy had been shot in the forehead and left to die in the front seat of his car. Some local kids found the guy and I was the first adult on the scene.

I was putting on airs of responsibility for the benefit of the kids, ostensibly looking through the corpse's belongings for identification or some other pertinent information, when I grabbed the thin wad of folded twenties. I instinctively pocketed the cash, although at the time I wasn't overly concerned about my financial state. I was hoping to find the dead man's gun.

As I said, this happened months ago. Things have quickly changed around here. Shortly after I came into possession of the corpse money the police all but stopped performing their civic duties. They still patrol the streets, but there's no way they'd respond to a call about one lousy dead guy in a car.


3.

Things have taken a drastic turn for the worse since I got the corpse money. There's the fighting of course, but I don't suppose sixty dollars could be to blame for all that. Even I'm not so paranoid as to lose all belief in coincidence.

The theoretical feces began to make contact with the proverbial axial-flow oscillator shortly after I returned to my room that fateful day.