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V

Usury, says the man on the radio, is money that makes money

It is money that climbs on top of other money to make more money, but there is no service rendered The interest rate is exorbitant Most world religions outlaw it; it is a bad sign of greed, of the avaricious nature of a financial situation gone awry What people need are services or products: now those are a worthy exchange It is, they say, one of the foundations of the current econo off debt, off credit-card offers froer they e-loanfor risk, off all these questions about regulation, offzombie who ate zombies?

He ate and ate and ate

But rew sick He was large and used to be strong, and he lay in a park, breathing hard The other zombies feared him, but when they saas ill, they surrounded hirunted They sharew bored and luain He was reaniry to look for another zo His own head, all eating, until he started to digest himself, until all that was left was a us, a stomach, intestines

VII

And, finally - a true story

I was at the house of a otten divorced He was sixty years old, and his wife had kept the household together for forty years, and then all of a sudden decided she was done with him She left hi He did not knohere to buy toothpaste

A friend reco of loneliness, of the sounds in the new house that felt like the clanging of death bells At sixty, the rest of his life was a vacancy He&039;dto take over his life for him, but the woh his wallet and looking too closely at his stock statements, and about money he was clear, so he threw her out He put her piles of shoes in rows in the hallway She yelled at hiot his correct name and called him the name of her ex-lover, by accident

He had five of us over to watch TV together, a show I knew him from work; others knew him from church We ate pizza and drank beer and watched TV and talked

At the end of the show, he looked around the roo, he said

We all nodded and s out Thank you for having us

But it stuck indown the stairs to my car What had he said?

The shoas a series, so ere back again the next week Each of us needing so, he said again, at the end

I waited a week, to be sure The folloeek, the sareen The city, black silhouettes Golden lights in front s

Thanks, I thought It should have been thanks

Thanks, everyone, for co

Why?

The bugs, inside The jittery bugs The lurch, the sharoan

Two ht, I had an idea

He was a se He surely knew the correct verb and grammar He spoke fluidly at all other times The only explanation I could find was that this is what he had been told to say to guests Most likely, they had had people over for years She had invited the people She had made the food She had picked out his clothes At the end, she told hi

And he had so fully stepped out of his own point of view that he sione froation that would make the words fit his point of view

They say it&039;s all fantasy - zooofiness? It&039;s all silliness we create for our own delightful fear?