Out on his ass again. Getting thrown out of the office would have been hard to believe only a week earlier, but the pattern as of late had become more or less acceptable. He dusted some pelletized glass out of his lap before gingerly rolling off his butt, to his hip. Gathering legs that felt more sure of themselves than ever before he stood up and stretched. Kicking his foot through the stratified debris of his desk he found his brown and white clip on tie. He wrung out the odd smelling water from the now shattered Hawaiian snow globe before clipping it snuggly under his chin. It was not so much that he felt good about the way things had gone, it was that he felt liberated.

Granted he didn't know for sure the door to Owen's office would break the first time he swung that goddamned Ikea chair, and it was pretty convenient that Owen's set of putters were just inside the doorway, but all of that didn't mean a thing now that it was done. Sure Owen might try to press charges, but he was fairly certain he hadn't hurt him too badly.

"You fucking used me. This whole fucking time. The clients. The raises. The options. None of it is worth shit! You've been playing me since the day I was hired!" Lisa peeked over the wall of her cubicle to watch the whole thing. The look on Owens face when that chair first came through his glass front door was priceless. He thought he had him under his thumb. Boy, was he wrong. He chuckled to himself at how badly Owen, chairman and CEO of Lippensetter Funds and Foreign Interests, was shaken up. The first two swings of the cheap ass putter were deserved. So were the two minutes he used to catch his breath while Owen proceeded to piss his silk lined Avan'che tailored pants. Maybe the last five swings were for everyone else he would live on to fuck over. Maybe they were for each individual part of his American dream that were now dust in the wind.

He glanced up from his aimless wanderings around the parking garage, his tie still dripping. It took both of the rent a cops to muscle him to the frieght elevator and down forty one floors to the parking garage where they dumped him, ass first, out of a job. Out of the life he thought he wanted for himself all these years. He looked to his right and parked before him was the shinning cream colored and tasteless-from-every-angle Cadillac, plate number OWEN52H07. "Why the hell not?" He shouldered off his black suit jacket and balled it up tight, holding it up briefly like the head of some slain beast. With his free hand he fumbled for and found the golden lighter he was awarded six months ago with the promise that he would sit on the board by years ends. He made sure each nook got a good dousing of butane from the lighter's well before lighting it aflame and punting it underneath the tail of the white whale of a car. Pocketing the lighter he turned smartly on his heel and headed for the stairwell.

In the service alley behind Lippensetter FFI a pair of gulls fought ravenously over what looked like it might have once been half a sub. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bought his own lunch, but he wasn't hungry. He wasn't a lot of things. In a few quick strides he was out from between the shoulders of giants and back among the liliputs he would sooner have spat on 12 hours ago. He walked with them. Against them. Wherever his feet wandered he didn't care. They weren't really his feet in gator skinned boots with whale bone insoles, were they?

The city fell away block by block, followed in rhythm by factories and cannaries. The foreign pulse and air dribbled away like rocks rebounding off the walls of a stone well, falling into dark water. High above him, where once they were bracketed off, cut, bound, and prodded into tiny swatches of whatever hue the smog turned the sky, the heavens unfurled like a flag that bore the colors of truth. He walked on. Patches of oil and hulking container barges slowly began to turn into patches of yellow faced dandelions poking up through cracked cement and collapsed brick and mortar. He walked on as the sun made its descent with all the grace of a dragonfly come to rest on the surface of a lake; a descent he had not witnessed in years. He could feel it now. The rhythm of the sea washed over and through him. The shouting and sirens he couldn't sleep without became the caws of birds and the crush of waves upon the rocks of the low lying dikes and in that moment he could feel it. None of it was real to him. None of it mattered because being there was real.

He pulled out his black leather bill fold and, feeling its heft a moment, chucked it as hard as he could into the breakers. The lighter followed. The car, the condo, the summer cottage upstate, those he would leave for others to battle over. It wasn't and never should have been his fight.