One spring night it snowed and the snow stuck to everything. Frank found a pigeon struggling to stand upright. He thought it had hit the big plate glass window and was only temporarily stunned. When he set it on its feet it did seem somewhat recovered. But it died of Asian Avian Flu Type B and Frank was rendered accidentally immune.

However, around him, for entirely too long, friends, relatives, acquaintances fell like sparrows, dead in mid-flight.

When we met on the broken sidewalk he was happy, jaunty-spirited, but the fact that he had spent the night sleeping in the empty shell of an old SUV ' what he called a 'dead beetle'� ' was too objectively reported by his clothes. His hair.

We walked together to his job interview.

The sun came out warm and snow dripped into clear puddles. Chunks and mesas of cement began to steam. The new grass in the cracks glowed clean and fresh as a salad, turgid with cold water.

It was the morning after the end of the world.

The sun was clean, and the light was white.

On the stone sill of a low window Frank found a little pool of lively water and he washed off his face with his hands. He toweled off with the sleeves of his tired shirt.

'Your face is clean as a daisy,'� I observed.

He spoke too; his tongue nimble this mid-morning.

Running his wet fingers through his hair, he innocently styled it in the way of bad boys and street Lovers, and the eye of the girl at the bike rack studied him and drifted from this world to gaze, no doubt, on a kitchen filled with light as bright as a smile full of strong white teeth.

On the smoldering bush by the post office he found a pale blue shirt, crisp as the sky. It fit him perfectly, of course, and he gave his old, wrinkled shirt to a street kid who would remember him. On this date, three years hence, I knew, that kid would give Frank the key to the vault down in the basement under Oberon's Bone Palace.

Today though, no one notices his jeans have gone a little too long without a good washing.

He jokes about cooking a sentence that is so nourishing that it feeds his inner wisdom and makes his coat healthy and shiny. He says it causes a little flatulence which smells like early lilacs and sounds like distant laughter.

Between the google eyes of a parking meter he finds a comb and as a further joke runs it though his hair. The street bohemian disappears and in his place stands a happy, confident, recent graduate seeking his first job on the upward ladder of prosperity.

Soon enough he finds a ring in the middle of a sidewalk puddle of crystal water that is popping with the breeze. With the ring playfully on his finger he becomes a newlywed, hopeful, eager to prove himself to his beloved.

It will be hard to do what I must do, come the time.

He mimes tipping his hat to the cop leaning against his patrol car and the cop accidentally bends his face into a smile, surprising even himself.

I wait on the sidewalk and watch through the big window as Frank interviews for the night watchman job. He thinks he wants the job. The boss smiles. The boss laughs. Looks like Frank will get the job.

I assume a Portent of Darkness. I hold up the back of my fist, thumb down, and when the boss looks out and catches my eye, I jerk the thumb down and shake my head slowly twice. No. No.

Frank doesn't get the job.

And although he will be disappointed the rest of the morning, I will not, for I cannot bear to see the Luck of the Living bound once again to the Wheel of Babylon.

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