Keeping my pajama pants on was an issue, but then it always is. Wiggling across the patchy grass lawn, I thought about Frank Williams, the late entry and surprise winner of our little contest. Father of four. Or was it five? All boys. He was always trying to teach his sons to ride a bike. When it wasn’t one son wobbling past my window with a hysterically tense grimace, it was another. I always hated the Williams boys for being slow learners. Now I felt sorry for them. No one should lose a parent through clumsiness. Their whole lives, those boys are going to have to say, “Yeah. My father fell off a roof. Lost his balance. What? What does it matter what he was doing up there?” Poor kids. Clearing gutters is no reason for a man to die. There’s just no honor in it.

The curious horde crouching around the dead man took no notice of the sick little worm crawling toward them. I made it through the legs of Bruce Davies, the town butcher. He peered down just as I peered up. Our eyes locked. I thought someone should tell him to get far away from the lifeless carcass of our neighbor. I didn’t like the glint in that butcher’s eye.

I looked closer. Frank’s neck was broken. His head had rolled back in a pool of dark blood and hung limp across the shoulders. When a neck breaks, it really breaks. I looked closer still. His eyes were wide open but there was nothing behind them, just a stupefying cavern. I thought: That will be me soon. Nothingness will envelop me just as it has enveloped him. Because of the contest and my own part in it, I saw this death not just as a preview of my own, but as an echo. Frank and I were in this together, chained to one another in some macabre marriage for all eternity- deadlock, I now call it, the affinity the living have with the dead. It’s not for everyone. You either feel it or you don’t. I did then and I do now. I feel it profoundly: this sacred, insidious bond. I feel they are waiting for me to join them in holy deadlock.