...of a wandering mind

Abel Reyes was still queuing patiently; his arms had gone numb from the weight. There was some very pretty girls in the queue, and he was watching them to pass the time. But in the most discreet way. He could truthfully have said that girls were what he liked best in the world, but he always admired them from a certain distance, held back by his pathological, adolescent shyness. He also felt that the inevitable stillness of a supermarket queue put him at a disadvantage. Movement was his natural state, albeit the movement of flight. To him, stillness seemed a temporary exception. He advanced step by step, as a train of full trolleys made its very slow way forward. Many of them were full to capacity, with what looked like provisions for the whole year. The people behind and ahead of him in the queue were talking continually. He was the only one who was silent. He couldn't believe that the neutron bomb really existed. Here, for example, how could it eliminate people and not things, since they were inextricably combined? In a situation like this, a supermarket queue, things were extensions of the human body. Still, since he had nothing better to do, he imagined the bomb. A silent explosion, lots of radiation. Would the harmful radiation get into the packets of food, the boxes and tins? Most likely. An analogy for death by neutron bomb occurred to him: you're at home, listening to the radio, and a song begins to play; then you go out, and you hear the same song coming from the window of a house down the street. A block further on, a car drives past with the song playing on its radio. You catch a bus, the radio is on, and what do you hear but the same song, still going - without meaning to, you've practically heard it all. Everyone hears the radio (at some point during the day) and many people have it tuned in to the same station. For some reason this struck him as an exact analogy, supernaturally intact; only the effects were different. These thoughts helped him to while away the time...

[Ghosts, Aira, C.]