Pounder

Pounder
by
Zander Williams

"Knock on wood, but not my brain," Preston cried, sitting on the john. He was taking a major dump, a.k.a. the big one. Perhaps he was constipated; the shit just wasn't coming out—pun intended. Strange it was to him that the food he had easily eaten was tough coming out of his anus. He wanted to strain harder to get that huge dropping out of him, but that would only make the pulse in his head grow worse. He was in a stinking predicament—pun intended again—until he gave up and strained.

Ughhhhn!

Plop!

His temples ached afterwards. Well...they always ached, but now they were hurting him badly. Ever since this brunette bachelor was ten, he had what his dad had called a pounder—a virtually endless headache. Preston's dad had had headaches, but he doubted if his dad ever had a pounder, a migraine that remained and kept on and on. Everybody would get headaches, from kids to old-timers—but only a few people had a pounder. Preston was now thirty-two, and a twenty-two-year-old pounder made him wonder on many occasions why he hadn't committed suicide yet.

He took some toilet paper from the roll, folded it nicely three times (how neat do you need to be to wipe your ass?). As he applied it to the crack, he noticed the heavy film of sweat that embraced his face like a gas mask. He wiped the tissue first over his forehead, then across his nose, and finally across his jawbones. The tissue was soaked then and he threw it in the toilet after lifting up to do so. He acquired some more tissue from the roll and wiped his ass with it, remembering to fold it over and make sure that no poop got on his fingers. He rose, threw the used tissue into the toilet, and scowled at the enormous turd swirling around in the water like a log. The size of it amused him (and the fact that it was the only turd in the toilet), but what absolutely amazed him was his ability to shit it out without popping a vein in his head. They managed to build the Great Wall of China and I'm amazed about how I managed to lay a big one in the john without having a stroke.

Preston lifted his pants up, fastened them hastily and flushed the toilet, hoping that its contents would go down peacefully without the need of a plunger. The contents went down smoothly. He unlocked the stall door and walked out. There was a guy at one of the sinks washing his hands. Preston's objective was to leave immediately to his office space, skipping the hand-washing part. He had to wash them now because of the asshole at the sink saw him. The guy might think I'm a filthy barbarian and tell everyone that I didn't wash my hands after taking a shit.

He went to the second sink from the one the guy was standing at. He was a younger guy with blonde hair and blue eyes in a suit; his kind was common in the business world and Preston was finding that to be aggravating. Yellow-haired pricks were what he liked to call them, their eyes blue for no legitimate reason. They were all sons of earlier businessmen who wanted their sons to be heirs of their corporate thrones—how else could these yellow-haired pricks work there? The thought of it all made Preston's pounder pound harder.

He turned the left nozzle of the faucet on so that hot water could flow; in the span of forty seconds, none did. He shook his head and then stopped shaking his head, almost forgetting about the pounder.

"The hot water never works in this building," said the yellow-haired prick two sinks over. He was grinning at Preston with pink lips.

I hate yellow and pink—too bright, too loud, too fruity.

"Are you homo?" Preston asked. He didn't mean to be discriminatory, but the pounder was too severe for him to keep all this thoughts inside his mind. Thinking out loud had gotten him into trouble plenty of times in the past; in one situation when an old woman had been interviewing him for a job at a telephone company, he had been close enough to grimace a bit and ask her, "Do you know that your breath stinks really bad?" He never obtained that job because of his pounder, and the only reason he had been able to obtain the occupation he had now was because of his prior college experience in telecommunication and his limited ability to have full control of his mouth.

All due to that goddam pounder.

"No, man!" said the prick, his grin swiftly transforming into a frown of discomfort. He reached for a piece of paper towel from the dispenser and dried his hands with it. "Are you?"

"I'm sorry," Presto lied, not feeling a bit repentant. "My head hurts and I'm not feeling well today." That didn't change his thought about the prick's sexual orientation, though.

"Whatever." The prick tossed the paper towel into the waste bin and took one last peak in one of the mirrors. "Can't you see that I look too good to be gay?"

"Dude, you don't ask guys how good you look if you're a guy." Preston didn't think this guy was a yellow-haired prick—he was an arrogant yellow-haired dirtbag that hadn't come out the closet yet.

He gave Preston a nasty glance and exited the restroom. When Preston turned the water off, he looked up in the mirror only to find a plump and juicy vein moving up and down with the beating of his heart. It had a discolored appearance that made him panic as he ran a finger along its crooked course; the start point was on his neck; it channeled along his cheekbone, it passed through his temple, and ended at his hairline. It looked so gross.

Preston pressed the vein with three fingers and the results were overwhelming—his whole head and upper torso twinged in a bizarre way that milked two scorching tears from his eyelids. His migraine always brought along the smell of apples when it worsened, and he could smell apples now. The pain traveled into his blood vessels and produced aching all over in every direction and dimension. Something had already warned him not to touch the vein, but since the migraine negated his ability to listen to his thoughts occasionally, he went and done it. Rotten apples, he thought.

Thump, thump, thump, th—

He examined the monstrous protrusion once again, the cadaverous green of it disgusting him. He then left out patting his face gently with the piece of paper towel he retrieved on his way out. Russell, his boss, greeted him with an open hand. I'd love it for him to see this blemish on my face so that he can send me home early, he thought.

"That must've been a long one you laid in the toilet there," Russell said, shaking Preston's hand with a perky quality that belonged exclusively to him. The baldness of his horseshoe cut gleamed due to the fluorescent lights over them; if they were any brighter, Preston thought he'd have himself a stroke looking at it. "Anyway, Mr. Trask, I want you to stay an extra hour tonight."

"For what reason?" Preston asked. He didn't intend to sound vexed, even though he was irate and feeling the need to lie down for weeks.

"Why, you're the hardest-workin man here, that's the reason," Russell replied. He began to look at Preston with critical uncertainty. "What the hell happened to the side of your face, Trask?"

"It's a bruise." Preston wanted to tell his employer to fuck off as they strolled on, but he thought better of it. "I got into a fight with this moron who almost hit my car because he can't read traffic lights too well."

"What're you doing fighting?" The two of them continued to walk up a hall of the building of Goodway Industries: Your World Leader in Technology Expansion and Enhancement, complete with five-star air conditioning, state-of-the-art carpentry, and first-class decorations that made even the most frustrated employee feel right at home. "You're a businessman on the climb of the corporate ladder—you have the willpower to sue that son of a bitch for every penny he's worth."

"Too much for the brain to handle." Preston returned to his office desk in the Telecommunications Department and sat down with promptness. Russell Woodruff, the T.D. director, followed.

"Well, I'll cut you some slack, Presto-Man," Russell said, leaning over Preston's desk. Preston hated when people called him Presto-Man—he had been hearing it all his life. Was it necessary to call him that just because name was Preston? "If you stay this extra hour, I'll give you tomorrow and the next day off to clear your head."

If only this jerk-off knew that it's impossible to clear your head of a pounder...

"Okay," he said, glaring at the goofy screensaver on his computer. The little cartoon dog at the corner of the screen urinated and giggled while blushing.

"And make sure someone is here to turn on the security surveillance cameras tonight," Russell added with a shaky finger pointed at Preston. As he went to leave out of Preston's office space in his brown business suit, he paused. "I hope you get well soon, champ—a lot of customers have been complaining and calling about those goddam Wayfones having defects. Wow, that thing along your face sure looks hideous now that you're sitting under that desk light. You sure that you're not turning into some type of alien or something?"

I'm pretty sure I'm not, you bald anus, Preston. His desire to say that aloud and the fear of losing his job made him grit his teeth.

When Russell left, Preston stuck up his middle finger and let his forehead land on the desk, which sent and agonizing pulse throughout his body. After trembling, he thought of the stupid contraption known as the Wayfone: The Good Way to Talk (he also wondered why everything that came from the company was forever equipped with some phony tagline or subtitle). The cellular phone was complete with all the features a go-go teen could ask for in one handset—three-way calling, call waiting, an unlimited supply of music ringtones, an installed camera, no roaming charges, and ya-di-ya-di-ya. The Internet, too. Wayfones, however, had a feature no other phone company thought of yet—TV Time, where you can actually watch all your favorite premium TV channels—meaning your favorite reality shows and adult cartoons at the time they would regularly air—on something that fitted contentedly in your pocket. Wayfones had major defects, though; maybe that was to happen since the Wayfone had been designed to look like the RAZR phone everyone was so goo-goo for.

The phone rang at Preston's desk. He sat up in a jolt and put on his earpiece.

"Thanks for calling The Goodway Industries Hotline, the Goodest Number You'll Ever Dial. This Associate Representative Preston speaking from Telecommunications Department. This call will be recorded for security and safety of information. Your name and how may I help you today?" Preston hated this introduction, the same thing he had to say to each caller who wanted to give Goodway a piece of his/her mind since he/she had nothing else to do with his/her life, apparently.

"Yes, my name is Rita and I have a problem with this thing called the Wayfone," the said. It sounded like an angry white woman in her forties, the type that would know what a cell phone was but not all the added features.

"Which is, ma'am?"

"I'm trying to watch Oxygen on this thing and the only channel I'm getting is The Hot Network," said the caller. Preston's eyes widened in amusement; he knew actually what The Hot Network was. He was a bachelor, and some nights he got lonely. It only took four buttons—one to turn the TV on and the other three to get the channel—and he could get off for the night. In fact, he was planning on this when he would get home from work.

"Okay ma'am," he said, trying to hold back a chuckle, "I'll need the serial number of the phone, please."

As he twirled to face the computer monitor and to type, a deafening sound went off in his head.

KNOCK, KNOCK.

He winced and placed his hand on his brow.

"And how would I find that out?" the called asked, obviously annoyed.

"It's the fifteen-digit number of the phone," said Preston, now kneading his brow like tough dough. "If you take out the battery in the back, the number should be on the in—"

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.

Preston flinched so hard that the earpiece shot out his ear. He raised both hands up to his temples; the pain was overwhelming. Something thick and gooey had leaked out of the protruding vein. He looked at his hand—the slime was half red and half clear.

Blood and pus.

Preston could hear Rita's enormous and infuriated voice blaring from the centimeter-wide earpiece that had landed on the carpet. It sounded like she was asking three different questions at once. Preston put the earpiece up against his eardrum, despising the surplus noise coming from it. He could see the other employees peeping around their monitors at him.

"Ma'am, just take the battery out of the Wayfone and you'll see a number consisting of fifteen digits—"

"I'm trying to if you just shut up!" the caller screamed, making Preston's temples hum with heat.

He stood up out of the chair and snapped like tree branch in a disastrous snowstorm. "Listen, bitch! I wasn't the one who told you to call, do you hear me? I'll reach into this phone and break your fucking neck in h—"

GUESS WHO'S KNOCKING?

Preston fell into his computer monitor and it tipped over, creating sparks when it landed to the floor. Huge back splotches reigned over his field of vision and sounds blanked in and out. What he had heard in his head wasn't just a sound—it had been a voice, loud and clear. It was powerful enough to send streams of blood from his eyelids and ears. He could taste some of it on his upper lip from a nosebleed.

Two of his fellow representatives—Jennifer, a woman he had went out on date with (but never had sex with) and Graham, one of the many yellow-haired pricks of Goodway—entered Preston's office space. He had fallen onto the floor; the anguish was spreading rapidly to other parts of his body like a mutating virus. Graham seized him under his arms and heaved him onto the desk chair.

"What hell is wrong, man, are you having an epileptic seizure or what?" Graham asked, trying to look into Preston's drifting eyes.

"Graham he's bleeding!" Jennifer cried, but she sounded distant—in fact, all sounds had the feel of a faraway distance. The fax machines, printers, ringing telephones, and the eternal chatter of the T.D. Dept. sounded as if it were in another dimension.

"My head is killing me," Preston replied, not entirely sure that his workmates had heard him. "I have a pounder and it's really killing me."

"What are you talking about, the sandwich from McDonald's, dude?" Preston was pretty sure, in his state of awaiting unconsciousness, that Graham had asked that that idiotic question. All of a sudden he yearned to wrap his hands around the prick's neck and sever his oxygen supply.

A frigid sensation scurried up his spine and into his head like an electrical shock.

KNOCKETY, KNOCK, KNOCK.

A splitting feeling erupted in Preston's mind, a fiery dilemma; it was like he wanted to do one thing and its opposite at the same time. He now knew for a fact that this phenomenon was much more than a pounder—there was something there that shouldn't have been (or was not welcome). Too bad he didn't dig deeper into his assumption, for he blacked out gazing into Jennifer's auburn eyes.

* * *

Sounds...

Images...

POUNDING...

Preston struggled to open his eyelids. In his view was a beaming whiteness. After his eyes focused the on light, he sat up in trepidation, not knowing where the hell he was and why. It took only a few seconds for him to recognize that he was in a hospital, since there was a polka-dot sheet covering his legs and a TV apparatus to the left of the bed he was in.

On his right was the ever-worried face of Jennifer, the woman with the curly coffee hair that bounced when she promenaded in her pumps. The only thing that had kept Preston from getting closer intimately was the pounder.

That goddam pounder.

He put two fingers from each hand up to his temples and rubbed them in a circular fashion.

"That's your sign," said Jennifer.

Preston stopped and squinted at her; he had entirely forgotten that she was right there. Her smile, no lipstick, was always a spectacle as it was now.

"I mean you massaging your temples like that," she added. "If you were doing it a mile away, I could identify you in a heartbeat. You make this puzzled face when you do it, as if you don't know where you are at the moment."

"That's how I felt waking up." Preston shivered. The room was fairly cool and the hospital noises wasn't that loud, but the light was horrendous and it evoked the feeling of duality, that splitting sensation that Preston had felt before—

"Did I blackout?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," Jennifer said, "as soon as Graham helped you to your seat at the office. You fainted and you were bleeding everywhere. Are you terminally ill?"

"I honestly don't know." Preston had a vague clue he might be, though.

"Well you would've bled to death if we didn't hear you cursing at the top of your lungs."

"Some lady was claiming that her Wayfone was only showing a porno channel and nothing else." The twinge in Preston's head returned; he massaged his temples again.

"So you freaked out on her like that?" Jennifer asked, staring at him in a manner to analyze his core. "Because she had tits and ass all over her cell? Did you know that we could be terminated for using profanity when talking to callers? It's part of Goodway's policy—you know that, don't you?"

Suddenly, Jennifer was talking way too much. Preston could never get along with the loquacious types—all they did was worsen the migraine at hand. Trying to process so many questions at once was a big fucking issue.

Just shuuuuuuuuut up.

"The caller was shouting and you know how much I loathe shouting," Preston murmured, moving his hand this way and that to add emphasis. He looked around in search of water or orange juice or anything else that the nurses may have left for him. He found a plastic cup of water with a second cup next to it. This shorter cup had at least six white pills in it.

"What's in the cup?" he asked. He sure hoped that it wasn't what he thought it was.

"Maxalt," Jennifer replied. She keenly gave him both cups. "The doctor—Dr. Wentworth—said that those pills were already prescribed to you before, so you shouldn't have any problem taking them. He said it helps you with your chronic headaches, something you never told me about..."

Preston sat the cup of water on the table next to his bed and dumped all the pills in his hand. He examined them carefully—they were indeed Maxalt pills, rizatriptan benzoate. He then threw them across the room as if they bit him on the hand.

"What an asshole!" he cried.

"What is wrong with you?" Jennifer asked, her eyes probably witnessing the violent activity of a psychopath.

"Those fucking pills do not work." Preston was irate. He couldn't remember the number of times he had informed Dr. Patrick Wentworth that the medication had had no desirable effect on the pounder. It had been a waste of money dealing with drugs that couldn't do the job. Preston thought that he probably was severely poisoned by now with an excess of those pills and shuddered badly.

KNOCK, KNOCK.

"Who's there?" Preston inquired. That ferocious voice had returned with unexpected bang. He looked everywhere, hoping that he would spot someone in the room that didn't belong, someone that had to have followed him from Goodway to the hospital.

OH YOU ARE SO PREDICTABLE, the voice answered.

"I gotta go the bathroom," Preston whispered, anticipating vomit at any second. He ripped the sheets from his legs and hopped off the bed, ignoring the fact that he had on hospital gown that would probably expose his buttocks. The floor was icy under his soles as he entered the door other than the one that led to the hallway outside. He heard Jennifer tailing after him, so he slammed the bathroom door shut behind him—he didn't mean to be rude, but he didn't care nonetheless.

He dropped to his knees before the john, lifted the seat, and let the load spew from his mouth, all with the light off. Some of the toilet water splashed up on his face; it completed his mask of vomit, sweat, and despair. He tried adamantly to stop, but his stomach pumped away on its own—or, as he was coming to expect, something was making him throw up. There was definitely a split, although he couldn't distinguish what (or who) was on the side of the split.

THROW UP AND THROW DOWN, the voice said.

Preston glanced up in the dark—yes, something malevolent was going on inside his head—something was moving inside there. Now that something was trying to get out.

"Show yourself!" Preston yelled, aggravated that there was no window in this bathroom to jump out of to commit suicide and put a close to his pain for eternity. He stood up and reached for the wall beside the door where he flicked on the light switch. The instant brightness caused his eyes to ache. "Godammit, show yourself now, wherever you are!"

HERE I AM, PRESTO-MAN!

Following the voice, Preston came to stare at himself in the mirror above the sink. The nasty vein wasn't on the side of his face anymore, but there was a pentagram in the middle of his fore head—bold and black as if it were a tattoo. Preston wasn't a Satan worshipper, so why in the hell was it on him?

"Preston, are you alright?" Jennifer asked (all these questions) on the other side of the door. She was banging on it and each bang made him cringe. What a bothersome bitch!

"Stop knocking on the fucking door, Jenny," he grunted, gritting his teeth back and forth and side to side. He could smell apples, immense and fragrant—that meant that his brain was in for a crucial ass-whuppin', as Dr. Wentworth had once told Preston when Preston was twenty-nine. It was called an aura, whatever that was supposed to be.

YOU ARE GREAT WITH THE LADIES, the voice said.

Preston's temples began to move in and out like a boisterous boom box. The only thing he could hear was his irregular heartbeat, skipping a beat spontaneously. Then, with a gruesome pop, a small arm emerged from each of his temples. They were covered in blackish-brown fur and resembled deer antlers upon Preston's head. Spikes jutted out of the elbows and rotting nails towered from the fingertips. One hand came down and jabbed Preston in the nose, inducing blood flow as he staggered on his feet.

"Get the fuck out of my head!" he shrieked, holding his terrified and hurting face with his nervy hands. He began to wrestle with the furry arms that continued to pummel his cranium.

I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE, the voice said. I'VE BEEN IN YOUR BODY FOR TWO DECADES AND IT SHALL BE MINE! YOU'VE BEEN A GOOD BOY AND THAT WAS WHY I COULDN'T TAKE YOU OVER, BUT NOW IT DOESN'T MATTER ANYMORE. IF YOU DON'T LET ME TAKEOVER, I'LL TWIST YOUR THOUGHTS! I'LL SQUASH YOUR BRAIN! I'LL RIP YOUR MIND APART!

The pentagram started to bulge profoundly. Looking in the mirror, Preston could see his forehead expanding out of proportion (and it would have been hilarious to look at under other state of affairs). Blood spilled as an ugly and grisly face pushed out of his forehead as if it were dreadfully giving birth; soon there was a furry head with urine-yellow eyes, wide cat ears, and two rows of grinning, sharp teeth.

"Now make a choice, human," the thing said and laughed malevolently.

Preston was seeing black splotches over his filed of vision and took hold of the sink to keep from falling over and fainting. He was furious with the furry thing which was responsible for the twenty-two-year-old migraine that wrecked his life, which had made it hard to think over the years.

"My choice is to give you one hell of a headache," Preston muttered.

Thinking with the suicidal mindset he had possessed for a very long time, he drove his head into the mirror and it shattered into an infinite quantity of pieces. The thing's cry pierced Preston's ears like an earring job gone wrong. There was a vivid green fluid smothering the sink, and it only had to be the thing's blood—demon blood. Preston grappled the demon by its neck and yanked hard; he could not feel it being pulled out of his forehead, but once it was out of there, he could instantly feel the grand relief; the split was no more.

He smirked as he followed the demon's progress to the bathroom door. Before his drowsy eyes the demon began to enlarge; huge bat-like wings sprouted out of its back. Wasting no time (he was finally thinking clearly enough not to waste time), he figured that if he didn't attack this demon now it would get loose and reek havoc in someone else's brain. He turned to the sink and obtained the largest piece of the mirror he could find, which almost looked like a hook. He turned to the demon, grabbed its ear with his left hand, and severed the ear with the mirror shard. After doing the same thing with the other ear just as swift, the demon fell to its stomach, green blood oozing down its revolting facade.

"Is it kicking in?" Preston asked, evidently seeing that the demon couldn't defend itself. Perhaps not having a body to thrive on in this world made it weaken. Preston used his bare feet to kick frantically at its head as if he were punting a pile of pigskins; the blood spattered against the door in hearty globs. He could hear a herd of people on the other side of the door trying desperately to get in. "Is that pounder kicking in now? Well let me kick it in for ya!"

Being sure that the demon's brains (if it had any) were completely gone from its head, Preston used the shard to slice off both its wings, not caring if the shard's sharp edges cut into his hand. He threw the wings to the side and they disappeared from existence. He then seized the hemorrhaging, screeching demon by the chin and carved a crooked lowercase T on its forehead. The demon went wild as the carving that was intended to be a cross sizzled with steam rising from it. Immediately Preston released the hell-spawn thing because touching it was like touching an iron that was about to become scorching hot.

"Does your head hurt?" he asked, plopping carelessly on the toilet after slapping the seat down; as woozy as he was, he had remembered that he had just vomited not too long ago. Clear thinking really paid off. "I sure hope it does. You've made my head hurt for over two fucking decades."

He sat back and watched as Jennifer, Dr. Wentworth, two nurses, and a security guard burst in through the door and crowd into the bathroom. They stood there flabbergasted as they witnessed the destroyed demon and its green blood fade slowly to nothing. Suddenly the thing reached out and caught hold of the leg of the nurse with the short brunette hair; she shrieked as the demon clasped onto her white skirt. Preston sprung from the toilet like a leopard and buried the shard into one of the demon's piss-colored eyes.

"Go be a headache to the devil," he said and threw what was left of the demon against the other wall where it faded away totally with an earsplitting scream.

Preston then glared directly at Dr. Wentworth, peering through the bifocals and into the doctor's aging blue eyes as to persecute the doctor for being an impostor. "And you thought some pills were going to take care of something like that. I oughta sue the fuck..." He trailed off, shaking his head discontentedly. Then: "Where are my keys? Or did someone bring my car here?"

Jennifer said, "They're on the table next to your bed. Why? Are you going home?"

"You ask too many questions," Preston replied as he walked past. He intentionally collided into Dr. Wentworth on his way to get his key ring. "But if you must know, yes, I am going home. I can sleep for a month the way I feel right know. Don't call me until the thirty days are gone."

"You'll be fired, ya know."

"Then so be it." Preston reached the room door and lingered there for a moment. "My job has finally been finished. If I were to die the next minute, I wouldn't care." He just stood there and watched the group at the bathroom door as they stared at him with contempt. "I know you people saw that fucking demon—it was about to tear the skirt off of that lesbian-looking nurse. You people—all people—are nerve-wrecking."

Back to the old ways of just talking without thinking, he thought. Can't blame it on the pounder now.

"Hey!" exclaimed the security guard, toting a sizeable can of Mace and a beer belly. "You can't leave without being registered out."

"Watch me leave," said Preston, knowing that the guard was too scared and irresolute to react.

Preston left out of the hospital in the dead of the night, only being an eye opener to the few who littered the halls; even though he was monitored as he left, not one person stopped him even if they might've considered him an escapee—and no one called for anyone neither.

He enjoyed the nocturnal breeze as it eased down the crack of his buttocks and into the area where his testes hung, for he still was clad in the checkered hospital dress and nothing else; he didn't care for anything else. The hospital still had his clothes and shoes, and obviously his wristwatch since he didn't see it on his wrist when he wanted to know what time it was. He had left his wallet in the glove compartment of his car before he had gone to work earlier on, so none of the hospital staff could steal his money or his identity. He was happy that someone had used his car to get him to the emergency room and it only took him a minute's time to find his silver luxury sedan (perhaps the most expensive vehicle in the lot, thanks to a nice and fat salary at Goodway but no thanks), walking barefooted on cool cement.

His feet didn't hurt from kicking the brains (if it had any) out of the thing that had knocked constantly on the doors of his mind for such a long time, and now he didn't mind that all. The sounds from the street didn't bother him. The incandescent arc-sodium lights of the parking lot didn't faze him. As he pressed the button on his key ring that unlocked his car doors, got in, shut the door, revved up the engine, and received goose flesh from the icy wafts of the air conditioning, there was one thing in his mind that perpetually stood in the place of his long gone pounder—the thought of ever smelling apples again.