TWENTY-THREE
Amlodd Jones returned to his office. He had nowhere else to go, no family inviting him for a seasonal stay, no friends close enough to share Christmastide with. He had long ago reconciled himself to a life of loneliness, enforced by the nature of his deformed body and people’s reactions to it. It often amused him to look on as people struggled to be overtly friendly in a does he take sugar manner, usually to demonstrate to others in the vicinity that they were empathetic, politically correct, and were unaffected by whatever presented itself to them.
He hated the term politically correct; it had dogged his heels throughout his career. He had learned to get a perverse pleasure from the patent discomfort of some shallow people who cultivated his company, courted a tacit friends
