The great thing about fighting with irregular troops is that they all want to visit the bathroom at different times. This gave us an advantage over our enemy, who every day had to move their bowels simultaneously at dawn. We shelled their portable camp latrines and wiped them out. The war was over and I smugly went back to civilian life.
But I was unprepared for the changes to civilisation that had occurred in my absence and I wandered around like a lost ape in the chrome jungle of my former hometown. New buildings had gone up but hadn’t stopped when they reached the top; they kept going. The sky was not only scraped by them fingernail-style but utterly impaled.
Like a concave man on the points of a thousand bayonets, I thought to myself, relishing the militaristic simile; but the truth
