Man appears in a surprising way.

The way we all expected him to arrive was in his usual pick-up, diesel growling and with perhaps an unnecessary bgggrrrrarm over something like a speed bump in the parking lot. We are the wagering type of colleagues, in fact few, even menial, things slip through our colander of speculation, before they are boiled up in ever ludicrous schemes to garner vending machine money and goofy favors. But today, today's event was a fat one. And all afternoon it lie limp and warm at the base of our concave snide desiring surfaces. And we shook ourselves with hunger, and wrung our hands, and pressed our chests together like gladiators buffing breast plates.

We stood beneath the pebble decorated cement threshold of the building. In one's standard orange outside lighting. Mark lit a cigarette and almost immediately flicked a tiny amount of ash into a pebble cement cylindrical ash try, which matched the building. It was his move, this flick, a motion that discarded almost nothing needing, save his own self-conscious smoking-is-cool shtick.

And then man appears in a surprising way and Mark coughs.

Mark coughs so violently, that we hear the de-clumping of clots of mucus off his lungs. And once the protective plugs peeled away, the fit slips down into the burning parts of his deep insides, and we heard that too. And we knew that that's when coughing becomes more akin to scratching a red welp. And that's when we all felt like this wasn't going to be a pretty end.

The man was approaching, and a palm tree eclipsed a lamppost, cast a long steady shadow which ended at Mark's wresting body.