Two things you can always manage to find in a doctor's waiting room: magazines that you can't stand reading and old men with lunatic expressions of slow motion death.
One of them has just walked into the room. I look up from a gardening periodical straight into his sunken, rabid eyes. His lips are pulled back from his clenched teeth. It's like he is enduring a five-year heart attack.
Some invisible puppeteer drags his thinly veiled bones into the empty seat across from me. He reaches down to the cuffs of his trousers and adjusts the way they sit on his brown leather shoes. As he looks up I catch a glimpse into those wide, wild eyes. Inside I can see him behind the controls of a runaway train. He is not frantically wrestling with levers or pumping at brakes. Instead, behind that cracked windscreen face, he proudly counts the hills that slide past. He counts the sleepers under the tracks, the sand and the clouds.
He looks to the looming horizon and I go back to reading about the best soil in which to grow roses.