text: The old man walked slowly down the sidewalk. Thinking about where he had just come from, he hesitantly reached into his pocket for a cigarette, but he soon realized he had none left. Taking a small detour from his planned route, he crossed the street and entered a convenience store, where he bought a pack of cigarettes. After walking another block or two, he approached a bench outside of a small delicatessen and sat down, taking a break from his prolonged saunter. As he felt the cold metal through the back of his long, black pants, thoughts of his late wife began to rush through his mind. He took out the pack of cigarettes he had just bought, and opened the box. Just as he reached for one, he noticed a quarter on the ground about ten feet in front of him. He stood up, and began to walk towards the coin. Before he could take another step, however, there was a deafening crash, as if something had fallen from very high. The old man turned around to see an old air-conditioning in pieces on the bench. Under the rubble, he managed to make out a now crushed pack of cigarettes. As the gravity of the situation set in, the old man was not hit with worry, as what had happened was not going to happen again. He was not hit with grief, as he had faced too much in the last few months. He was struck by gratitude- not just that he had managed to narrowly avoid a terrible death, but that God had been kind enough to show him a sign. The old man walked down the sidewalk with newfound pep. This sign could only mean one thing- that he needed to quit smoking. This made sense to the old man, as his wife had been a smoker too, and met her end via lung cancer. Although he was sad about her passing, his motivation to quit smoking took over, and all an outsider would have seen was a jolly old man out for a stroll. When he finally arrived home from the cemetery, the old man decided to call up his daughter, explaining what had happened, and told her about his vow to give up cigarettes. While his daughter was very excited about this proposition, she cared little about his incident. She was more concerned about how this air-conditioning unit managed to fall onto the sidewalk, and curious as to why he did not stop to see who had been in the apartment; surely they would have come down to apologize. She tried to ask these questions to her father, but the old man was stubborn, and continued to rave about the “miracle” he had experienced. As a pious man, it was his responsibility in life to achieve greatness just to give away the credit to some external force, in the same way that his wife’s responsibility was to go to Him when He decided it was her time. The old man walked into his house, and immediately beelined to his room, not caring to lock the door or even take off his shoes. He collected every cigarette he could find, and started to walk back downstairs to throw them out. As he reached the bottom step, he saw a man dressed in all black approach him. The man in black grabbed a knife out of his pocket and proceeded to slit the throat of the old man, who now lay in a pool of blood at the base of the stairs, dead. The man in black looked down, and said to the body, “If you’d just stayed on that bench, I wouldn’t have to clean this shit up.