I suppose the overwhelming likelihood is that if I was going to be murdered, I’d be dead. Instead, I’m just sitting here, and I’ve a growing sense that this is something else—something that perhaps belongs not to Augustine at all, but to me. They’d have me believe otherwise, these brave men who manhandle sleepy women from their beds in the small hours, but note well: it’s a clean sack. In fact, it’s positively the luxe model, no splinters of wood or bits of hay or beetles. It isn’t a silk hood, either, so the erotic sort of foolishness is at least somewhat off the table. This sack, then, is just a sack, but one with the barest trace of...respect? Or in the alternative, they don’t do this all the time and have therefore gone out to the market and bought a shiny new sack, just for me. In some way I’ve become important in my own right, and that means that I have bargaining power.