In Instant Karma Town sit two men. Each hold a fishing pole in his respective right hand. All around them is a glorious gold lake —beneath their feet in a wooden dock, floating peacefully above the calm water. They are about to cast when one of the men decides he had better not. All over him becomes of this sick feeling, like all is rotten -- like all is not quite right. It is that sudden and expressionless nerve that strikes against every cell in one’s body all at once and screams red faced into one’s soul in the most obscene and superstitious of warnings. The other man laughs and casts out his bait, making a small splash some sixty feet off the dock. The thumbs of his hands immediately disappear from sight, becoming replaced only by a soft mound of fleshy tissue that stretches from palm to pointer finger where his thumb had once protruded.