Popcorn 9: Page 2 a blackened, cold wick where once a flame had hotly burned.     In the case of Michael's soul, a fight for the exit ensued. His suddenly dead body lay under-neath a hefty, momentarily overpowering man, his trapped soul desperately wanting to flee its flesh-and-bone cage. Crammed into lungs and spilling down the throat, the body's genius found the way to freedom blocked by a wind-pipe crushed between two hands around Mi-chael's neck. Two hands that, although they had already ended Michael's life, refused to stop strangling his body.     The soul pushed and pried at the pinched throat, knocking itself against the mucous-lined flesh, an abandoned dog assaulting a shut door. Defeated, it turned back on itself again and again in that wispy, smokelike way that souls have, swelling Michael's chest, inflating his lungs close to the point of explosion.     Then it settled. The soul stopped struggling, deciding instead to occupy the cramped space, a prisoner patiently bidding his time until es-cape becomes possible. The naked murderer on top of the naked Michael would have to let go sooner or later, and a soul, after all, can wait a very, very long time.     Though longing to evaporate into the ether, the soul sat back and relaxed, and, much like Michael would have done, enjoyed a cigarette, mulling over, without the slightest surprise, how the homo sapiens specimen it longed to leave had successfully courted such a nasty end at such an early age.     For nearly half of his nearly three decades of life, Michael had drunk his as well as somebody