​Sinclair Clay loved his mother, but he did not love living with her.  He’d moved her into his apartment just after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis last year.  Since then, her state seemed to deteriorate.  It was fine that she put the eggs in the cupboard or the laundry in the garbage compactor, but a few months earlier, she had let Sinclair’s dog, Rufus, out the front door of the apartment and Rufus did not return and was not found later at the dog pound.  But the worst of all—and Sinclair hated that he regarded this as the worst part of it—was that his mother often thought of him as a child, sometimes as young as 12 years old, and she would make a great fuss over him.  Sinclair had looked into a few residential memory care facilities, but they were cold and sterile.  Even the one he’d visited just up the street, Sunnyvale, seemed strange and custodial and not the vale of sun its name suggested.
Still, it seemed like it was just a matter of time before she hurt herself, or wandered out the door when he wasn’t home, or on the phone, or running on his treadmill.  He’d taken to running at the apartment rather than going out through the neighborhood for his exercise.  He’d also been working at home more often, neglecting the necessary time with his staff to keep morale up and a smooth workflow in his office.  Still, Sinclair could not find the courage to move her into the sterile world of the Sunnyvale Residential Memory Care Apartments.  Despite the brightly colored brochure on his nightstand which boasted that she could still “enjoy a vibrant life with stimulating activities,” Sinclair trusted only himself to care for her daily living arrangements.  For the time being, she would simply have to stay put.
 
One day, as Sinclair went over his notes for a new business contact in the Gobi, he heard his mother making a loud racket in his kitchen. 
“What’s all this?” he asked as he came to investigate.  Opened jars and packages of deli meat and plastic-wrapped cheese were strewn about the counters.  A roll of paper towels lay unspooled across the stovetop spilling a ribbon of Bounty into the dining room.  Three knives were scattered on the tile floor, evidence of the clatter he’d heard.
“I’m making your lunch,” she said, without looking up at him.  Her hands were occupied with the task of spreading mustard onto wheat bread.  She was dressed in a housecoat, the kind women wore in the 1960s, that hung to her knees in long pleats from small gathers just below her shoulder-heads.  Large, floral print made the housecoat, and his mom’s tiny body, seem comically big, disproportionate to her head, which seemed small, crowned with her golden-rimmed glasses she’d perched on the top of her shaggy gray hair.  She pulled the glasses down to her eyes smearing one of the lenses with a thin fingerprint of yellow mustard.
Sinclair looked at the clock.  It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon.
“I’m working from home tonight, Mom.”  He tried to emphasize the time of day.
“Home?” She looked at him with glistening eyes, obscured behind the shine of her large spectacles and yellow smear.  “Oh, goodness no.  You are so silly.”  She laughed.  Then she set about layering cheese and meat onto the bread.
Sinclair could not know what was happening in her thoughts and it pained him to recognize a vacancy in her demeanor.  “I’m not being silly mom.  I am working from home this entire evening.  My client is in the Gobi desert and I need to Skype with him once the sun comes up in Kumul.”
Hearing this, Sinclair’s mother shook her head and creased her brow.
“It’s a very important call, Mom.”  And it was, too.  Sinclair was making arrangements to travel to China to meet his overseas partners and finalize the race route he’d been planning.  He had worked hard on this project.  Going to China was a dream he and his staff had shared from the onset of his company; it was finally happening!  Yet the thought of leaving his mother in the care of a nurse made him feel very anxious.  He also knew he could not take her with him this time, certainly not like before.  He’d even thought about bringing his mother along with a nurse as well.  And there was the Sunnyvale option, of course.  But any of that would have to be decided at another time.  Right now, he had to prepare for his important call.
“It is indeed—a very important day.  It’s not every day that a mother’s young man starts middle school.  Now go get yourself dressed.”
Sinclair looked down at his polo shirt and Dockers and flinched with exasperation.  He felt angry at her for being so stupid.  Then he felt angry at himself for being angry at her.
He started winding the paper towels back onto their cardboard spool.  “I am dressed, Mom,” he said and he set the rumpled paper towels on the countertop and stared blankly at her.  She stepped over to him at once, and in a swift gesture, licking the entire palm of her hand as she came toward him, she reached up and smoothed his cowlick with her wetted palm smashing down the hair that jutted up to the left from his forehead.  They locked eyes for a moment.  Hers were soft and round beyond the lenses of her glasses, filled with hope and love and care.  In that moment, Sinclair almost wished he was really off to middle school, to discover for himself the reason for the optimism that loitered in her gaze.  But, no.
“Mom, I’m 32 years old.” He pushed her hand away.  “I work for a company . . . I own a company that organizes extreme races around the world.”  He felt like he was introducing himself at a conference.  “Last year I took you to the Andes?  Remember the giant mountains?  The ruins of the Inca?”  He regretted his tone at once, thinking about how the neurologist had cautioned him to curb his frustrations, find other outlets for his exasperations, especially because his negative reactions might be frightening to his mother unaware that she even experiences symptoms. 
She looked helplessly at him, confusion unseating her optimistic expression.  The clock clicked ever noisily with a tick, tick, tick, and Sinclair observed how loud it was for the first time.  He studied his mother’s wide and wondering eyes.  Golden streaks emitted from the hazel of her irises, the frames of her glasses surrounded her eyes and echoed their gold tone, making strange halos around her gaze.  Sinclair thought she had lovely and clever eyes then, but distant, like they were looking back at him from far away.  He became aware that he held his breath in and he let it out.
“Your social studies reports are going to be even better this year; I can tell,” she finally said, resurrecting her smile and breaking the silence.
Sinclair let out a weighty huff.  “Mom, I’m not 12.  I’m 32.”
“Not yet, you’re not.”
She licked the tip of her thumb then wiped it down his cheek as if removing a smudge of dirt that he almost believed was real. She winked at him and then moved back to the task of layering the bread atop the sandwich before picking up one of the knives from the floor and using it to trim the crusts. 
He returned to his office and locked the door.  Sinclair stayed away for the rest of the night, privately secure in his solitude.  He did not return for the sandwich.
 
The next morning after his shower, Sinclair stood at his bathroom mirror shaving wrapped in a towel at the waist and humming to himself.  Suddenly, his mother peered into the bathroom doorway, tilting her head sideways past the doorjamb and moving slowly like a sly cat.  He saw her there only after her glasses caught the reflection of the vanity lights and the vision of her partially obscured face staring in at him gave him a start.  He wondered how long she’d been there and the thought gave him an odd feeling.  Through the reflection, his eyes went to the vacant robe hook next to the shower door.
“It’s your birthday,” she announced.  “Happy birthday, my big boy.” Her own playful laughter accompanied her as she came fully into the bathroom and put her arms around her grown son, holding him tight from behind. 
Sinclair stood six-foot-even, about half a foot taller than his mom, and the embrace was ill-fit.  In the reflection, he saw only her arms wrapped around his bare torso and a tuft of her gray hair angled out from beneath his raised right arm, which still held the razor hovering in midair, suspended in the surprise of her arrival and actions.  He could feel her breath on his back and he wanted to shake her away.  Half of his face was cleared of shaving cream and stubble.  He noticed in the reflection that he wasn’t smiling—but rather gaping with such incredulity that he might offend her—and so he forced a smiled hoping the situation’s awkwardness would improve.
“Thanks Mom.”  He stood straighter, trying out his patience for the first time that day.  “How old am I today?”
“Oh, 12, you silly moose.” She unwrapped her arms from her son and bent to pick up his laundry.
“12, you say?  You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.  I remember the day you were born like it was yesterday. Your father . . .”
“Dad? What about Dad?”
She continued to gather socks and small items from the floor as she spoke.  “Everything’s set.  It’s all just so.  We’ll have cake when your dad gets home.  I want this to be the best birthday ever.”
“Mom, what if I told you that I am really 32, and that it’s not my birthday at all?  That it’s just another regular Tuesday?” 
Sinclair’s mother stood with a small armful of damp towels and clothes.  She was grinning at him and her glasses had begun to fog with the moisture and heat of the bathroom, two opaque screens clouded over in a pause.  She shook her head, then turned to leave.
“Mom, I’m serious.”  Sinclair followed her through the bedroom, but she kept moving, the flat of her back and blank shoulders telling him that he should not push the issue today.  He followed her all the way through the apartment until they reached the closet with the laundry chute.  She did not turn to face him.
“I thought I might come down to your school today and get on the volunteer roster,” she said as she dropped the items down the chute one by one.
“There is no school today, mom,” Sinclair declared flatly, crossing his arms over his bare chest.  He felt vulnerable, exposed.  She turned toward him and her gazed traveled across the half of his face that was still covered in shaving cream.  “There’s no school, mom.  Not today or anymore.”
“I know.  You’re all grown up now.”
“You do?” His head snapped back in surprise.
“Sure I do.  I see what’s going on here.”  She winked at him.  “You want me to drop you off down the street so your friends don’t see you.  I can do that.”
“Mom, I don’t go to school anymore.  I graduated from business school at USF five years ago, remember?”  She didn’t seem to hear him.
“I’ll drop you off by the 7-11 and then I can pick you up at that same spot later.  No one will know except us.”
“You haven’t driven in nearly ten years,” Sinclair sneered, sounding angry and impatient. 
“Why are you mad at me?  I am just trying to help.”  He could see tears form in her eyes and her forehead began to crease with worry.
“I’m not mad, Mom.” He reached out and gently placed his hand on her shoulder.  She lowered her head and looked at the ground.  “I did it again, didn’t I?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong.”
She lifted her head and pushed the bridge of her glasses up on her nose giving Sinclair the illusion that her eyes grew larger in that instant.  He could see pale flecks then of emerald surrounded by thin ribbons of gilt-edged hazel woven in her irises—such deep, intelligent eyes.  How could he turn her over to total strangers?  She had been a math teacher in high school, a hospital volunteer.  She even coached his soccer team one season when he was nine and she was great at it.  He could see her inside her eyes, as clear as ever.
“Okay, good,” she said, breaking his trance.  “Then go get dressed.  We’re leaving in 15 minutes.  You don’t want to be late for your first day.”
 
What was Sinclair to do?  Should he go along with his mother, dress as a seventh-grader, maybe insist that they walk to some local school yard and then fake ill so that he wouldn’t have to go to school?  That could work.  He could spend the day with her making him soup and grilled cheese, watching cartoons with him and reading him full chapters of Hardy Boys.  Would it be an act of love if he carried on with this charade?   Or would he be merely postponing the inevitable?  But was postponing the inevitable so bad when the outcome was set to be as terrible as he could imagine—for him at least; she wouldn’t know.  Or would she?  She was his only blood relative; no aunts or uncles to call upon or distant cousins to check in with on the hereditary characteristics of this disease.  And when she was gone, it would be just him. 
Ultimately, he decided to ignore her and avoid her for the rest of the day, but he worked from home that day just in case she needed him near.
 
That night, she came to him in his office, two mugs of hot tea in her hands.  She handed him a cup, a steaming red mug; a paper tag hung from a string dangling over its edge.
“I’m afraid, Sinclair,” she said.  She squatted down and sat on the footstool by his bed.
“Me too, Mom,” he answered, closing his laptop.  He had been reading again about the Sunnyvale Residential Memory Care Apartments and mapping the distance to it, not more than twelve blocks from his apartment. 
“I know why you were mad earlier,” she said.
“You do?” he asked, his eyes filling with tears at his own realization that he did not have to try to figure out if this was really her talking, if she was really present just then.
“Son,” she started.  “You father and I used to talk about never wanting to be a burden on you.  He loved you so much, you know?”
“I know.”
“When the doctors first told us about his cancer, we didn’t want to tell you.  Did you know that?”  Sinclair nodded his head and blinked back tears.  She had told him the story before but he could hear it again.  He could hear it a million times if it meant his mom was lucid, clearly recalling such tender details of their lives with accuracy and fluency.  “We walked through the park that day, no fog over the bridge, and he was joking about the Golden Gate not being golden at all.”
“It’s red,” they both said in unison, and Sinclair laughed a small chuckle that almost stifled his crying.  Instead, it came out as a choked guffaw and he felt embarrassed, like a young boy. 
“Well, he said we shouldn’t tell you,” she whispered and she shook her head when she said it like she meant to say the word “no” out loud, but couldn’t.  She couldn’t respond to a man that was dead, a man she loved, a man she only remembered now in brief moments of clarity.  “He said he would go away on some trip and he intended to go, too.  He would rather have died all by himself than to make either of us suffer with him.”
“I know.”
“In the end, it was me.  I convinced him to tell you.  You were so young.  Just barely in high school.  And the fact that your dad was an orphan and my parents were both already gone, that left just us to help him, to help each other.  I needed you to know, son.  I needed you to know, Sinclair.  You know?”  Tears had gathered along her lower lashes and her eyes glistened at him.
“I do know.”  Sinclair swallowed hard after he said these words.  He had yet to sip his tea, but felt the warmth of the mug moving through his palm and fingers.  He stared at the circle of the mug’s rim, noticed the tiny string that hung over the edge dangling a paper tag.  He fingered the tag and read the offering of the name on one side “Yogi” and the saying “All knowledge is within you” on its flip-side. 
“What’s your tea tag say, Mom?”
“My what?” she looked confused.
“Your tag.  There.”
“Oh,” and she grinned as she gathered it.  “It says ‘say it straight, simple, and with a smile.’ That’s nice.” And of course, she smiled at him then. 
“Mom,” Sinclair leaned toward her.  “Do you remember what it’s when you think I’m . . . I mean, do you remember us talking earlier about me being in middle school?”
His mother’s radiant smile slowly faded.  The tea tag fell from her fingers.
“Yes.  Now I do.  A little.”  Her voice was so small then.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t think you should be burdened with this disease of mine.  What if I really do try to drive?”
“You won’t,” he said, and she looked at him skeptically.  “Well, you can’t.  I’ve hidden the keys.”
“Or worse?” she asked with some finality to her tone.
“Worse?”
“You know.  Worse.” As she said the word again, Sinclair felt a tug in his gut as if something were pulling him from the inside out.  For a long moment, they stared at each other.  Sinclair thought about how he could see her in there, clear and lucid, through the lenses of her glasses, deep in the pools of her eyes; and they were unfathomably deep. 
“I have been looking into a place that can help,” Sinclair said, deciding to break the silence.
“A place?  What kind of place?”
“Well,” he took in a big breath.  “There’s a place not far from here that has . . . memory care and a staff of doctors and nurses.  They focus on neurology and they can help.  The doctors and the nurses, they aren’t residents but the patients are.  They—”
“Residents?  I would live there?”
“Well, yes, Mom.  You would live there.  But it’s just up the way.  I can actually walk there in about 15 minutes.”  He rubbed his thumb along the top of the mug’s handle, looking into the deep amber of the cooling tea.
“Well, I guess I didn’t realize how difficult it had become,” she said, her words sounding inflicted, resentful even.  “And here I thought I was actually being helpful.”
“You are helpful, Mom.  Please don’t take it that way.”
“I’m not sure how else I should take it, with you making plans for me to go off and live somewhere like a . . . a . . . kept woman!”  Her voice bayed.
“It’s not like that, Mom.  I’ve just been worried.  I’ve been scared too.” Sinclair’s eyes burned with tears and his throat cinched shut stifling a whimper.  “I’m not sure . . . when you know and when you don’t know, or when you remember and when you forget.  How long before you aren’t even sure where you are and you wander out of here?  What then?  I can’t always be here.  I’ll have to fly to China soon.  What then?” 
His mom didn’t answer him.  She just looked at him with a stunned expression, her eyes wide behind the glare on her lenses.  Sinclair moved flat fingers to his cheeks and pressed the streaks of tears away from his face.  His mother also reached out and touched his face, her stunned expression fixed.  He grabbed her hand and squeezed it with a small, desperate grasp.
Then, she stood and reached out for his undrunk cup of tea.  Looking up at her, he handed her the mug. 
“It’s time for bed.  It’s a school night.”  Her tone was flat, her gaze distant.  She turned her back on him and left the room.
 
That night as he slept, Sinclair dreamed of the Sunnyvale Residential Memory Care Apartments.  Painted on the wall of the facility was a saying by Mark Twain: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Sinclair knew the saying from his college fraternity but wondered why it was appropriate for such a facility.  He didn’t ask.  He only wanted to find his mother.  Beyond the entryway, a group of workers in long, white coats busied themselves with clipboards and boxes, checking boxes on the clipboards and stacking boxes on the floor.  They had no faces, but instead blank slates of flat flesh in colors of tan, peach, brown.  Though he found their featureless heads odd, he wondered mostly about their lack of eyes.  They seemed to see where they were going and what they were doing, but they had no eyes to lead them through their task.  He moved from person to person asking where he could find his mother but the blank slates could not respond, having no mouths from which to speak.  Instead they gestured with their hands in a mannequin fashion, barely animatronic. In his panic, he started to run, and before long discovered he was running in one of the extreme running competitions that his company organized, except this one was not set in some dangerous desert or along the steep escarpment of towering mountains.  Instead, he was running in place in a plain and mundane landscape, but he was running as fast as he could run, trying to catch up to his mother’s flat back and blank shoulders. 
He awoke to cold sweat and the sound of the smoke alarm.
Panic bounced him out of bed and he flashed down the hall, the piercing sound reverberating off the walls and through the apartment.  It came from the kitchen!  Smoke!  He noticed there was actual smoke so it couldn’t just be some malfunction of the alarm.  His senses were on high alert as he rounded into the kitchen and saw the outline of his mother’s back.  She was fanning smoke away from the oven by waving a large frying pan back and forth in the air.
“Mom!” he yelled, and grabbed her to pull her away from the oven.  She screamed and hit him in the head with the pan.  Sinclair saw stars before he fell to the floor and the world went black.
When he came to, the fire department had just entered the apartment and his mom was sitting in the living room crying with a neighbor, Mr. Lee.  He found out later that Mr. Lee had heard the commotion and called 911 before coming over and banging on the door.  They were lucky that his mother had sense enough to open the door and let Mr. Lee in.  He brought with him a fire extinguisher and he put out the burning loaf of bread that smoked in the oven.
“I forgot the bread was rising,” Sinclair’s mother explained to the firefighters as the paramedics examined and bandaged the gash on Sinclair’s forehead.  “I always give the bread a second proof but I just forgot when I set the oven to preheat, which I do at a higher temperature to crust the bread proper, you see.”  She looked at Sinclair as if he might help explain the steps to her bread making.  Instead, he openly wept, sobbing in loud, guttural gasps and heaves.  In the end, the fire department did not charge him for the call.
 
A week later, so much had happened.  Sinclair had moved his mother into the Sunnyvale Residential Memory Care Apartments and she even seemed to like it.  She was under the care of a new neurologist who specialized in the treatment of Alzheimer’s and he had put her on a new medication which gave her longer periods free from the symptoms of her disease.  As a result, she’d been lucid for much of the time she had already been in the memory care facility.  This actually gave Sinclair pause.  He questioned his motives for wanting to admit her before his upcoming trip to China, but his mother seemed to get along with the other women there in her apartment wing, and the care workers were attentive and compassionate, so he told himself it was okay.
As Sinclair walked into the courtyard of Sunnyvale, he spotted his mother across the patio sitting with her new friends.  He approached her and set down a loaf of fresh baked bread on the table in front of her. 
“I picked this up at the bakery,” he smiled at her.  She looked at him over the rim of her glasses and for a second, she seemed to glower.  But the moment passed and then she was warm like sunshine.
“Oh, ladies,” she beamed.  “This is my son, Sinclair.”  She had introduced him before.  The women nodded at him just as they had before.  She continued, “Sinclair makes ultra-marathons.  Do you gals know what that is?”
“Mom, not everyone cares about that sort of thing,” Sinclair said.  He noticed how lucid she seemed and the pang of regret he felt surfaced and lingered.
“Nonsense.  It’s important,” she said, pushing up her glasses as she looked at him.  Kind creases accented the corners of her eyes.  “Sinclair makes one hundred miles races in the desert.”
“Who would drive a hundred miles into a desert?” asked one of the ladies in a salty, cracked voice.
“Not drive, Carol.  Run,” Sinclair’s mom said, and she fired an air pistol with her finger on the word ‘run.’  Then they all started laughing as if such a thing were the funniest thing they had ever heard.  Even Sinclair’s mother laughed.  Even Sinclair laughed to see such a thing, a group of women carrying on about something that really wasn’t very funny.
“Well, go on then,” said the woman named Carol as she pulled out a chair for Sinclair to sit.  “Tell us about your hundred mile running races in the desert.”
Sinclair sat and they talked for a long time into to the afternoon.  He and his mother shared long glances, some of which were warm and forgiving, but there were times when Sinclair would detect a hint of anger as her brow furrowed at him, narrowing her eyes.  When it came time for him to say goodbye, she walked him to the gate.
“You’re just going to leave me here like a caged animal, I suppose,” she pouted.
“You seemed to be enjoying yourself”
“Sure, I like the Jell-O.  It’s got more flavor than the company,” she said, casting a look back toward Milly and the group of women in the courtyard.
“Listen Mom, if I thought there was any other way—”
“No, you’re right.  I nearly burned down your apartment.” She sighed.  “You can put me in here, but you can’t make me like it.”  She squinted knowingly at him.
“You’re right.”
Sinclair’s mom reached up and touched his cheek softly with her fingertips.  Her eyes were full of concern toward him.
“Be good,” she said and she turned away, leaving him standing at the gate watching her the flat of her back swish slowly as she sauntered across the courtyard to return to the women at the table.  Then, Sinclair turned to the guard at the gate and gave a wave.  The buzzer sounded and he pulled the gate open.  Once outside, he bent low to tighten the laces of his Nikes.  Then he stood, took in a deep breath, and finally sprinted off down the sidewalk starting out on what he hoped would be a long and satisfying run.
 
 

​“I’ll take three of them geranium pots, and one of them nice white baskets for the begonias if you have ’em, Willie,” Mrs. Norris said, unrolling the dog-eared wad of bills which she had removed from her cleavage.
            Old Willie Jargin’s spectacles fell askew as he eyed Mrs. Norris solemnly.
            “I’ve still got one basket put aside, but it’s got the washin’ in it, and it’s in my bedroom. Cally’s still asleep; jist got her home yesterday—hip replacement, you know—”
            “I understand sackly, Willie-boy,” Mrs. Norris said magnanimously. “Of course I wouldn’t expect the dear to hobble down in that condition. You jist go get that basket and I’ll hop over later to see her…when she’s well enough to sit on the porch, that is.”
            Willie grunted something akin to assent and began moving the geranium pots into the little blue shop which was the foremost structure in the small nursery, his exacting eye never deviating from the rotund blonde and her scarecrow of a daughter, who hummed complacently as she pressed her thumbs diagonally into her navel region.
            Mrs. Norris was never a woman to wait for somebody else’s Yes or No. A door in Hartstop would never close upon her so long as she had a foot to press against the frame. For all her flaws she was still a self-made woman, having conquered and married the owner of the gun-
and-tackle shop up the highway, quite a leap from third child of a carpet cutter’s assistant.
            Mrs. Norris loved people; and, by extension, she loved to assist in their affairs, particularly those of a high profile. When Faith Lovecroft, who organized the church’s annual charity-food drive, had broken her femur, Mrs. Norris was there to direct giver and packer and cook and delivery man alike. There were of course a number of pessimists who questioned her methods, but no one could doubt that as a whole it had gone off tolerably well (though a box of tasteful romance novels and a case of peach and blackberry preserves could not be accounted for in the end). Thereafter Mrs. Norris took charge of the event every year—despite Faith Lovecroft’s protestations—and eventually became secretary, treasurer, substitute Sunday school teacher and lead backsliding investigator for Pure Stone Baptist Church. Mrs. Norris was a walking armrest to all mankind regardless of color or creed, as evidenced by her frequent patronage at Willie Jargin’s nursery. Her own father, a ranking member of the Ellis County Klansmen, would have had a stroke at the thought of his daughter buying flowers from a black man; therefore it was impossible for one to conclude that Mrs. Norris had a racist or unkind bone in her body.
            While she was undoubtedly a natural-born leader, Mrs. Norris harbored a number of personal ambitions as well, including the establishment of her own little clan’s respectability in Hartstop. This included the marrying-off of her four daughters. Mary Jane had been taken up by the constable’s mechanic son, Sharon-Rose by the man who drove the garbage truck (“Fifteen dollars an hour!”), and Smyrna, who had borne two of the mayor’s nephew’s sons, was just as good as married and off Mrs. Norris’s hands.
            “And which one’s this, now?” Willie said kindly, nodding toward the sweet-faced girl whose gaze was fixed longingly on the cornfield on the other side of the highway. “Forgive me
hon, you know how bad I am with names.”
            “That’s Lizabeth,” Mrs. Norris replied rather icily. “She goes to that Hillpine, you know. That’s their college, Hillpine is. A fine place that, Hillpine. For them. Now how’s your son, Willie? He still roomin’ with that night librarian from the ’versity?”
            Mrs. Norris habitually avoided prolonged discussion of her youngest daughter, and she had found through many experiments of trial and error that it was best to divert attention to others’ weaknesses and soft spots.
            “Yes,” Willie said, a little rigidly. “But he’s not gettin’ into trouble like people talk. Fact, he’s thinkin’ o’ turnin’ preacher. He and that Orlando are plannin’ a mission trip this summer, to some wild country called Kiwi Vest or somethin’ like that. Some place where they have the gay ’bomination.”
            “Oh, you don’t have to tell me ’bout that. Gawd, what a judgment on us all! Now show me what you got growin’ in Greenhouse Three, Willie. I’m thinkin’ o’ some nice shrubs and cannas and sich for my patio.”
            And they left Lizabeth alone among the inferior plants spread out upon splintering tables before the little blue shop.
            Lizabeth was a burden and intellectual challenge for Mrs. Norris. The poor woman spent most of her time these days contriving the union of Lizabeth with the preacher’s son, Robert Lee Bragg Mason, who was just as gaunt and quiet as Lizabeth, though rather grim and pimply as a pickle. But for all the drawbacks of his sourpuss visage, Robert Lee maintained a promising future as an English major at the junior college, and of course his family’s social standing completed Mrs. Norris’s intricate mental legacy mural. Mrs. Norris saw the two of them wedded blissfully, or just as good as; Lizabeth less silly, Robert Lee Bragg Mason with an editor’s post at
the South Sentinel (“Newspapers will allus be ’round, o’ course”), exerting all his grimness into
the proper discipline of Lizabeth and therefore kinder-faced to everyone else.
            We cannot begin to imagine the deliciously painful workings of Lizabeth’s mind as she looked out upon the spears of corn on the other side of the highway. Perhaps her mother’s abrupt manner on the subject of herself had conjured up some abstracts from the past; that spring afternoon in kindergarten when Mrs. Norris had screamed at Lizabeth’s teacher for suggesting she be held back; that evening in third grade when her mother had beaten her over the head with a math textbook; that prayer meeting when she was ten during which Mrs. Norris had stood up in front of the congregation and declared, “Dear Gawd, my baby is dumb as a satchel of hammers!” Even now in her brief adulthood, a Hillpine counselor’s rough grasp as they were herded across the street to the public library. Whatever her musings, Lizabeth felt instinctively that others considered her a hardship, a condition which she fought daily in her own way to overcome. The small acts of kindness which quicker intellects considered simplemindedness were nothing more than longings for affection.
            Lizabeth did her best to please Mrs. Norris. She uttered not one complaint or remonstrance as her mother contrived parleys with Robert Lee Bragg Mason, donated cardigans and canisters of vegetable soup to Mrs. Mason, or even as she hinted at a specific dowry to Mr. Mason. Mrs. Norris invited the boy over to every Sunday dinner, after which he sulked with Lizabeth on the patio and read compositions. Mrs. Norris herself had listened to a few of Robert Lee’s poems, such as “The Drunkard Gambler’s Fate” and “The Horrors of the Guilty Soul at Death’s Door,” and declared that her daughter’s intended would make a famous poet someday as well as a godly husband. Lizabeth comprehended very little of the whole affair, but what few revelations did dawn upon her assured her that her future was as grim and rigid as the spine of
the boy who sat reading poetry endorsing public beheadings of abortion doctors without the
benefit of a trial to her on sultry Sunday afternoons.
            Perhaps Lizabeth was mentally tracing the sharp lineaments of Robert Lee Bragg Mason’s face when she first spotted the oily figure emerging from the foremost row of spears. The man was tall and powerfully built, though he sported a weak chin and rather languid features. His blonde hair was slicked back in an almost respectable style, though the oil might have come naturally. He crossed the highway without a glance in either direction and ambled carelessly toward the girl, a worn leather satchel slung over his shoulder, a threadbare guitar case in his hand.
            Lizabeth had heard her mother telling patrons at Mr. Norris’s shop about the man. He was a vagrant who hopped the rails in the traditional sense, believed to be the same one who had tricked a seventy-three-year-old down in Beadle into marrying him and had run off with her money. Until recently he had played the guitar—rather dreadfully—outside the Ellis County courthouse for donations. The constable’s wife had given him twenty-five dollars, three oranges and a religious tract to stop playing—“especially that godawful singing”—and no one had seen him since.
            “No one pities them out-o’-work folk more ’n me,” Mrs. Norris had told her customers, “but the whole lot should be locked up for their own good as well as ourn.”
            Lizabeth harbored a certain fondness for strangers, particularly the musical kind. And while he was no great looker, the guitar player had an eccentrically masculine air, a sort of fatherly demeanor which, while relying on empty flattery as the catalyst, is irresistibly attractive to the vulnerable.
            “Hello there, Lizabeth,” the man said in an obnoxious, sing-song voice.
            Lizabeth was startled.
            “How come you know my name?”
            “I was listenin’ in,” the guitar player said unabashedly, “and plus I’ve bin in your daddy’s shop, heard ’bout sweet little Lizabeth who likes bird-critters so much she wanted to be one. You got a purty name, jist such a purty name, Lizabeth.”
            The girl blushed. The man sidled closer to her and she registered the savory scent of hickory.
            “You’re a little cutie, you are. Don’t you want to know my name?”
            Lizabeth refused to submit to his banter just yet. She felt instinctively that Mrs. Norris would disapprove of her consorting with a man who carried all his worldly goods on his shoulder like a badge of honor.
            “Name’s Paxton,” the man supplied, “Pax for short. You wanna hear me sing like a sweet bird?”
            Lizabeth smiled and nodded approvingly. The man reached into his pocket and retrieved a maroon clay whistle. It was supposed to be in the shape of a robin but had been worn down by extensive usage until it resembled a disgruntled eagle. Pax blew gently and a clumsy, almost apologetic wheezing was released from the thin slit that curved along the bird’s neck. It was neither pleasing nor harmonious, but it spoke to the girl, to whom precious little music of any kind had ever been directed.
            “You know what you need? What we both need?” Pax said, reaching gently for Lizabeth’s trembling hand, “We need us a vacation. Wouldn’t you like that? Wouldn’t you like to see the world with a nice fella like me?”
            Lizabeth glanced sideways in the direction of Greenhouse Three.
            “Now don’t worry ’bout your big fat mama. She’d be happier if you went off for a while.
Come on, don’t you wanna see the great big world? Wanna see all the pretty birds that kin fly away? Wanna be a bird?”
            Lizabeth thought longingly of wings, of rooms without locks and faces that never pity you while your mother snatches you along sidewalks and narrow aisles in the market.
            She nodded slowly but distinctly.
            “Good girl. But now we need some money, and you’ve got to carry your weight if you wanna go off with me. Now jist step into that little shop there and go behind the counter.”
            Lizabeth had given herself up to the prospect of wings. She obeyed the man with an impulse long pent up within.
            “Good. Now you see a little drawer with a handle in there? Show me how you kin pull that out on your own. Show me you kin do it.”
            Lizabeth pulled the battered wooden drawer from its metal sling and dropped it heavily on the counter so that the man could see her work.
            “Good. Now grab all them green papers. Go on.”
            At this stage in the proceedings Lizabeth hesitated. Deep within was a pricking which no beating of wings could alleviate.
            “You want to go off with me, don’t cha?” Pax whimpered.
            Lizabeth nodded.
            “Then take all them green papers. They’re your mama’s anyway. She wants you to be taken care on.”
            Lizabeth reluctantly grabbed the thin roll of bills and pressed her fingers into a tight fist, as though she might compress the sick feeling into a dense point of nothingness.
            “Good girl. Now come on. There’s a freight train leavin’ in fifteen minutes an’ we got to
kitch it. Hop along, ain’t got time for your droolin’.”
            Soon Paxton had traded the threadbare guitar case and the leather satchel for the roll of cash, and the two were off beyond the spears of corn, two birds feasting on a fine summer blast rather than the half-baked kernels of the dry, forbidding land.
 
            “Oh, Willie, it’s jist ungawdly what these kids get in their majentations these days,” Mrs. Norris said tragically as they stood examining a thick spray of honeysuckle outside of Greenhouse Three. Mrs. Norris had just recounted the grizzly assault down in Beadle as described in the South Sentinel in which a mentally ill young man had attempted to force his own medication down his father’s throat. Aware that Willie did not take the Sentinel, Mrs. Norris had amended the story so that the young man had attempted to smash his father’s skull in with a shovel but had only succeeded in dislodging the lower mandible. “You got these punks these days with their jungle music and their jump ropes—”
            “Well, let me get that basket for you,” Willie said, a note of impatience in his voice. “And speakin’ o’ kids, where’s that sweet little girl o’ yours? Up in the clouds with them big green eyes o’ hers?”
            “Oh, I’ll go get her,” Mrs. Norris called over her shoulder, already halfway to Greenhouse One. “She is a dreamer if there ever was one. I think she had an eye on them pretty little posies.”
 
           
 
            

   “Jason come on! We’re going to be late to meet the girls!” Mark yelled while scrambling to fill up the water bottles and get the snacks for the day. Like always, Jason overslept, making them late so mark had to get everything done himself. When Jason walked down he had blankets and hoodies as if they were spending the night there.
   “Um, Jason. It’s only a hike. What are you doing with all of that?”
   “You never know, we might need it. I just want to be prepared. I was searching for some hiking materials on the internet and people bring a bag with some rope, extra water, blankets, snacks, and a first aid kit just to be safe.”
    “We’re going to be gone 2 hours max. I doubt any of that will be needed.”
   “We’re a package deal. Either the bag comes with me or we don’t go at all.”
   “Okay Jason, whatever you say. Let’s go,” Mark sighed as he rolled his eyes.
   As they arrived to the girl’s house, Mackenzie and Lindsey were already outside waiting for them. By the furrowed brows and the blank expressions, they had been sitting there for a while.
   “Took you long enough, we were starting to age,” Mackenzie stated.
   They passed deserted roads and many different types of homes on their way to the hills. As usual teenagers, the music was on blast and it was like all their problems went away at that moment.
   As they arrived at the spot where they were going to begin their hike the temperature was an already excruciatingly hot 98 degrees with no wind. They all grabbed their stuff and started the long hike to the top of the mountain.
   Every couple of steps Lindsey would stop to take some pictures with her camera. She was a photography major and her camera was probably one of the most important things to her.
   “Bet you I can run to the top faster than you can” Mark said. Jason didn’t even reply, he just started to count.
   “1,2,3, go!”
   rushing up to the top where the girls already where Mark didn’t calculate how fast he was actually running and the friction that the shoes had with the ground so he slid and bumped into Lindsey sending her camera flying to a ledge bellow them.
   “Mark!” Lindsey panicked and started to run over to the tip of the hill. “You insipid idiot! That’s the only camera I have!”
   “Lindsey, oh my goodness. I am so sorry. We’ll get it back, I promise.” Mark said.
   “Mark, how are you going to climb down a 20 foot drop to get the camera?” Elizabeth said.
   “Easy, I have a rope. “Jason stated. “I told you we’d need it.”
   “Give me that,” Mark said under his breath as he snatched the rope and started to tie it to his hips.
   “Okay so you guys will hold the other end and slowly bring me down.” There were beads of sweat on his forehead and his hands started to shake as he started to slowly get on the edge of the hill. Slowly he was lowered as if they had all the time in the world, no one wanted to be responsible for the rope slipping out of their hands.
   Marks foot slipped and they all started to get pulled forward.
   “Hold it!” Jason strained.
   “Guys! “Mark yelled.
   They finally got their balance again but while the rope was sliding down a rock scraped it and now it was cutting in half. The three of them looked at each other.
  “We can’t tell Mark,” Jason whispered. “If he finds out he’s going to freak and it will only make things worse.”
   The two girls nodded their head and held on to dear life on the rope.
   “I’ve almost got it!” Mark said. The rope let out one more strand. “Woah. Guys hold it steady!”
   As Mark reached for the camera another strand let loose and he inched lower again. What is going on?  He didn’t let anything distract him and finally grabbed the camera.
   “Got It! Pull me up!” Mark felt the biggest smile on his face and put the camera strap over him.
   He felt himself being brought up and wanted to make it go quicker so he started pulling and climbing. With every tug, another strand let loose and as soon as he was about to reach the top, the rope broke in half. Mark tried to grab the edge but it didn’t work. Everyone started running to him as fast as they could. Jason lunged forward and at the last second grabbed Marks arm. Mackenzie and Lindsey held onto Jason as he pulled mark up.
   “Come on. Almost there!” Jason yelled and with one bug pull, Mark was up.
   No one said anything for a while. They all just laid there trying to process everything that had just happened.

         Abruptly one day my ex-wife stopped speaking to me in any recognizable way. What came out instead in our weekly discussions, which were centered mostly on our eight year-old son Charlie, were breathless musings about his unique style of speech toward adults, mindless philosophy regarding his silence toward other children, and a claim that something special was waiting for them both. Just when I started to grow attuned to it all, a new voice emerged, an articulation of a secret unhappiness that felt every bit as false as my wish that she remarry.
            My son had warned me, or tried to. “I think Mom needs help, or something. It’s because she’s lonely. She misses us.”
            I nodded and sighed. “Did she tell you that?” I asked, hating the sound of my (father’s) voice in that instant.
            “No—I mean yeah. In that way she has. I told you.” And he had, he had.
            Unfortunately, I had been half asleep—dreaming—at the time.
 
         In the dream Kathryn stood folding a bed sheet and staring at her swollen belly. She signed and clamped her teeth as an unborn Charlie, a week overdue, spoke to her, inside her. Asked her questions, all kinds. His voice in her mind was perfectly clear but if she did not reply immediately she would forget what he had said, his words dissolving in her bloodstream. Blinking tears, she claimed that Charlie was making it happen. He was not giving her enough time to answer him, causing her to unremember his most recent inquiry, and yet she always knew he had said something. Sometimes she called him spiteful and a hypocrite. If the little brat’s that impatient, what the hell is he doing still backstroking in there? she asked me eventually. What does he expect me to do?
            I pretended to think about it. Catch up, I said.
 
         Before the divorce, when Charlie warned me about Kathryn I barely heard him. And after, when his warnings persisted I thought he was merely getting back at me, making me think what happened was my fault. I told him it wasn’t and he responded coolly, “She knows that. Everybody knows that.”
How strange, that I hadn’t known that.
 
     What I did know: the difference between a panic attack and a nervous breakdown. Before the divorce, during our very worst arguments my wife had experienced intense panic attacks, acute rushes of adrenaline when it became clear her side of the argument was lost. And one week after, in another state, she had a nervous breakdown in a barricaded room somewhere, alone. 
 
       The first thing I ever noticed about Kathryn was her fingers, tapping absently against the side of her head, just above her cheekbone. She saw me and her fingers stopped tapping and her lipsticked mouth formed a grin. Months after we were married I had a dream about this initial encounter; except in the dream, when her fingers stopped tapping, one of them came away bloody.
 
      Life is a beautiful and hideous thing, she had told my father once, and from what I knew of her childhood, I’d thought her declaration entirely reasonable. It irked him the way most things had when he wasn’t soaked in alcohol. “What is that even supposed to mean?” he challenged.
            “It means that every flower has its mound of shit from which it sprang,” she said, looking directly at me.
            My father was stunned into silence, and I into the profoundest love I had known; until then at least.
 
            Her arms around my neck, pulling. Always in the oddest places, a smile of mockery, of premeditated impulsiveness. Daring me to object, knowing it would only encourage her more; and knowing that, I’d  object strongly.
 
       Eighteen months of marriage. Then seeing Charlie for the first time, Kathryn in an epidural-induced fog and myself more awake than I’d ever been in my life, wanting to speak, knowing it would only reveal how unprepared, how truly uncomfortable we both were. Knowing that, I said nothing at all.
 
    Charlie was an uneasy child, his sleep ravaged by every sort of nightmare. Sometimes he would run from his room and out of the house before either of us could stop him (though it seemed like each time Kathryn tried less and less). The reason for these nightmares was not something Charlie was ever willing to discuss. No one who knew him could understand or help him, he said. When I asked him why, he replied, exasperated, “Because. That’s how nightmares work.”
 
      Soon there was always a day in the week that each time the doorbell rang, it was him. A stranger,  recommended to us by neighbors who’d heard Charlie in the night. A stranger hired to observe, speak, listen closely to what our son said (and would not say). For a while the stranger’s day was Tuesday. Since there was no choice but to open the door, one of us did while the other stared tensely at the floor. Feeling emptied out, inadequate. Trying not to think of ourselves as failures, of Charlie as victim.
 
     Three months later Kathryn told me the stranger wasn’t coming back. “Why not?” I asked, halfway knowing what she was going to say.
      “Asshole wasn’t helping,” she muttered. “So I fired him.”
      I nodded, shrugged. “Okay. Now what?”
      “Now what what?” she spat out, then softened after a moment. “Honey, Charlie is not the problem. Never has been and everyone knows it.”
      How odd, that I hadn’t known that.
 
      But it was Kathryn that had led me to take a closer look at Charlie, calling him a highly peculiar boy not long after his fourth birthday. “Did you know he actually asked me if I was his mother once? He wasn’t sure!”
       I bit my lip, anger welling up in me toward Charlie.“When was this?”
     “I can’t remember,” she said and made a dismissive gesture. “Ask him.” And when I did, Charlie couldn’t remember either. But he assured me whatever doubts he’d had were gone. “Don’t worry, she’s definitely Mom.” 
     I wanted to force him to say more, what he had meant by doubting his mother’s identity at all.
        Forget it, I thought instead.
 
      “I’m not responsible for what he says or does! Why must anyone look at me?”
     I told her that she was not responsible--we both were. That more and more she was withdrawing from Charlie and from me, and that if she wanted to be freed of all culpability concerning our son’s odd conduct (on that day he’d asked several teachers if hate actually existed or was it merely the absence of love, and was outraged at all their answers) then she knew what to do. “Just as your mother did right in front of you, Kat. Or have you forgotten?”
     Stricken, hiding her face in her hands, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited.
 
     Some days Kathryn would arrive home later than others, some explanations were better, more likely, than others. I was slightly suspicious perhaps, but I hid it well. Even when she finally admitted to a brief affair with another man whom she barely knew, I hid my hatred for her surprisingly well.
 
        A hospital administrator two states away called nearly a month after the divorce (of course Kathryn’s medical records still had me listed as her emergency contact). In a lowered, urgent voice the administrator politely informed me that she had caused a disturbance in a local motel, had barricaded the door to her room after the manager tried to gain access. The poor man, in his early seventies, was simply responding to complaints from other guests. Screams, they said. Objects thrown against the walls, broken. The police came and arrested her. They were accompanied by an emergency services team which included a physician who, after failing to calm her, had her committed to an area hospital.
       “So what exactly do you want me to do about this?” I asked in disbelief.
Catch up, a voice inside me said.
 
            In three months Kathryn’s treatment team determined that she no longer needed inpatient care and handling. She had suffered an acute psychological collapse following a long period of stress which had not been adequately dealt with, according to the doctor who’d admitted her. Through psychotropic medications, therapeutic interventions and rest, she was restored to her previous level of functioning; though I wondered how exactly could they know that. Yet after speaking with her about why our marriage ended and where we could both go from there, I had to agree—so did Charlie. Kathryn was herself again.
This was the dangerous time.
 
       Because Charlie began to feel threatened in Kathryn’s company. Because during his bimonthly weekend visits to her new apartment—less than a mile away from us, her idea—she would become drenched in perspiration if he asked a question she could not answer instantly. Because she followed him everywhere, into the kitchen, the bedroom, even the bathroom—almost. Because she refused to answer her cell phone in his presence, as though he would object to the distraction, talk that may or may not include him. Because she questioned him closely if he had left her sight for more than a minute without warning. Because she recoiled if Charlie expressed any irritation with anything at all.
        One day Charlie called me to ask if I could come and get him a day early, saying he was not feeling well, saying Kathryn’s behavior was making his head spin and his stomach hurt.
        “Why are you acting like this, making him so uncomfortable, making him sick?” I confronted her at the door, “What the hell are you thinking?”
      “I’m not thinking anything!” she cried. “He won’t let me!”
     I looked over her shoulder and saw Charlie waiting for me in the car, his head in his hands.
 
      A week later, a handwritten letter from Kathryn arrived in the mail. It read:
 
I’m sorry for what I am.
I love you so much.
K
 
    I carefully folded the letter and looked up. Through a teary haze the face of Charlie stared.
 
    The telephone rang the next day, near midnight.
    They—she and Charlie—had come to a decision, Kathryn was telling me.
    “Okay. When?” I asked, and stepped lightly into Charlie’s room. He was sprawled across the bed, sleeping soundly on his stomach. “When?” I asked again.
     “Now. Just now,” she said.
    I wanted to embrace her. “All right. Why don’t you wait until the morning and we’ll talk about it then?”
     “I can’t. I’d like to but Charlie says it has to be right now. This second.”
     Goddammit, I thought, holding back tears. “Well, what is this decision, Kat?”
      “It’s my best option. Charlie will tell you,” she answered, sounding hopeful and sad. “I love you.” Then she hung up.
      I stood very still, listening. And somehow I was absolutely sure that I would not see or speak to Kathryn ever again. Moments later Charlie woke up, wiping the sleep from his eyes. He yawned and looked at me and blinked.
     “Don’t be mad,” he pleaded.
     “Why?” I asked him.
     He smiled thinly. “I finished,” he said.
 

Sig looked at Lana from across the room, sadness in his eyes. He loved her, but the match was an impossible one. She was a mortal and he’d been alive since before recorded history began. He ached, never expected to feel this way, but there was something about her, something familiar that he couldn’t quite place. His mind snapped back to reality. They had a job to do, and it was always about the job.
 
In the dim light of the meeting room, he scanned the faces of his team. Tense, focused, some lightly perspiring. He could smell the fear, the aggression. In the far corner, he noted the glowering eyes and immense shadow of Cervantes, his right-hand man.

“Lana, are we set for tomorrow? Ex-filtration, overwatch, and diversion?”
 
Lana motioned to the projector. “Yes. Ex-filtration is set for precisely 1645. After you and Cervantes destroy the Sanctum, Guy will set off explosions at these locations...” she paused to point to the marked areas on the map. “They will be programmed into your HUD, to ensure maximum damage and effectiveness.  Fen will be circling in the S4, providing sniper cover and updating HUDs as positions change. I will infiltrate tonight, and make contact with our source on the inside. This needs to be a flawless operation. If we fail, Wurzak will summon his armies from the other side, and the world as we know it will end.”
 
The room erupted in a chorus of muttered agreement. Chairs were slid back, and the room was empty, save Lana, Sig, and Cervantes.


Sig was tall and dark, long, black hair to his shoulders, and a well-kept beard flecked with silver. Slender, but powerfully built, he was well-armed with an array of handguns in an elaborate holster setup. A pair of mirrored kukris crossed on his back completed the ensemble.
 
Cervantes was similar in height, but built like a bull. Blue eyes and light brown hair gave him a somber, intimidating look.  He had a solitary revolver in a holster on his thigh, and a high-tech battle axe on his back.
 
Lana was shorter, with long, curly black hair, and deep brown eyes. Unarmed, save for two bladed tonfas, she was built and outfitted for speed, stealth, and agility.
 
Cervantes stalked across the room, arms crossed, and a scowl on his face. This op wasn’t going to go well. He knew Sig was a loose cannon, and that would get him in trouble. Over a century earlier during WW2, Sig had almost blown a night operation in France. Before that, he went berserk on a trench-full of Germans in WW1.  Sig had no self-control, the primal nature of his blood coursing through, but with each passing year, it intensified. And though Cervantes still had a primal side, he had learned to control it.


“Sig, you going to keep a lid on it tomorrow?” Cervantes said with a bit of a smirk. He loved Sig like a brother, but his irritation factor toward him was extremely high.
 
Lana could see an argument coming, and couldn’t spare either one of them if it escalated. She stood up from finalizing the uploads to the battle hub, and rushed to get between them.


“I’ll keep a lid on it as soon as you stop opening a can of worms every time I make a mistake. All you ever do is...” Sig was cut short by Lana stepping between them. Her small frame was dwarfed in height and size by both Sig and Cervantes, but they both knew better than to challenge her. She was soft-spoken, but could hold her own, along wtih their combined tempers.
 
Sig and Cervantes lowered their eyes. Lana turned and walked away, chuckling to herself. Both men in turn silently left the room, and went to their respective quarters. They had a big day ahead, and even immortals needed to sleep.
 
Sig happened to be the son of the first vampire, Mordecai, and his mother was an angelic being who was initially unaware of Mordecai’s true nature. The combined powers and longevity of both parents had given him his extraordinary set of powers.
 
Cervantes, son of the patriarch of all werewolves, King Lycanus, as a boy, fell into a silver mine. Instead of killing him, it strengthened him, and built his immunity to the deadly element.
 
But no one knew much about Lana. She was mortal, as far as they knew, well-skilled at fighting, a technical wizard, with no supernatural powers to speak of. She looked to be in her early 30s, but no one was sure of her true age.
 
Sig leaned over his desk in his quarters, staring intently at the security monitor. He was watching the gate. He never liked when Lana went out alone. Deep in his heart, he wished he’d said something to her before she left. Yes, she was good at her job, and always came back, but he still worried. The gate opened, and her matte black Skyline raced through, speeding off into the night.


“Yes?” he said before he even heard the knock on his door.
 
The door opened, and Fen walked in. Fen, Fenris, was a brother immortal once a Viking fatally wounded during the siege of Constantinople, then brought back from the dead by a monk with a vial of holy water, and now the team’s resident sniper. He was average height, but with a battle hardened build. Red dreadlocks to his waist, and a braided beard cascaded over his chest, Fen was the epitome of intimidation.


“Sig, I’m setting up overwatch tonight. Something doesn’t feel right, and we need to keep eyes on Lana.”
 
Sig turned and slowly straightened up. Fen wasn’t often wrong. It was his worst fear coming to life. This battle might be the one where he again loses someone he cared about. “If you think something feels off, go with your gut.”
 
Without another word, Fen turned and left the room. A few short minutes later, Sig saw the faint silhouette of the S4 in the moonlight. He sat down on the edge of his bunk, and breathed a sigh of relief. At least he could rest easy for a short time. He laid back and closed his eyes; he needed rest.
 
Suddenly, after what seemed like only seconds later, he was jolted awake by a sharp rap at his door. “Sig, its time!” He heard Cervantes sprint farther on down the hallway, stopping at the next set of doors.
 
He got up and donned his holster rig, two strapped to his thighs, two on cross-draw setup on his waist, two shoulder holsters, and two behind his back, directly under the twin kukris. His black jumpsuit was a combination of kevlar and carbon steel chainmail.
 
He left his room, and looked to either side, checking on his team. Down the hall, Cervantes was armored in a similar jumpsuit, but with the addition of high tech steel plating covering his chest and shoulders. He had added another .50 caliber revolver to his gear, strapped to his other thigh, a literal myriad of axes and blades were strapped to his waist and chest, with the gems of his armory, a double sided battle-axe, and his very own greatsword that he had carried into battle almost a thousand years earlier at Constantinople.
 
Guy, a knight once trusted with protecting the Holy Grail, had pledged his life in service of it, and the Church. In return, he was granted a year of life for every denizen of evil he slew. He was a giant of a man, making even Cervantes look small. His long blonde hair hung in braids from under his helmet, falling over his modern scale-mail armor. A shield outfitted with small rocket launchers and a flamethrower paired with his black steel longsword. Bundles of semtex explosives hung from his belt and bandoleers.
 
Guy hopped on his steel grey Ducati, and raced out to the wooded area near the Sanctum, to prep for his diversion.
 
Sig stepped outside, and looked at their little makeshift compound. Chain link fences and razor wire surrounded the modular base. Everything had been airlifted in to this remote part of Eastern Europe over a year in advance while the recon team checked with the locals, and used thermal imaging to detect the Sanctum. A few random motorcycles, trucks, and cars littered the compound yard, and a few spare Spectres and S4s sat on their landing pads. All in all, the operations base probably covered a good 6 or 7 acres, most of which was bunkers and living quarters.
 
Sig turned to face Cervantes as he too, stepped out into the early morning mist. “We need to keep this quick and clean, man. No hesitation, no mercy.”

“It’s not the hesitation I’m worried about, Sig. It’s Wurzak. Last time we fought him at St. Lo, we almost died.” Cervantes looked tired, and worn.
 
Sig nodded in agreement, and jumped into the rapid response vehicle next to him, motioning for Cervantes to join him. He floored the gas pedal, and raced to the Sanctum, over ten miles away. On the drive, he tried to raise communication with Lana, but no response. He was worried, but had to focus, couldn’t waver now, but he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and thoughts of Lana.
 
The Sanctum... a dark temple to the other side. The pillars and statues were in ruins, and the stone was crumbling. As Sig and Cervantes made their way through to the inner Sanctum, they took note of its age. They hadn’t seen architecture like this since they had been young, millennia ago. But somehow it looked older, even otherworldly.


“Keep sharp, team. Thermal readings are off the charts.” Fen’s voice came over their earpieces. At the same time, something whizzed past Sig’s head, and slammed into something soft, then they heard the shot. A denizen uncloaked and slumped to the ground, a large gaping hole through the body. More shots rang out, and a dozen more bodies appeared and fell over.
 
“HUDs up, folks, they’re cloaking! Use thermals!” Sig touched a button on the side of his sunglasses, and pulled out a pair of pistols. He held them crossed over his chest, closing his eyes for an instant to listen for footsteps. He heard something... Eyes open, he turned, and fired. The denizen screeched in pain, and crumbled into heaps. More appeared out of nowhere, and he began firing. Over to his right, Cervantes was facing off against a swarm, battleaxe in one hand, sword in the other, swiveling and turning, taking out entire groups with a single swing.
 
Above, he could see the heat signature from Fen’s rifle, firing periodically, and in turn, more bodies stacking up.

The ground started to shake, and a low, guttural roar emitted from within a stone arch. A flash of purple light and smoke, and a warlord appeared with a new regiment of denizens.
 
“Sigfried!” TuCroth, the warlord shouted, pointing his sword menacingly. “We meet again. This time, you will die!” He waved in Sig’s direction with his sword, and motioned to Cervantes with his other hand. The regiment split into two groups, and ran headlong into the fray.
 
Suddenly, the ground was rocked by explosions. Guy’s voice came over the headset. “Had to set them off early, there’s over a thousand converging on my position.”
 
Never breaking rhythm, Sig calmly replied, “Do you need assistance?” all the while smoothly dodging and ducking attacks, and performing his own counterattacks.
 
“A little help would be appreciated!” Guy’s response came through, but it was choppy.
 
“I’ll be there as soon as I can! Fen, help him out if you can,” Sig said.

“On it,” Fen replied.
 
Sig had depleted his ammunition, and pulled out his mirrored kukris. The enemies recoiled in shock. They had seen weapons like these before, long ago, but in their home world. The shock was only momentary, for at a wave from the lieutenant, they charged again. Sig kept swinging, parrying, and countering, and the bodies around him continued to pile up.
 
“Sig! A little help?” Cervantes had been overrun. At least six were on his back, tearing at his armor. He was big, but they were fast and strong. Sig tucked and rolled, and sprinted towards Cervantes, when without warning, TuCroth was in front of him.
 
TuCroth...Half demon, half human, stood a mammoth of a creature with scaly grey skin, and a face like a swine, which made him unbearable to look at. In one hand, he grasped a sword, in the other, a large warhammer. An evil grin crossed his face, and he raised his hammer for an attack.
 
He brought it down in a heavy swing, making the ground quake with the impact. Sig rolled away, nearly losing his footing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her... Lana.  She was sneaking through the battle, making her way towards Cervantes who was now buried under a growing mass of enemies. In one swift movement, she darted in, cleared a good portion of them with her bladed tonfas, and pulled Cervantes out.

“Go!” she shouted. “Regroup and get inside the Sanctum! My source was captured and they tortured him into giving information. At all costs, we must destroy it. Ulrik has opened the portals, and soon Wurzak will have entrance into our realm.”
 
“What about you?  Sig said to keep you safe!” Cervantes replied, grabbing her arm.
 
“No. I will do what I have to, and meet you when I can.” She sprinted towards Sig’s position.
 
Sig was still in a deathlocked fight with TuCroth. Eventually, one of them would make a mistake, and it would get them killed. TuCroth was pressing the advantage of his size and weaponry, making huge, powerful attacks to stun Sig, and while Sig was dodging the attacks, he was weakened from a wound to his thigh.
 
TuCroth lunged forward with a well-placed kick to the wounded leg, and floored Sig. His kukris went flying, and he laid on the ground stunned. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and the ground shook from an explosion deep within the earth. In the distance, he could see Guy sprinting towards him, and in the sky, Fen’s S4 was being bombarded by the netherworld’s batlike bird, Nethars.
 
TuCroth strutted slowly to where Sig was trying to regain his bearings. He tightened his grip on his warhammer, and raised it for his killing blow. As he brought it down, Sig reached for a denizen’s shortsword that lay nearby, to make one final effort, when a flash of black fabric shot in front of him.
 
Lana attempted to block the attack, but her tonfas were instantly shattered. The hammer connected with her body, and she was thrown like a ragdoll into a heap some yards away. Sig seethed with anger at the sight of Lana laying helpless, and his mind snapped. He felt the primal rage taking hold, that deep-seated nature he had been given by his father, and he didn’t try to stop it this time.
 
He launched himself at TuCroth, bare-handed, and began tearing at his throat, his face, his armor. Time and time again, he felt his fist connect with TuCroth’s wormy worthlessness. He heard the sound of bones cracking, saw skin ripping. He could see the life slowly exiting TuCroth’s eyes, but he wasn’t finished with him yet. Then, a gentle yet strong hand grabbed either wrist.
 
“He’s dead, Sig. He’s gone,” Cervantes said softly. “The Sanctum is destroyed, and Ulrik is on the other side.”
 
Sig stood up. “Wurzak? Is he..?”
 
“He never made it through. I made a call to seal it off. It needed to be done,” Cervantes replied.
 
“Lana...” Sig spoke as he turned.
 
“Sig, I’m so sorry. She’s gone.”
 
Sig’s body began to heave and shake. Oh why did he have to be this way, always hiding his feelings? He had never found the nerve to tell Lana how he felt, because after thousands of years of falling in love, then outliving the women he fell in love with, he had made a vow to let them live their mortal life, to be happy with another mortal, and not break another heart, not allow his own heart to be broken again.
 
He knelt by her lifeless body, cradling her in his arms. Crying softly, he kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry it ended like this, my love. I wish I could have told you how much I cared for you.”
 
His team stood motionless, time seemed to stop, and the wind picked up. A dim, haunting light shone on Lana’s lifeless body, and a voice spoke.
 
“Sigfried, darling. I’m not gone.” An apparition appeared before him. It was Lana! Slowly, more apparitions appeared. He recognized them all, each and every one, the women he had fallen in love with over so many years. From the daughter of a pharaoh, to a noblewoman in the court of King Louis IX. His mind swam and he feared his heart would leap out of his chest.
 
“I don’t understand,” he stammered.
 
“It’s always been me. Throughout the ages, it’s been me you loved. Every woman you fell in love with was me. Every woman you’ve yet to fall in love with is me. The soul takes many forms, Sigfried; I’ve always been by your side, through everything, everything. Don’t cry. I know you love me, and I love you, but this is my curse. To be forever alive in spirit, but not in body.”
 
Sig nodded tearfully. He didn’t understand it, why it had to be this way, but he understood that this is why she seemed familiar. He closed his eyes, and gave her remains one last hug, then looked up and the apparitions were gone. “Did you see that?” he asked Cervantes.
 
Cervantes shook his head as he knelt next to his best friend and brother. “Let’s give her a proper send-off, shall we?”
 
Some months later, Sig was sitting at a cafe, sipping on a coffee. Using his peripherals, he glanced up from his book to see a young woman sitting across from him. He noted her bearing, her build, and the fact that she had two shoulder holsters printing on her trench coat. Blonde hair and dark brown eyes, she looked professional, beautiful, and terrifying all wrapped into one.
 
“May I help you, miss?” he said without looking up.
 
“Please, call me Anne. The reason I’m here is I heard you were in need of a new team member.”
 
Sig put the book down, and looked at her. Her piercing, yet soft eyes had a quality he was familiar with. “Who sent you?”
 
“I think you know who sent me, Sig.” she said. 

​

   The sun was breaking over the hill as we entered the woods. Tyler Wagner’s back beckoned me to follow, a pair of work gloves shoved in his rear pocket.
   “What are we looking for?” I asked.
   “The spirit of a tree.”
   “Oh.”
   He explained, “I try to find the spirit of the tree before I make the first cut. Even a down tree has a spirit. I’ll try to take a down tree before I take one that’s up. Sometimes I take a standing one, one that no one else wants. A logger wouldn’t want a split top. Logger’s like trees that are tall, full of straight board feet. I like trees with character, knotty, choppy, and full of individual spirit. It makes my work more interesting.”
   He stopped in midstride. His neck bent back as his eyes trailed upward. “See that? Lightning took that one. It’s a white pine. Took it high enough so that it’s still good for carving. Wonder why she didn’t fall?”
   He reached out, touched the tree, and closed his eyes. After awhile he pulled his hand from the tree. “I know what I’ll carve from this one.”
   “How do you know?”
   “I asked. I also thanked the spirit of the tree for the opportunity to work with it. The pieces that come from it will be beautiful.”
   “So what will you carve?”
  “There’s an eagle in this one. Sometimes I get a run on eagles. I think it’s because the tree spirit has been locked up so long they want to pull up their roots and fly. It’s a personal thing.”
   Tyler turned and headed down the hill. We stopped at three other trees and he placed his hand on each one and closed his eyes. He settled on the tree hit by lightning along with two other trees.
   We walked to his van and climbed in. It smelled of wood. “My partner and I will use a cant hook to turn the logs so we can trim off the branches. Then we’ll stack the brush into piles for the rabbits, squirrels and quail. We’ll keep any thick branches that look like they’d make good coat racks, bedposts, toilet paper holders or towel bars. We like authentic, rustic pieces for our trademark, TNT Woodcrafting.”
   He shifted the van into higher gear and went on. “We use log tongs to bring the logs out of the woods so we don’t hurt any of the other trees. Sometimes we can get a truck deep into the woods, but since we’re not loggers and don’t take many trees, we usually end up hauling them out by hand. Sometimes the two of us can get the log out, but sometimes if it’s too big we have to get someone to help.”
   Tyler got his first carving saw in 2003, a little electric Husqvarna with two interchangeable carving tips. The tip on the larger blade is the size of a quarter, the tip on the other is the size of a dime.
   “I still remember my first carving. My mom wanted a mushroom for her garden, but I wasn’t sure how to make one. I looked at the two-foot chunk of dried pine for a long time before I made my first cut. Then I cut away everything that didn’t look like a mushroom, and there it was. I’ve been cutting away at logs ever since. I now know that the pause before cutting is the most important part. I know that the spirit of the tree is speaking to me, somehow, and I know what to cut away. It’s very gratifying to see what emerges. No two are alike.” We pulled up in front of his workshop located in Wautoma, WI.
   “Do you have a favorite thing to carve?”
 “The first thing I ever carved was a mushroom, so they’re my favorite. I’ve developed a technique where I can make a spiral stem that looks like a corkscrew. They’re very decorative. When I feel restless I’ll take the saw and carve out a mushroom and I always feel more settled when I’m done.” He placed his hand on a rust-colored mushroom with a cap that looked like a top hat. We walked toward the workshop and he pulled open the heavy door to reveal a room filled with his art.
   “Lately I’ve been working on a series of signature benches. You wouldn’t think there would be a spirit in a bench, but there is. I’ve taken to naming each one. Sometimes the name comes right away, sometimes I’m halfway through, and other times the name doesn’t come until days after the bench is complete. I’ll walk by the finished bench and it’s like it shouts its name to me, and then I know. We burn each name on the underside of the bench along with the company logo. Some people like benches for their gardens or their porches, but others put them in their house at the foot of their bed, near the fireplace, or to take their boots off when they’re done working for the day.”
   I wandered among the rows of benches, oohing and ahhing, touching the ones that called to me, and he smiled. “It’s amazing how they whisper to you. I’m a roofer by trade, but I must admit, my heart is in the carving, in the wood. I love being outdoors, working with my hands, and feeling the sun on my back.”
   He sat himself down on a copper-colored bench named Penny. “I like taking something from the woods and putting it together in a different way so it’s custom-fit for someone’s house. I think my benches would feel pretty comfortable in just about anyone’s home.”
   The next day I visited the workshop to choose a bench for myself, a bench where I could sit and take my shoes off when the day was done. I picked one with wide sturdy legs made of knotty pine.
   “Good choice,” Tyler said. “Want to know her name?”
   I nodded. He tipped the bench over and I smiled. Her name was Knottya.

​            "Ah choo!  Why do stores have to put perfume counters right smack inside the main doors?"  Libby muttered.
            A strolling model waited with an atomizer spray.  "Would you like to try our newest fragrance?"  She was poised ready to squeeze the bulb to broadcast liquid.
            Libby held her breath, shook her head from side-to-side indicating a 'no', and tried to rapidly walk away before the model could move forward and do it anyway.
            A sale table had merchandise laid out on a wooden table.  These same items had been on sale, displayed on a hanging metal rack, just the preceding week.  Libby smiled with the remembrance of that.  The movement of her lips into an upward curve seemed to shake some tension from her body.  She shifted her leather shoulder bag from the right to left shoulder, adjusted the collar on her plaid winter jacket and freed some caught strands of limp hair.
            "Hello Mrs. Slotter," spoke a young woman.
            Libby turned.  "Janet!"  She smiled at one of the students in her English 251 class.  "Didn't I give you a long enough assignment that you've time to shop?"  Libby joked.
            Janet pulled the beret from her head and feigned shoving it in Libby's mouth.  "You're a great teacher," she then quietly mentioned, "and I like also being able to laugh with you."
            Libby smiled again.  This time her eyes watered.  Janet noticed.
            "Guess you teachers really do toss papers down stairs and any that stay on the top step get A's, one's in the middle B's, and so on," Janet quipped.  She stood at an angle and the store's fluorescent light gave her skin a slightly blue glow.  Her features were full, almost fleshy, but the absence of make-up on her young skin was attractive.
            "Of course," Libby quipped.  "Why do you think I have time to shop when I'm not teaching?"
            Janet shoved the beret into her pocket.  "Nice bumping into you, Mrs. Slotter.  Whomever you're shopping for, I hope he or she appreciates it."
            "Didn't I tell you in class, people don't consciously speak in correct grammar and you shouldn't even, at your college level, try to write differently from your conversation."  Libby scolded in a fun way but was serious.
            Janet extended her hand.  "Don't tell anyone.  But I'd almost love to flunk your class just to have you next semester."  She walked away humming softly.
            A sigh seemed to squeeze out of Libby's lungs.  The escalator looked higher today.  "Appreciate," she sighed again and whispered to herself.  She stepped on the rubber escalator mat.  Unfastening her jacket, and returning her purse to the right shoulder gave her something to consciously do and think about on the short ride to the store's second floor.  Coat department was to the left.
            "May I help you?"  A saleswoman quickly approached.  She was short, wearing a too-long challis skirt and needle heels.  Libby wondered how she could stand in those shoes all day, and why the woman hadn't the courage to dress for her height rather than designer decree.  Libby also thought of the times she needed sales help and no one ever appeared.
            "Thanks.  I need a few minutes alone."
            "Any specific size?  Coats are arranged by color now, not by size."
            "Thanks."
            "Any specific color?"
            Libby tried to keep the tension from returning.  "Just a few minutes alone, please."
            The woman turned, approached another customer, and began the dialogue.
            "Red.  She said red.  I don't know why."  Libby muttered, caught her reflection in a long mirror, and without words, talked to herself.  "She never ever asked for a specific gift.  Never.  Why now?  And why such a ridiculous item for California?  A long red wool coat.  She can't use a long coat in California.  And so specific a color."  Libby's blue eyes looked greyish in the light.
            The jacket she was wearing was placed on a close chair.  "Skinny marink," she thought as she looked again at herself.  "I'm still skinny marink although I still don't know what a marink is.  Why did my mother call me that?  Maybe I should ask her what a marink means.  With the tubes in her, guess she couldn't answer too well...but she was able to talk well enough to ask for a long red wool coat for her birthday.  Why did she have to move 3000 miles west when most of family still is east.  Was selling the house after dad died so awful that she couldn't stay on the east coast?"
            The short saleslady interrupted the silent monologue.  "Ah.  I see," pointing to the jacket on the chair, "that you've found the color you want.  Here," she pulled out a petite extra-small coat, "this should look wonderful on you with your hair color."
            Libby's hand went up as if to protect a blow.  "The coat isn't for me.  I'm buying a gift for my mother.  I'll need it mailed to a hospital in California.  No tax.  Out of state mailing.  Gift wrapped."
            "What size?"  The clerk softened her tones.
            "I don't know!"
            "Then how about a wrap-coat.  Size isn't too important."
            "No.  I want the most luxurious feeling coat you have.  She weighs about 115, well, she did anyway.  Is my height.  I'll try some on."  Libby thought about her mother's distended abdomen from disease which doesn't let the body's liver get rid of waste.  "But it should be loose."
            "Here.  Try this."  From a heavy wooden hanger, an all wool coat was removed.  It had a red acetate lining that was very shiny.
            "Red.  Long.  Wool.  Coat."  Libby's head repeated these words like a record stuck in an etched groove.  "Never asked before for a special gift.  Took anything I sent even when I sent something she hated."  Aloud, she said, "Something else.  The armpit area is too skimpy."
            A dolman-sleeved coat was handed to Libby.  She slid her arms into it and wrapped its bathrobe style around her tiny frame.  "What am I agonizing for!"  She hadn't realized that this sentence came out loud.  Blood vessels filled and her face blushed.
            "Gifts are hard when you don't know the size."  The clerk was getting sympathetic.
            Tears smarted Libby's eyes.  She sat down on top of her jacket.  Her plaid skirt pleated around her knees.  "This one will be fine."  A monotone sound of resolution.  "It really does not matter."  She emphasized the word 'not.'  "My mother will never wear it."
            "She'll love it.  And if it's the wrong size, she can ship it back and exchange it."  The saleslady sensed despair.
            "She won't need a different size.  She's terminal.  She'll be dead very soon.  She asked me for a red, long, wool coat for her birthday so she could fly east when she gets out of the hospital and visit with me.  The only trip she'll make east is in her coffin as family graves are here."  There.  She said it.  Out loud.  It didn't take the pain away.  It didn't take the disbelief away either.
            "I'll bring the book over.  Sit."  The clerk wobbled on the stilletto heels and returned with the sales book.  "If it's never worn, you can have someone there ship it back and I'll credit your charge.  It's the most expensive one we carry."
            "Oh God."  Libby smoothed a pleat of her skirt with a clammy hand.  She knew the clerk meant well, but the coat was just going and not returning.  On the tiny gift card, Libby kept up the charade:  To Mom.  Happy Birthday.  Enjoy wearing this for your trip east.  Looking forward to it.  Love, Libby.
            She printed the name, hospital address, on the sales slip.  The gift card was slid into an envelope and secured to the paper slip.  "Gold box.  Big.  Big red bow."  She instructed.
            "I'm sorry," the short clerk looked straight at Libby.  Her eyes were green, Libby noticed, and large for her face.  Her face had high cheekbones and the purplish lipstick actually was flattering.  The eye contact showed sincerity.  "You know, red is the color of blood and blood is life."  She was almost philosophical.  "It's a good choice.  She'll love it."
            A repeated nod was all Libby could express.  She signed the charge, patted the clerk's hand, slid her arms into the jacket and stood up.  Her legs felt heavier and the down-escalator was a walk that seemed too far away.  She still didn't know why her mother had asked for a certain birthday gift, and couldn't ask.  "Maybe," she whispered with a possible correct choice, "she wants it for a life-blanket to keep her body warm on its last trip east."
            Libby's feet felt the escalator's power beneath them.  The coat was bought.  She hoped it would make its way across the country for her mother to actually see it.  She didn't question why, upstairs, she'd bought the most vibrant, heavy, soft one; she'd resolve that another time.  She'd lose herself in grading student essays soon and that sense of purpose helped.
            "Ah choo!"
            As Libby exited, the model instructed to sell perfume sprayed first, then questioned, "Would you like to try this new fragrance?"                 
 
published Summer 1996  Lynx Eye  ©1996 Scribblefest Lit. Group (as a personal essay) reprinted: 1996 Rochester Shorts (as short story)
reprinted: March 2010 The Jewish Press (as a personal essay)  
reprinted: October 2016 Fabula Argenta(as a short story)
 

"Step on a crack.  Break your mother's back."  A small child was jumping on sidewalk squares and reciting the verse in a sing-song style.
            Carole glanced at her wristwatch, then stared at the colonial frame house.  She'd made a special trip to this street hoping it would help her decide about possible organ donation and subjecting her own life to surgical hazards on the slim chance it would help another.  She needed to deal with anger stored up since her 1940's childhood.
            "Step on a crack."
            "Fifty years later," Carole sighed.  "Still the same sidewalk game."  Her attention focused on the house and, in her mind, she replayed a typical scene from decades ago:
            "Ha, ha, ha-ha, ha," Molly chanted in a singing manner.  "I get to dust the living room and can listen to records."
            "Big deal."  Carole pretended to not care.  "I'd rather clean up the kitchen anyway today."
            "I don't believe you," Molly laughed.  "You're jealous that nearly every Saturday you lose the coin toss for dusting the living room."
            "Oh shut up."  Carole turned and walked away;  her big braids bobbed.
            Molly took two 78 rpm sized records and set them on top of the mahogany player.  She wondered whether Frank Sinatra or Dick Haymes would upset her sister more.  She decided to hear Haymes.
            "Why do you have the music so loud?"  Carole called from the dinette.  "Just wait until Mother gets home and I tell her how loud you play the phonograph."
            "She won't believe you," Molly again sang these words.
            The living room had a false fireplace;  below the wood stack was a tiny fan, a piece of red cellophane, and an electric light.  When a switch was engaged, the fan blades revolved and the glow looked like a fire.  On the left side of the fireplace was a built-in radio.  The entire unit was framed by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.  The walnut Baby Grand piano had a Spanish scarf draped over its closed lid;  fringes hung helplessly.  Molly told herself if she ever got that piano she'd keep the lid open all the time; she hated the scarf, all the `junk' on top, and the muffled tone  when she played.  She stood on a piano bench to dust the inner part of the torch lamp.  Indirect lighting was pretty;  she also hoped she'd someday own this tall lamp.
            "Bet mom and dad give ME the piano when we grow up."  Molly didn't hear any response.  "Hey, Carole, did you hear me?"
            "Oh, Molly, can't you stop picking for one day!  Act your age."  Carole, two years older, tried to sound mature.
            The record ended and the needle made repeated scraping sounds across the final groove.  Molly ignored it.
            "Oh maturity," Molly spoke with sarcasm, "I hope you do mature in your head and someday get married because Mom and Dad said the older has to be married first.  I'll be 90 if they make me wait for real."
            Carole's appearance at the archway to the living room startled Molly.  "Look, skinny, no one'll ever ask you."
            Molly stroked her thin flaxen hair, wiggled her behind, and pretended to be untouched by the remark.  "Carole-Barrel, Carole-Barrel," she shrieked.  "You're so fat you could be rolled over Niagara Falls and not even get hurt."
            Molly knew just where her sister was most vulnerable.  Once she got started with this verbal abuse she seemed unable to stop it.  "Carole-Barrel, you must be adopted 'cause no one else in the whole family looks like you."
            Carole's greenish-blue eyes welled up with tears.  Her short fingers felt the plump brown braids.  Mom and Molly are blond, Dad has dark hair and light blue eyes, all are skinny, maybe I am adopted.  Oh, God, don't let that be, Carole thought.
            "Don't worry, beanpole, I'll get married first.  Probably it'll be the only wedding made in this house."  Carole tried to cover her wounds which Molly once again opened and irritated.
            Molly did a cartwheel and nearly toppled the coffee table. "Let's see you do that."
            "Leave me be," Carole replied.  "You almost broke the china vase."
            "So?"  Molly said.  "I'd tell 'em that clumsy you cracked it.  They'd believe me.  I'm pretty.  I even have the bedroom with the window box."
            "My bedroom is much bigger and I have three windows," Carole played out the one-upmanship.
            "I have pretty nails;  you bite yours."  Chips of pink polish flashed out at Carole.  Molly's storehouse of abuse was always ready.
            The 1941, black, Buick's tires caused the gravel on the driveway strips to crackle.  Both girls looked out through the wooden Venetian blinds.  "Dad's home."
            Molly ran to the front door to be the first to greet him.  When he came through, she wanted to hear his usual "Hi, princess" before her older sister.
            In the background, the record player revolved and the diamond needle continued to thump against the wounded groove.
 
            "Step on a crack and break your mother's back."  The small girl who was taking wide strides to avoid sidewalk cracks looked up and said,  "Hi.  You live around here?"
            Carole looked down, smiled, and stated, "They still play sidewalk songs."
            "Well," insisted the youngster, "do you live around here?"
            "No."  Carole ran her short fingers through her grey hair.  "I once lived in this house," she pointed ahead at the brick and shingle colonial, "but that was a long, long time ago."
            "Oh.  Bye."  The rhyme continued as the child took long steps and walked away.
            The once-tiny Chinese Maple tree filled a large section of the left front lawn;  its fullness concealed the living room windows.  "You did manage to get the piano, Molly," Carole said aloud.  "And the torch lamp, and the porcelain vase that sat on the coffee table."
            Carole moved along the sidewalk until she could see the bedroom window through the higher maple leaves.  The window box was gone.  Carole whispered.  "You always played the princess, and all these years have had it easy...until now, perhaps.  Looks, brains, talent, nice kids, doting husband...even your hair hasn't turned grey yet.  My life's been a mess.  Wasn't it your fault?  Wasn't it?  Even during my divorce, you took sides with my ex.  How could you side with that man!"
            Carole shifted her heavy body.  She turned towards the driveway, now a one-car, smooth, asphalt path.  "Well, you were changed for the better," she addressed the once-gravel yardage.  Me?  I guess no one ever did care;  I sure couldn't hold onto a relationship;  I still bite my nails;  I wish..."  Carole was suddenly aware that she was talking out loud.  No one was on the street except the little girl who was re-tracing her steps back along the sidewalk.
            "You looking to buy that house, lady?"  The girl stopped her giant steps.
            "Do you have a sister?"  Carole spoke.
            "Yeah.  She's a baby and I hate her.  Bye again."  Her walk continued.
            "Simple."  Carole said.  "Simple.  She's a baby and I hate her.  Why couldn't I have ever been allowed to really express that?  Why didn't I when I had the chance?"  Carole glared at the two-story structure, turned and began walking up the street to where she'd parked the car.  "Too bad girls couldn't have fist fights so we might have settled the junk and gotten on differently.  Oh.  Probably nothing would have mattered.  Rivalry stuff.  Why do my friends think that childhood peeves vanish, even when illness happens, and spew 'holier-than-thou' phrases to me?"
            Carole opened the car door and slid behind the plastic steering wheel.  Looking into the rearview mirror, she spoke as if her sister were behind the rectangle of glass.  "Well, Molly, you used to wonder whether I was adopted, yet you want me to submit to tests to see if one of my kidneys is compatible with yours.  Has my anger finally, today, been spent... or is it still festering?"  She adjusted the rear view mirror for its driving position, hesitated as she thought of her emotional dilemma, shook her head gently up and down agreeing with her mind's choice.  Then she inserted the key into the ignition.
 
 
©2000   Green’s Educational Pub.  (Canada)   It was the lead story in the Autumn 2000 issue of Green’s Magazine

​  He was a great thinker and wrote Letters to the Editor to the Philadelphia Inquirer. They were always published and signed Stephen Weinstein, Elkins Park, PA. I met him and his wife, Arleen, at a Move.on party held at my home. About forty people showed up, including a former boyfriend I’d forgotten all about.
We were thrilled to be voting for the first black man, Barack Obama, to be president of the United States. We strategized about pounding the pavement to introduce our man to the community.
Stephen and Arleen, a svelte black-haired beauty with dangling earrings, would both go out onto the porch steps to smoke.  I’d join them just to stay close to them. In time, we became friends.
Stephen’s huge black and white photo, which I copied off my blog, hangs as a talisman to the right of my computer. No reason to remove it. I peek at it every now and again. He was a handsome man with blue eyes, that looked black in the photo, a little stubby beard, and a speech impediment where he couldn’t quite pronounce his L’s. Arleen was a speech therapist.
They boosted my morale, little Ruthie, holding a political rally at my yellow house with the swinging bird houses on my front lawn and a bird bath where birds of all kinds  - tiny sparrows and chickadees and loud-squawking blue jays would splash and drink. 
          We got together socially a dozen times after that. They loved to entertain. My boyfriend Scott and I would drive out to their condo for a Rosh Hashonah dinner or to meet some “New Age” friends they thought I would like.
          They loved Sonoma, Arizona. Half of their living room furniture had been shipped from that city of artists and poets and hippie-clad folk.
          They had bought a new bed and wanted to show it to us. A Craft-matic like you see in commercials. The headboard was a wrought-iron curlicue pattern, while the queen size bed had different “comfort levels” you could control yourself. We all removed our shoes and lay in the bed.
          Quite honestly, I was never in love with Stephen, but it was fun to fantasize being his wife. Since I’m no one’s wife, my life style would drastically change. Arleen was a phenomenal cook, so I’d have to get a five-course meal ready for him when he came home from work. He installed “sanitizers” in grocery stores, hotels, restaurants and even private homes. Simply squeeze the clear liquid from the jar, rub it on your hands, and – presto! – they were sterile. For a few seconds anyway.  
          It was all the rage back then, but you rarely see people using it any more.
          All this time, I would email Stephen my endless poems, some thoughts I had,  but his responses became less and less. I had no idea his cancer had returned and was slowly killing this good man, with Arleen at his side.
          Occasionally, in a last gasp of communicating with the world, one of his Letters to the Editor appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He always sent me a copy.
          One day the phone rang. Arleen was on the phone.
          “Ruth,” she said, with a trembling voice, “Stephen wanted me to call you. He passed away.”
          “Oh my God,” I said. “I had no idea!”  
I was not in the inner circle.
          She told me where the funeral would be held. Goldstein’s Funeral Home in nearby Southampton.
          Scott wore a beige Armani suit a friend had given him. A bit small, he could barely sit down for fear of bursting a seam. I changed into six different outfits before I found the right dress. This was the end of August and the sweat poured from my arms and legs.
          “You look very handsome,” I told Scott when he arrived at my house. We live next door to one another.
          “Why, thank you,” he said. “You don’t look too bad yourself, kid,” he said.
          I rattled my car keys in my hand.
          “Hope you don’t mind if I drive,” I said.
          What a mistake that was. I thought I knew where the funeral home was.
          We set off in my gray Nissan. We had plenty of time, I thought, not realizing I had no idea where I was going.  
          “It’s gotta be just down the street,” I said nervously, driving faster and faster.
          “Ruth,” said Scott, with his angry voice. “This is ridiculous.”
          “Okay,” I said. “I’m going home and we’ll look it up on the Internet.”
          The sweat was pouring off me. My hair was soaking wet. I rarely use my air-conditioning as I feel like I’m in a freezer.
          Scott and I ran into my house and looked up the location.
          “You drive,” I said, “handing him the keys.”
          Goldstein’s is one of the few Jewish funeral homes in the suburbs. When we arrived we drove around the parking lot looking for an empty space. Then we couldn’t find the door. We ran around the building and Scott finally yelled, “It’s over here!”
          What an idiot I am, I kept thinking. Was that Stephen laughing at me from on high?
          The windowless wood-paneled chapel was freezing cold. We sat in the back. Shivering with cold, I looked at all the folks who had come to say their final goodbyes to this wonderful man.
          The next day Scott and I went to sit shiva in his condo. I’d written “Ode to Stephen,” which I pressed into Arleen’s hand. The shiny coffee table from Sonoma was filled with candy, nuts, cut-up fruit, potato chips and pretzels with spinach dip, and Marzipan candy in the shape of tiny apples, strawberries and oranges.
          I stuffed myself until I was full. Scott, who doesn’t eat between meals and has no taste for sweets, abstained.
          The door of their bedroom, which was on the first floor, was closed. That’s where he died. He had given up smoking after his cancer returned. Stealthily, I searched the beige carpet to see if any of his hairs – head, eyebrows or beard – would give proof that this man once lived, loved, fathered a child, Jennifer, who was there taking care of the refreshments, had ever existed.
          Can you hear me, Stephen?
         

​I wake up as I do every morning until I see what day it is on my phone.  The day my parents died exactly one year ago.  And it’s the first day of my 8th grade year.  This day could not possibly be worse.  I have spent the last year in Europe at a fancy private school to escape my friends and my life.  But, me and my uncle decided it was time to face reality.  So I get ready for school and go downstairs for my usual breakfast and then head out the door for the bus.  I hop on the bus and am surprised that I don’t recognize anyone.  I guess the bus route changed while I was gone.
 
            When I finally get to school after a forty-five-minute bus ride, I have to go to the office for my schedule.  My uncle didn’t register me for school till last week so there was no time to mail my schedule.  When I get in there, there is a line for other new students waiting to get their schedules or to get their schedules changed.  I can’t believe people already have complaints about their schedules but I guess that’s just how things roll.  I finally get my schedule and I already know the school so I don’t need the map the lady keeps insisting I take but I take it anyways to please her.
 
            I get to fifth period class and still don’t recognize anyone.  I guess this year I don’t have any classes with any of my old friends.  I just hope I can find someone to sit with during lunch next period.  I guess if that happens I can just eat in the library or in a bathroom stall like new kids do in the movies.  I really hope that doesn’t happen.  Right as I’m thinking this day could not possibly get any worse my old best friend walks in the room.  When I say old best friend I mean all of elementary school we were close then middle school happened and he did anything he could do to torture me and put me down.  I have never needed a friend more in my life than this very moment.  I look next to me at the empty seat and just internally scream at God saying to please not let that idiot sit next to me.  But, of course I don’t have that kind of luck.  And he sat down smiling at me the whole time.  He tried talking to me about my parents and where I’ve been this past year and kept picking at my wounds but I just simply ignored him.  I was trying to be the bigger, wiser person like my father taught me to be.  You have to be the better man in business just like in real life. 
 
            I just go to my next class after lunch and luckily the teacher doesn’t have a class so I eat there.  Me and the teacher had a long conversation about school and I even told him about Europe and what it’s been like for my uncle to take over being my legal guardian.  I could tell I was going to like him, that he’d probably be my favorite teacher all year.  He just knew how to talk and he knew all the right questions to ask when talking about my parents.  He didn’t get all awkward and tip toe around the subject.  He knew what questions were appropriate and to not go too far like the kids in my last class did.  And, we had the same name even though mine is short for Theodore while his is just Todd.  Even when this class did start, if anyone was bugging me he’d shut them up.  I feel like this teacher was my only friend I had made during the school day.  It was kind of nice.
 
            Last period rolled around and finally I was about to go home.  It was a study hall and since I was still pretty tired from traveling back from Europe I decided to take a quick nap.  I put on my headphone and put my head down and fell asleep within minutes. 
 
            I wake up and the room is pitch black and so it outside the windows.  I’m still waking up so at first I’m really confused till I realize where I am.  I’m still at school and no one is around.  I think to myself how I could have slept through the loud screeching bell but then I realized that my music was probably too loud to hear the bell, but still someone should have woken me up.  I take of my now silent headphones, only to see my phone is dead.  I pack up my stuff and slide out of my chair.  I walk over to the classroom phone but it’s off and then I remember how to school is trying to be more conservative by turning off the power during non-school hours.  I walk over to the door and jiggle the handle only to find out that it’s locked.  I start breathing more heavily and look for any other possible exit of the room.  I run over to the windows and open them and look out.  I am on the top floor of my school and jumping would most likely kill me.  I start screaming out the window for help but it’s no use, there’s no other buildings around here within a mile radius of this place.  I start hyperventilating and sit down on the floor with my back against the wall, trying to come up with any way to get out of here.  I go over to the door and start banging on it hoping a janitor will hear me.  I look at the clock on the wall and see it’s only 6pm.  Which, means that there should be a janitor somewhere in this building.  The thing is, I just got to hope that someone will hear my banging. 
 
            I bang on the door for what feels like hours but has only been thirty minutes.  I hear footsteps and so I start hitting the door harder until a little old man appears in the doorway opening the door from the other side.  He looks very shocked to see me here and instead of explaining it all I just ask to borrow his phone to call my parents.  Except, my parents won’t answer their phones.  Because, they’re gone.  So, I think of who else I could call.  But, my uncle is in Tokyo for the next two weeks.  I guess I could call my driver but would he hear the house phone ringing from outdoors.  I ask the little old man if he can drive and when he says yes, I ask if he’d mind giving me a ride home.  He smiles and agrees to drive me home.  I walk with him out of the school and to his red Mercedes-Benz.  I compliment his taste in cars and so, the whole way home all we talk about is cars. 
 
            I finally get home at 7:15 pm and go straight upstairs and to bed.  I usually don’t write in a journal but after my parents died my uncle forced me to go to therapy and the therapist gave me this journal to write my heart out into.  So I open it for the first time and write down about this day, my first day back to school.  Because, this day was the strangest day of my life and I don’t think I could make this up.  I plan on showing it to my uncle when he gets back home from Tokyo.  I wonder if this will help me get back to school in Europe.  I guess I’ll have to wait and see.  But, I guess one good thing did come out of this experience.  It will be a great story to maybe tell my kids someday.
           
 

​I wake up from another dream about Tony, I don’t get how my mind always wonders to him when I fall asleep.  Don’t people usually dream about rainbows and unicorns or something, why are my dreams always about a guy who will never be a reality.  Not that unicorns will ever be a reality but still.  I’m an only child band geek who has a crush on the most liked guy in school.  Usually in books and movies the quarterback that the girl likes it actually obnoxious and a total idiot, but Tony is up for valedictorian and he’s actually a good person.  Yesterday I saw him tutoring after school some middle schoolers at the local library.  If that isn’t the cutest thing I’ve ever seen I don’t know what is. 
            I stop thinking about his beautiful, brown eyes long enough to realize I’m late for school.  I rush like every morning this happens and get ready in a total of six minutes, probably my all-time new record.  I drive me and my little brother to school so of course I expect him up and ready to go, maybe even yelling at me for being late but no.  I find him in his bed sound asleep with a note on his door telling me to just leave him be and that he doesn’t need school.  So, I do just that and let him be so that after school my parents can just yell at him for me, I’m too tired for this. 
            I get to school and walk into my Astronomy class right as the late bell rings, but of course I’m Mr. Merkle’s favorite so he lets me slide in with a smile.  I look up at the board to see what’s happening and I see he’s changed our partners again for the fourth time this semester.  I have a few band friends in this class so I’m not worried until I see my name next to…Tony.  My heart immediately starts pumped at a thousand beats per minute.  Then I hear my name being called and it’s Toni waving me towards the table we’re now sharing.  I someone how start moving my feet towards the desk and sit down next to him.  Luckily, before we could even say a word to each other Mr. Merkle starts explaining todays assignment.  Something about finding the angles of something or another.  I wasn’t really listening and instead focusing on the calm sound of Tony’s breathing, in and out.  As if not freaking out like me at all.  Of course, he wouldn’t be because it’s not like he’s had a crush on me since the third grade. 
            The class actually goes by pretty quick, he started a conversation and it hasn’t stopped.  We keep getting in trouble for talking though, but he doesn’t stop talking to me about his family and football.  He keeps asking about me and band but I just tell him nothing new and insist for him to go on.  Eventually we decide to do the assignment at hand and he every so often makes jokes and accidentally taps my leg with his foot or brushes his arm against mine.  I’m doing everything I can to not let my mind go there, to think that he’s flirting with me, but would that be so crazy.  I mean, doesn’t he have a girlfriend.  I shouldn’t think about this I should be thinking about the assignment, except he’s already done it.  So then he goes back to what I think to be flirting with me.  I try not to make it so obvious that I like him, but I cannot help it.  So I laugh and giggle like a little school girl, flirting back and nudging his shoulder like they do in movies and books. 
            When I’m really happy and thinking he likes me too, I see his phone light up with a text from Margaret with a heart next to it.  And my whole world just crumbles and I’m filled with embarrassment that I would mistake him being nice with flirting and how I probably totally creeped him out by giggling him so much.  I turn my head around and just close my eyes to contemplate about what just happened.  To figure out where I went wrong and what signals I misread, but I cannot think of anything that he did that would be wrong or cheating.  He was just being nice and I mistaked it because of my craziness for him.  So when the bell finally rings after us being dead silence for ten minutes while he texted back Margaret I ran out as quick as I could to my next class, just hoping Mr. Merkle would switch partners again tomorrow.
 
 
 

      I was the one who ruined it between us. But, you should’ve forgiven me. I have said sorry so many time I’m starting to think you never wanted me in your life. But I have new people, amazing people who make me excited for new adventures wherever they might take place. So instead of apologizing to you anymore, I’m thanking you for letting me go.

​Jonathan Ferrini is a published author who resides in San Diego. He received his MFA in Motion Picture and Television Production from UCLA.

The screams and cries are loudest at night and aggravate the inmates who encourage the predators and fantasize about the fate of the prey. It isn’t long before “Om Mani Padme Hum” resonates throughout the cell block and peace replaces terror.  It’s my final night after being incarcerated at Corcoran State prison for five years. 
The tiny plastic mirror above my combination metal sink and toilet reflects the transformation of a slightly built eighteen year old into a formidable man with prison tattoos. The tattoo on my forearm reads, “El Chico de Ajo” which translates into “Garlic Boy”.
Soon after my incarceration, I visited the prison library and randomly selected “The Teachings of Buddha”. Reading it removed the hatred and vengeance consuming me.  I wrote to the Buddhist publisher and thanked them for transforming my life and was forwarded additional Buddhist publications. The transformation I found in Buddhism spread throughout the cell block and I became a revered Buddhism counselor to the hardest of criminals and their jailers.
Its daybreak and the Warden escorts me to the bus which will take me home. The only possession I took is my copy of “The Teachings of Buddha.”  He hands me a pencil drawing of a family of spiders nestled in their web. The drawing is titled “Peace and Gratitude” and the Warden tells me “Charlie” meditated and gave it to me as a gift.  I tell him to sell it and buy Buddhist publications for the library.
Gilroy California is a farming community known for growing garlic. Our family lived in a trailer home located downwind from a garlic processing plant and gave my family the permanent stench of garlic. There are two social classes of Latino’s who live and work in Gilroy:  wealthy landowners tracing their lineage to Spanish land grants and migrant farm workers harvesting their crops.   My parents are migrants paying the wealthy land owner rent and a percentage of their crop sales. I’m an only child, and was a lonely, quiet, studious kid with dreams of attending college to study agricultural science and one day owning our own farm. My garlic stench made me an outcast teased and bullied with the exception of Andalina, a quiet, studious girl, exchanging loving glances with me in school.  Andalina’s parents own a beautiful ranch home on hundreds of acres. A relationship was never possible given our economic differences. I received a postcard from Andalina in prison 
telling me she graduated from college and was attending graduate school. I was proud of her but too embarrassed to write back and tell her I earned my GED in prison.
My parents often sent me to the only minimarket/gas station in our neighborhood to buy groceries and I welcomed the errand because they included money for a “Slurpee”. The owner of the minimarket is Ernesto. He was once a struggling immigrant but saved to open the new minimarket/gas station.  He’s considered a “Coconut” by Latino’s and prefers to go by “Ernie”. Ernesto was politically ambitious and a “law and order” businessman with aspirations of running for mayor.  His minimarket/gas station has no competition for miles and he charges monopoly prices.
I entered the minimarket and dashed for the Slurpee machine. I poured a tall Slurpee and grabbed the groceries. As I approached Ernesto to pay, a Latino gang entered the store which was empty except for me and Ernesto. One gang member stood guard at the entrance.  Sensing trouble, I hurried to complete the transaction and get out of the store.  The leader of the gang passed me and smelled my garlic stench placing his arm around me saying, “You’re my garlic boy”.  His grip was firm and he approached the counter with me in tow. He held a gun to Ernesto’s head demanding money. Ernesto opened the register and handed over the money begging, “Please don’t kill me!” The gunman turned to me and said, “You stink man!” He hit me on the back of the head with the butt of the gun. I fell unconscious.  
I regained consciousness to find Ernesto standing over me. My arms and feet were bound and I was being photographed by the local newspaper. Ernesto assumed I was a gang member and used the robbery as a photo opportunity for his mayoral run. Ernesto planted the pistol dropped by the thief in my pants.  I was arrested and charged with armed robbery. The Public Defender ignored my plea of “wrong place, wrong time”, and pressured me to accept a plea deal. I was sentenced to prison and Ernesto was elected mayor.
The bus ride home feels like a prison cell as it crawls up Interstate 5 surrounded by Central Valley farms.  I’m anxious and clutch the “Teachings of Buddha”. We pass a billboard reading: 
Next Services 8 miles.
Ernie’s Minimarket and Gas Station
 
The billboard reignites hatred and vengeance towards Ernesto but I hold the book close to my heart and chant, “Om Mani Padme Hum” which calms me.  I’ll get off the bus at Ernesto’s minimarket and buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate our family reunion and treat myself to a Slurpee which I dreamed about in prison.
The bus stops in front of the minimarket. I enter and recognize Ernesto behind the counter. I pour a Slurpee and select a bottle of champagne. I approach the register and ask Ernesto, “Remember me?” to which he replies, “No. You all look alike!”  The doors to 
​the minimarket swing open and in the store mirror behind Ernesto, I see the “shark like” stare of a “meth head” quickly approaching the register determined to rob and likely kill Ernesto. I alone will determine if Ernesto lives or dies. I turn to the meth head rolling up my shirt sleeves revealing prison “tats” criminals recognize while giving him my “prison eye stare down.” I hold the bottle of champagne like a baton. The meth head stops dead in his tracks saying, “It’s cool man. No hassle from me!”  He backs his way out of the store and runs to his car speeding away.  Ernesto knew he “dodged a bullet” and holds out his hand to shake saying, “Thank you.  How can I repay you?”  I hand him my copy of “The Teachings of Buddha”.  I walk out of the store to my family reunion sipping the Slurpee like expensive cognac.
End.