Category: random

“What in the hell was that, Doc?”

“It was me.”

“Yeah, I know! But why?”

“I’m afraid of spiders, Sarge.”

“Oh, for chrissakes — gonna have to take your man-card away from you if you keep that shit up!”

No longer was I paying attention to unnecessary ass-chewing. Instead my eyes were focused on the tile floor at the sergeant’s feet. He looked down and saw the large black tarantula-like spider slowly passing between his highly glossed boots.

With an ungodly yelp, he tried to join me on the commode I was inhabiting. Nearly falling off, I pushed him back and demanded, “Get your own fucking toilet…this one’s presently occupied.”

Without touching the ground, the sergeant sprang from my perch to an adjacent one. As he did so, his left foot slipped and he dipped that boot ankle deep in toilet water.

He glared at me as I watched the spider slip away to places unknown through a small crack between the wall and floor, below the far sink. Five minutes later Sarge was on the horn demanding that our area be fumigated.

While playing the air drums to Metallica in my truck, I accidentally flipped one of the sticks out the window. Had to switch to Def Leppard.

My thought on today’s interview is as follows: I got all dressed up to meet a man who didn’t wanna be there interviewing people for the position. So perhaps a little levity will break the disappointment…

Well, Hell’s bell
That interview
Didn’t go well.

My other thought is that perhaps I ought to dress like a ragged-assed schlub as many others do. I may wear blue jeans, but at least mine are clean, pressed and hole-free.

It’s a battle maintaining the positive when one feels the bite of defeatism creeping into one’s brain. Anyway, I gotta keep trying because as my folks used to say: ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

The people of Beowawe said the man had railroad smoke in his veins. For forty years, he’d stood beside the tracks, swinging his lantern through the Nevada dust to guide the locomotives westward.

He was a flagman, proud and patient, until the day the coupling broke and sent a freight car rolling down the line. The accident left his legs mangled, twisted things that clattered when he walked. He retired after that, but retirement never quite took.

He lingered around the yard like a ghost that had forgotten how to fade. You’d see him out there at dusk, poking at the gravel with his cane, whistling tunelessly, eyes fixed on the horizon as if expecting something to come crawling out of it. Nights were for stories and the glow of the pot-bellied stove, where men swapped lies about coyotes and train robbers while the wind rasped against the windows.

Then the fires began.

It wasn’t unusual for Beowawe to catch flame in the cold season. Desert air and woodstoves made for easy kindling.

Most of the time, the volunteers doused the blazes before they took hold. But that winter, it was as though the fire had learned patience. It crept closer to the rail yard, smoldering in sheds, leaping to stacks of lumber, always hungry.

The nightwatchman, Harlan Jessup, a quiet man with a large family, was found burned black near the switching station. They said he’d gone in to save a stray cat that lived in the tool shed.

Brady was the first to find him. He’d been called from his bed by the alarm, the sky above the yard bruised red and orange, smoke rolling like surf over the rooftops. When the fire crew dragged Jessup’s body out, something caught Brady’s eye: a figure limping away from the tracks, the dull gleam of a metal brace on his leg catching the light.

The flagman.

Brady’s stomach turned cold. He knew the man’s gait, the slow rocking motion of it, the way he planted his cane before each step as if measuring the earth. But there was something wrong now, something too steady about the limp, too deliberate, as though being guided by an invisible rhythm only he could hear.

Brady followed.

The man’s house stood at the edge of town, half-buried in tumbleweed and cinder. When Brady forced the door, he found the crippled flagman crouched by an oil drum, whispering to something inside. The air shimmered around him, and for a heartbeat Brady thought he saw movement, like smoke swirling against the inside of the drum, taking shape, pressing outward.

“What the hell are you doing?” Brady demanded.

The man froze, his eyes wide and glassy. “You shouldn’t be here, Brady,” he said softly. “They’ll see you too.”

“Who’s they?”

The man smiled, a cracked, weary smile. “The ones behind the lights. Been calling me ever since the accident. Said they’d show me the truth beneath the rails.”

Brady’s gaze dropped to the floorboards. The house vibrated faintly, though no train passed this late. Beneath the floor, something pulsed—slow and deep, like a buried heart.

“You killed Jessup,” Brady said. “You set the fires.”

The flagman’s expression twisted. “Not me. I only opened the way. The fire needs doors, that’s all.” He looked past Brady then, eyes unfocused. “They ride the lines, you see. The rails don’t end in Reno or Salt Lake. They go down. Down where time don’t run straight.”

Brady lunged, tackling the frail body to the ground. It was like wrestling a bundle of sticks.

The man howled, thrashing, but Brady’s anger was stronger. He bound him with a length of cord, looped a noose over the beam, and forced him onto a chair.

“You know the nightwatchman had a family? A wife and five children,” Brady said.

“Yeah,” the old man croaked, “but how’s I ‘spose to know he’d try and be a hero? That ain’t his job.”

“And setting fires isn’t your job.”

The man wheezed a laugh. “You think this’ll stop it? Go ahead. Make your choice, too.”

Brady struck a match and touched it to the curtains. Flames licked up the fabric like eager tongues. “No,” he said. “You’ll make a choice. Burn or jump.”

He turned and left the house, shutting the door behind him.

As he stepped into the cold, the sound came, not a scream, but a long, metallic shriek, like a whistle echoing from deep underground. The ground trembled, and from the cracks in the earth came a faint orange glow.

The rails began to hum.

From a distance, a light appeared, a headlamp, round and blinding, gliding silently along the tracks toward Beowawe. Yet no engine followed, only the light itself, suspended in the smoke. The air smelled of hot iron and ash.

Brady backed away, heart hammering, as the light passed through him. For an instant, he saw the flagman’s face reflected in its glow, eyes hollow, mouth open in awe. Behind him, vast shapes moved in the brightness, long and jointed, coiling like serpents through an impossible sky.

Then the light vanished. The rails were still. The night was quiet again.

By morning, there was nothing left of the flagman’s house, just a black square in the dirt, and the faint impression of two sets of tracks that led nowhere at all.

And sometimes, when the trains pass through Beowawe, the engineers swear they see a crippled man by the signal post, swinging his lantern toward the dark, as if guiding something in that no living man ought to welcome.

Every woman has a bit of Marilyn in her. You jus’ have to figure out if it’s Monroe or Manson.

After screaming for help and scratching at the box, buried far beneath the dirt, for hours, I gave up. I gave up my fear of the ungodly darkness, of suffocation, of death and let it come upon me in as natural a way as possible.

That was two years ago. This morning I heard the heavy machinery above my desiccating body and knew they were finally going to disinter me.

The nearer the hand shovels came, the more I could hear them talking between each other. There was fear and trepidation in their voices.

As felt my casket lifted from the ground, I wondered, “Why are they so scared, after all, I’m the one that was buried alive.”

The thicker my glasses get due to age, the better I can see through other people’s B.S.

The two elegant figures trotted up the ramp like the other beasts, two-by-two. But Noah turned them away telling them, “The time for magic had ended on Earth.”

“But our rhinoceroses cousins are inside.”

“Yes, but their horns, unlike yours, are not magical.”

So the two Unicorn headed north and stood on a nearby mountain as it began to rain. Soon the water was over their hocks and they believed that they had breathed their last.

But God saw their plight and took mercy on them. He whispered, “Use your magic one last time to become something that will be able to withstand the ocean’s depth.”

“We’ll become fish,” one said to the other.

“Better yet, let us change ourselves into whales.”

“Can we keep our horns?”

“Yes, we can – we’re magic.”

Thus the Unicorn disappeared and became the Narwhal, the unicorn of the sea. Narwhal are known to dive to a mile in depth and the more elder the whale, the whiter they become.

latent finger prints
beaten and battered heart
bruised up but not broken

“So, shall we do this thing,” John said.

“If you think it’ll make us rich,” James answered.

James caught up his horse and rode out of New Helvetia, heading to the water-driven sawmill he had built in nearby Coloma on the south fork of the American River. The idea was to salt the river with a few nuggets of gold John had brought from Europe in 1834, before embarking westward towards California.

The pair wanted to create a new town and believed this was the perfect way to get settlers to cross the wide open plains, the Rocky Mountains, Nevada’s scorching deserts and finally Sutter’s fertile land holdings. And they were right, as hundreds of thousand left their Eastern homes at the news and struck out to get rich.

Unfortunately, Sutter nor Marshall had any idea that the land was rich in gold and that this gold would destroy their dreams. Eventually, New Helvetia and Sutter’s Fort would be replaced by the city of Sacramento.