As she struggled, her yellow dress, already short, was now over her hips. She was not wearing underwear.

Still haunted by the memory of what had happened in Iraq, he smiled at the thing in his bed, “I’m gonna fuck you till you scream with pleasure.”

Already naked himself, Nick stuffed his erectness into the woman, and she screamed so forcefully that the bedroom windows rattled. Within a couple of minutes, he released into her, and again she reacted with the same effect.

But Nick wasn’t done. He remained stiff and continued to pound away at her.

Fifteen minutes later, Nick felt her stiffen up. Then she bucked at him, bending in an arch that lifted him from the bed.

Still in her and balancing on her hips, he continued to thrust and thrust. Together, they came in a violent spasm that went finished she collapsed and he on her.

“I must have been dreaming,” Nick said as he climbed from the tangle of sheets.

Weak in the knees and his thighs sore, he walked into the bathroom. As he stood to pee in the toilet, Nick knew he had not been dreaming after all.

A panic set in, and he raced to the full-length mirrors of his closet only to see a woman standing in his place. His fear ebbed as his eyes began to glow red, and the smiling woman in him grew hungry for her next victim.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I’m on the tequila diet, and so far I’ve lost three days.”

Once inside and with the door securely locked behind him, Nick relaxed a little. As he prepared for bed, he looked out his window at the street and where the woman had been.

He felt himself jump as he looked down on her, and she stood still, staring up at his window. Nick picked up his cellphone and prepared to call the police, but when he looked back, she was gone.

With his 9mm Berreta and phone on his nightstand, Nick turned out the light and settled in to get some sleep. Suddenly, his phone rang, and he picked it up.

“Hi,” was all the text read.

“Who is this?” he texted back.

“The woman under your covers.”

Nick reached over and turned on the lamp. Then he tossed back the blanket and sheet that covered him.

There was the woman in the yellow dress, eye aglow with red and growling. She sprang at him, and he twisted out from under her.

Now on top, Nick held her down at her biceps and refused to release her. Though possessed like a demon, she was no match for the Marine, who had maintained his physical strength since his days in the Corps.

The odd walk, the goofy grin, and the overpowering sense of danger were nothing new to him. He had seen it once before while on duty at a checkpoint outside Baghdad nearly 16 years before.

Back then, he was in the Marine Corps.

The night of the incident at the checkpoint remained burned in his memory. A woman, covered head-to-toe in a yellow burka, came out of the darkness and refused to halt before fired upon and killed.

Now he was watching a Black woman dance and pirouette along the sidewalk across the street. She also had the strange smile that the long-dead Iraqi woman had when her veil was finally removed.

Strangely, they had spent most of the last year and a half wearing face masks because of COVID-19. Nick wondered if the woman across the street was suffering some odd effect of wearing a mask for too long.

Still, he kept walking, his mental alertness at its peak and his folding lock-blade knife in his right hand. As he made the corner, he realized the woman was now behind him on the same sidewalk about 75 yards away.

He picked up his pace. Home and a sense of security were only a couple of hundred feet away.

A gunman held up a U.S. postal carrier in the early evening hours of June 7, along Kipling Drive in Dayton, Nevada.

Investigators with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) describe the suspect as a Black male, about 20 years old, five feet, seven or eight inches tall, last seen wearing a red hoodie, black shorts, and gold-colored shoes. The USPIS is offering $20,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the robber.

While there were no injuries during the robbery, the irony is that the U.S. Postal Service is advertising to hire another Dayton-area mail carrier.

Part of Center Street in Reno, between UNR and the railroad tracks at Commercial Row, was renamed University Avenue in 1920. Then in 1957, Reno renamed Center Street from Virginia Street north to the University as University Avenue.

Both times, Reno changed the name back to Center Street.

Now, in time for its 2024 sesquicentennial, UNR wants Reno to rename nine blocks between the Truckee River Bridge and the University gates along Center Street to University Way.

“The potential renaming provides a powerful testament to how important the University’s position as the doorstep to downtown Reno truly is,” said UNR President Brian Sandoval.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Dogs may drool, but people suck.”

Perhaps I’ve been slow in recognizing that people love to argue, win at all costs, and for no reason at all. Worse yet, we battle over unimportant stuff.

For example, I like to post historic photographs. I don’t post them without first vetting their background.

In the recent past, I’ve posted stuff without checking first, and some of my posts have come back to bite me in the ass. So I am careful.

Yesterday, a friend forwarded me a picture of a 16-mule team pulling two empty wagons up Geiger Grade in the 1870s. After researching it, I posted the photograph.

Within 24 hours, someone claimed that the photo was of “a 20-mule team returning empty from Daggett up the grade 1895.” Daggett is in the Death Valley area of California.

After following the link they provided, it was the same picture I’d posted. But once again, it is a 16-mule team and not a 20-mule team.

The person also claimed to know that the grade up the hill was “never that steep.” I wasn’t alive to know how steep Geiger Grade was in the mid-to-late 1800s, so I cannot argue that point.

But the clincher for me: They ended their argument with, “I got my information from an official government website.”

“There’s your problem, never trust the federal governement,” I wanted to argue but didn’t, and that makes them the winner.

She awoke lying in the tall grass of the prairie. Despite being wrapped in a quilt tightly from head to toe and in the sun, Sarah still felt chilled.

It was much better than what she had been going through. The night before, she was deathly ill with a fever so high it was believed she would not make it till daylight.

Slowly Sarah pushed apart the blanket and sat up. She looked around but saw nothing save the high waving grasses.

The only sound was that of the unceasing wind that blew day and night, playing tricks on the mind. It was a maddening tumult that made a life among the Conestoga wagons nearly unbearable.

Though unnaturally quiet, Sarah did feel better and was soon on her feet. As Sarah pressed through the grass, she found no sign of the thirty wagons she had been a part of since St. Louis.

She called out to her husband. He did not answer.

Finally, she found deep wagon ruts gouged into the thick sod. She followed it for as far as she could before finally sitting down and crying in utter despair.

How long she sat there and cried and screamed and wailed, Sarah did not know. What she did know was that she knew the sound of a wagon train, with the plodding of the oxen hooves, the crack of the whip, the sound of the wheels creaking and cast iron pans clanking beneath the heavy wooden wagon frames.

Then she saw the first Connie of the westward-bound wagon train. Sarah scrambled to her feet, racing towards it.

The startled oxen tried to move off the trail. They were beaten back onto the path by a man walking on the left side of the team.

“Help me,” Sarah said. “They left me behind.”

The man failed to acknowledge her. He didn’t even look her way.

Sarah ran down the line screaming for help.

The fifth wagon back, where a woman walked beside a man, she wailed, “Please help me.”

“Did you hear that?” she asked her husband, her face a mask of fright. “It sounds like a woman crying.”

“It’s only the wind,” he said.

Wally Barrieau, Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps, returned from his third tour in Afghanistan a different man. He knew it, and so did everyone else, and that is why he felt it necessary to exit the service.

His sudden personality change happened after he became separated from his squad and ended up wandering around the desert, lost. During this time, April five through July 15, 2006, something so incredible happened to the Sergeant that he could not bring himself to speak of it.

It began with a massive dust-devil in the early morning hours. Once cleared, Barrieau found himself surrounded by wood-framed buildings, the kind he had only seen in old Western movies.

As he was assessing his situation, he heard a woman scream. Before he could react, he watched a man race from the nearby building.

Then he heard a door at the back of the building open and close.

“Where in the hell did you come from?” a voice asked from deep in a shadow of the building.

Barrieau paused, “You American?”

“Yeah?” the voice returned. “What else would I be.”

Barrieau had no time to answer as a man stepped out of the shadow and struck the confused Marine on the side of the head. Barieau dropped to his knees as a second blow fell.

Without thinking, Barrieau drew his service pistol and fired four times point-blank into the man’s body. The gunshots fell him instantly.

Bloodied and bruised, he was arrested while lying in the street outside the building with the man he’d shot on top of him. He was taken to jail to escape a quickly forming lynch mob.

That morning, Barrieau was presented before a judge, and a jury was hastily gathered.

“Why are you dressed so oddly?” the Judge asked.

“I’m a Marine and we’re at war,” Barrieau answered.

“What war is that?” the Judge asked, adding, “Not the Phillipines again?”

“Shut your mouth,” said Patrick McCarran, his defense attorney.

“Where am I?” Barrieau asked.

“Tonopah, Nevada,” McCarran responded. “Now shut up.”

The young man argued that his client had acted in self-defense against an attacker trying to avenge his mistress and not a lawman who was working in the line of duty.

Questions arose after Nye County Sheriff Tom Logan, a family man with eight children, was found dead clad only in a blue nightshirt. Logan had been spending the night with his mistress and brothel madam, May Biggs, not the heroic fight to stop a “pistol duel” between two “gamblers.”

Biggs claimed that Barrieau had been asleep in her parlor when she tried to rouse him and send him on his way.

“He elbowed me, and I yelled for him to ‘get out,’” she added.

“I was never inside any house,” Barrieau shouted before being ordered to remain quiet or be removed from the courtroom.

“At my scream, Tom burst from our bedroom and began beating him,” she said.

Seeing Logan had a gun and not knowing he was the county sheriff, Barrieau fired four shots, each striking Logan. The jury found Walter Barrieau innocent on July 13, 1906, and he became mostly lost to history.

Afghan sheepherders found Barrieau half-dead and informed a nearby Army patrol of his location. Barrieau laid in his hospital bed in Germany, not only suffering from a severe concussion and dehydration but unable to get the hallucination off his mind.

Eleven years later, Walter Barrieau saw the historical article in a newspaper column. And while his name was misspelled and the facts incorrect, he realized why he had disappeared from the pages of history.

“It’s one hell of a story and no one to tell,” he chuckled as he folded the paper up. “Besides who would believe me.”

As he left the casino’s restaurant, he walked to a corner store to buy a bottle of whiskey. Barieau would treat himself to a solid drunk because not only had he experienced a one-hundred-year-old time slip, he had also slipped the noose.