He looked up at the entrance to the well. There was no way out.

Soon he began to hold a conversation with another man in the hole, certain that he was not real.

“We’ll never be able to escape,” that man said, “We’ll die down here. Forgotten and alone.”

“Leave me be,” the other cried out, “You’re not really here.”

“Oh, I’m real alright,” that man said, “You’re simply losing your mind.”

“You’re crazy!” the first man shouted.

The other laughed maniacally.

Suddenly their nurse called down, “Get out of there before I call the orderlies, you two nut jobs!”

Whatever it was, it had stepped on his foot, waking him. Still seated on the couch, he looked around in response to the pain.

Nothing.

“I should go to bed,” he said to the dog as if it might understand.

He looked down, but the dog was gone.

“Ah, the dog stepped on me,” he said.

In a sleep-fog still, he noticed that the TV was on and an infomercial was playing.

“But wait, there’s more,” he grunted, pushing himself from the couch, remote in hand.

He didn’t feel the bite of the Werewolf as it chomped his head off.

Helene got out of the shower, toweled off, and wrapped it around her. She was exhausted and laid back on the bed.

The phone rang. Helene quickly grabbed it because she didn’t want her family downstairs to pick it up.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, hon,” it was her husband, Dan.

“Daniel?”

“Yes. Who else would it be?”

“Where are you? You should be here with me. With us!”

“I know, I know, but there’s a little trouble with my flight.”

“Trouble?! Trouble?! We buried you today, Dan!”

The phone went dead, dead like Dan’s body had been in his casket.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I’ve decided to give up ‘people’ for lent.”

My Cousin Elmo says, “Jeep should rename the ‘Cherokee’ ‘Elizabeth Warren’ out of respect for the tribe.”

Found this on a sticky-note inside a pile of loose papers in a box labeled ‘1995’ with no other annotations. I cannot recall if I wrote it myself or copied it.

if it stays,
it is love,
if it ends,
it is a story,
if it never was,
it is a dream
and
if never begun,
it is poetry.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I tried to get my shit together, but it was simply too runny.”

The newsroom fell silent as the heated exchange grew louder. The two men were practically nose-to-nose arguing over a single word.

“I’m tired of the use of the word ‘workers’ when it ought to be ‘employees,’” Bob stated.

Rich, the news director, returned, “I don’t care what you think it should be. The guide says ‘worker,’ and therefore it’s ‘worker.’”

That was the end of the argument.

Bob returned to his work-station and continued with the business at hand; writing and editing. Rich had a report to file.

The following day as Bob was on the air and in the middle of presenting the news, he was arrested and charged with seditious behavior.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I love humanity. It’s people that I can’t stand.”

He had always been the wrong kind-of-citizen, so Tony was not surprised when they arrested and held him for deportation. What did surprise Tony was the number of good citizens the police had rounded up in their recent city-wide sweep.

Many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when picked up, often found to be without their mandatory papers on their person. But it did not matter as the police had a quota to fill.

That was more important.

Loaded into moving trucks in the middle of the night, destination unknown, those that survived the trip would never survive the ordeal. Of the ten-thousand sent, only a third would live to tell the tale, but none would ever be allowed to speak of it.

The play for survival began the moment the rolling doors on the large vans closed. Criminals pushed their way around the darkness, assaulting women, murdering any man that offered resistance, and taking what valuables anyone had in their possession.

By the time the two-day journey ended, few men were alive, and even fewer women wanted to be alive. Tony was one of those men still living, having played dead to keep from being strangled or suffocated.

Authorities, not wanting such undesirable people near their town, decided that it would be best if they loaded them onto barges and off-loaded them onto the nearby island in the middle of the river. While they knew the island had few resources for so many people, they believed the deportees would figure out how to make a living from the isolated land.

Once the boat landed, and with no guards present, Tony quickly walked into the Poplars and disappeared. Here, he would stay until the crisis had passed or until he could figure a way off the island.

Day-in and day-out, Tony heard the screams of people, mostly women, and children as they were tied limb from limb between two trees and filet while alive. Men of the most inhumane kind stripped away the choice parts for eating.

Slowly the screams died away, leaving an eerie silence in their place, and death over-ran the camp.

Tony did not witness what happened next. He was killed by a sniper from the other side of the river while riding a raft of three logs towards freedom.

“This is how I know what’s happening over there,” Bryant explained to the town’s Mayor, laying the still-damp note’s on the desk before him. “I read these papers I found in his jacket pocket, where his makeshift raft and body washed ashore.”

Bryant would be labeled ‘undesirable’ the following week and would not survive the following 13-weeks.