I’ll bet that giraffes don’t know what a fart smells like.

Twice now, I’ve sneezed and it feels like I’ve ripped something from the back of my smoke-parched throat. I do this after learning that the President and First Lady have tested positive for COVID-19.

“Well, folks, that there is the election,” my wife has pronounced.

Meanwhile, someplace in the back of my mind I hear an MSM talking-head gloat that the First Couple are with the disease.

My wife has gone to work, a ‘lunch lady’ we joke, but she’s good like that. Me? I wanna close my eyes, sleep and dream.

But there are sheets and towels to wash and later, beds to make. 12 minutes left in the cycle.

As I await their completion, I’ve turned on our sprinkler system. Section 5 hasn’t been working for the last couple of months and is finally fixed after replacing a burned out solenoid switch.

The poor grass is dry and dying, yet I allow myself to be hypnotized by the rotating sprinklers. Round and round they go, reminding me of playing in the water as a kid.

The image shifts and now I think of my favorite horror character; Cthulhu. But wait! There are no leather wings and then I think of a gigantic spider, a tarantula, one infused with radiation and on the hunt for human blood.

Better yet, I imagine the spinning spray of an Esther William’s movie. I visualize her, in all her fabulous technicolor glory, rising slowly from the center of the water-wheel and gracefully raising her arms above her head and plunging into the…

My poor grass, once so lush that I could lay in it, now dry and dying. Esther Williams has disappeared between the yellow-brown tufts of grass.

I cough.

My throat feels raw from sneezing and now I’ve begun coughing. Hell of a way to start the day as I burble a gulp of hot coffee all over the table.

The washing machine calls for my attention with it’s melodic tone, one I once mistook for my cellphone’s ringer. Answering ones cellphone doesn’t help get the wash into the drier, but it is worth a snicker.

Answering that other call, the sheets are in the drier and I’m sipping another mouthful of coffee. It occurs to me that I ought to go dance in the sprinklers before it gets too late.

Gosh, my coffee tastes great and Esther is such wonderful company.

She started to cry. Long, hard sobs that felt like she were emptying her soul down her face, down to her chin, snot draining from her nose.

Everything seemed to be falling out of her life and she couldn’t control it what was happening. The idea made her begin to laugh, first low and quiet, then loud and even more uncontrolled.

The man with the rosary, the beads, the ability to avoid death, stood and looked down at her but not with any demeaning intent. “Welcome to your new life and have a good one,” he smiled and walked away.

Why I should recall his face after so many years, I don’t know. Dale White Sun is his name and I met him at the Stumps.

A Shoshone, he had never lived on a reservation. No, he grew up a suburban child in Glendale, Arizona.

Once his service was up, he left the Corps and headed off to the desert. I’ve never seen him since, though I did look for him a couple of times, including once the same year my brother died.

“Enjoy the rest of your time in the Suck,” he said, “And look me up when you’re out.”

Final last words as we shook hands and he climbed in his beater ‘73 Chevy Nova. The old ‘No-Go,’ as he called it.

As I lay in bed last night, into morning, I thought of him. I also thought how he’d given me a very small crystal skull.

It was on a piece of leather and was actually made of glass. I thanked him and wore it when ever I had the chance, which was nearly every time I was out of uniform.

It’s stowed in a wooden box among a hundred trinkets collected over a life time. I have since removed the piece of leather after breaking it one afternoon.

Also on my dresser are my tennis shoes. I put them there because we’ve had a sudden infestation of brown scorpions.

As a man of habits, some OCD tendencies, I rap the heel of my sneaker on the carpeted floor in my bedroom and out pops one those bugs. I’m quick about grabbing the bastard by its pissed-off stinger and rushing it outside to set it free.

“I can’t kill it, don’t want to kill it,” I think.

Had I slipped my foot in that shoe, it is no doubt I would have been stung. It is a juvenile in this case, so it would have unloaded all of its poison and my foot would’ve been swollen to twice its size in minutes.

There’s been enough death.

Search as I might, I could never find Dale. I located a bunch of people who know him, directed me out to a place beside a mountain in the Arizona desert, where I found the stone hut he’d began constructing.

But no Dale.

The hut was nearly complete. The wood slats that served as a roof had begun to warp and bend as the sun cooked them, no window panes, only wood shudders and an old bed, blankets and sheets filled with the sand and dust of wind storms.

I returned three times, leaving my skull where he could find it should he suddenly reappear.

After my first trip out, 42 miles one way, go to the right at the fork, half mile passed the new water tank, I started hearing rumors. They were not good rumors.

One afternoon, when I still wore the skull around my neck, now strung on a piece of hemp twine, I was working for a moving company. I casually jumped from the loading dock, a distance of three, perhaps four feet, and the skull rose up and slapped me in the front teeth.

There was a very small chip in my left front tooth, so tiny only I could notice and only when I licked my tongue over the upper bridge. I removed it.

That was a year after my second sojourn into the vast Arizona desert, following the hints I had realized tucked in the many rumors I had heard.

By this time I was certain he was dead. Murdered, either by accident, during a gang beating or purposely during the same violent act.

“If you’re lucky, you might find a bleached bone,” I was told more than one time.

With it came the finger of accusation and who might have done Dale in and why.

“He was an Indian,” this one stated, “He found gold,” that one claimed, “Water,” another said. I could never figure it out and as I skirted closer and closer to the truth, the more I found myself feeling threatened.

No one said or did anything. It was the silence I encountered, a deafening lack of sound, that unless you’re on point , you never hear coming till it is too late.

Years before this, I was hiking by myself when I found a prosthetic leg. Seeing it hung up in the scrub left me chilled, believing there could be a body nearby.

I backed out the way I came and notified the law.

Questioning ensued, nine-hours worth. Then, it was over — after someone looked up the serial number etched in the aluminum shaft and learned the man it belonged to was alive and that the ‘peg’ had fallen from an airplane he’d been in.

How it came to fall from a plane passing over the desert, was never answered. I had to simply accept it and move on.

The third time I returned to the stone hut, I felt the eyes of malignancy on me and I knew I had to beat feet from the area. I grabbed the glass skull I had left for Dale to find, the one he would never return to find and I left.

I’m sure Dale lays buried in shallow grave out in that lonely and mostly empty desert.

Shortly after coming home, where once again I felt safe, I consulted a friend, a Shoshone medicine woman and she performed a ‘closing ceremony,’ at least that’s what I think she called it, and I said goodbye to Dale’s spirit. Tonight, I’m going to place the glass skull in one of my shoes before bedtime.

I have accepted these truths and have learned to move on.

The thought of thee some stillness doth beget.
I stunn’d am by thy generosity,
By thought of thee my problems I forget.
Upon high desert we two shall soon be seen,

For yonder love doth wait on our behest.
I ne’er shall from embrace of true love wean,
My love for thee hath ev’ry day progress’d.
Love, as the wilding wolf, ruthless in its ways,

Love blossoms when ‘tis planted in the heart,
Love is the wondrous pow’r that speaketh “yea,”
Love doth heal pain and grief, at least in part.
Let rivals come, who chase me at the rear,

With thee, e’en space shall not too bleak appear.

“You are everything that you’ve ever experienced during your lifetime,” the man said, sitting at the opposite end of the bench, where all of this had begun.

Her head suddenly filled with ‘pain,’ and then dissipated to vague memories. “What did you do?” she tried to scream.

“Nothing. You’re the one doing it. You’ve been doing it to yourself all of your life – willingly. Now is your chance to make a change. A change to happiness and joy. Your choice.”

She closed her eyes and watched as her bible was rewritten. Suddenly, she understood as the veil lifted from her.

My wife’s intuition is so highly developed she often knows when I’m wrong even before I open my mouth.

Turned on the television to watch a political dog-and-pony show and an actual debate broke out.

Sleep came to her shortly afterwards. Dreams also came, disquieting dreams.

In them, she spun and spun. She couldn’t tell if she was floating upward or being dragged down.

The constant and confusing rotation eventually fell away to a lightness that was very uncomfortable in its coming. She relaxed and allowed the lightness wash over her being, deep inside her.

When she woke, she realized she was never actually asleep. No, she was back on the bench, awake and looking at the man, who was fiddling with a set of beads.

“Anger isn’t the answer,” he said, without looking up.

The man held the rosary out to the young woman. She stared at it.

“But I’m not…” she began. She didn’t get the chance to finish.

“Don’t have to be.”

“Who are you?”

“I think you already know. You don’t wanna admit it though.”

“I’m lost.”

“Yeah, you are, you have been for a very long time. Lost in a darkness.”

She frowned deeply.

He smiled, “Everything we believe is like a religion. A personal belief system all our own and everything we take in, we add to our private bible in our mind.”

She laid there, thinking on this.