Stephanie first saw him as he stood in the main hallway of the high school, seemingly lost. There was something different about this boy, foreign perhaps, maybe innocence, a shyness or even worldly.

She couldn’t tell. However, she rushed over anyway to ask if she could help.

“New here?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Stephanie.”

“Howie.”

“You look lost. Can I help?”

“Do you know where this room is?”

“I sure do. That’s my home room.”

She led him to the door. He opened it and allowed her to enter first.

It was like that through much of the first few weeks of their junior school year. She met him at the front of the school each morning and they’d sit in their home room chatting.

“Would you go out with me?” Stephanie finally asked.

“Sure, but I don’t have a car or my license.”

“That’s okay. I have both. Will Friday night at six be okay?”

“It would be great.”

“Super! Then we have a date.”

“She’ll be like puddy in my hands,” Howie thought as the class bell rang.

Friday night finally arrived and Stephanie pulled up to the curb in front of Howie’s home. He came out and got in the car the moment he saw her.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asked.

“I thought we’d go for a dip in the ocean off of Kellogg Beach.”

“Oh, I can’t swim.”

“Really? I can teach you.”

“Okay.”

Once at the beach, the two stripped down to their underwear and headed for the water. True to her word, Stephanie showed Howie how to swim, though he wasn’t very good.

Afterwards, they returned to the vehicle where they retrieved the towels Stephanie had brought, then started to redress. As Howie stood next to a half-dressed Stephanie, he felt his excitement rise and he leaned in and kissed her.

She pulled back in surprise. Then she checked her partially-naked self, then looked up at Howie, who stood there dumbfounded by her actions.

“Mom and Dad have always told me to beware of the change as I become a woman,” she offered sheepishly.

“Does that mean you didn’t like me kissing you?” Howie asked.

“No! I loved it,” she giggled, “And I want you to do it again.”

The two pressed themselves tightly to together and engaged in a lengthy time-forgetting french-kiss. Suddenly Howie jerked from her away with a frightened gasp.

Stephanie had changed. She was a greenish glob of goo that spilled out of his arms and oozed its way to the ocean.

Howie turned and ran, forgetting the rest of his clothing. He spent the remainder of the weekend in his bedroom trying to figure out what had happened.

Monday morning, a still confused Howie learned that Stephanie’s family had abruptly moved out of state over the weekend. That evening, while preparing for bed, he allowed himself to relax into his natural translucent-red blobulous self.

“If only Stephanie knew how perfect we’d be together,” he thought, falling asleep.

Ink and watercolor, 8 x 11 1/2

The old man struggled to push the wobbly shopping cart west along Mill Street. He wheeled the noisy cart to the north on Lake Street and under the city’s ancient arch, before turning it west again on the tiny street of Bell.

He’d heard that there would be trouble that night, so he wanted to set up his place on the sidewalk before it got too heavy later on. With a kind-of state-mandated quarantine in effect, life had become somewhat harder and he did need it to become anymore difficult.

“Certainly,” he thought, “This spot’s got no value to those looters and rioters.”

Quietly and methodically, he pulled the cardboard box out of the cart and set it up against the nearby building, a closed bar. It would serve as a place to rest his head during the coming storm.

Over it, he spread a well-worn blue plastic tarp across the box and his cart, affording himself some form of privacy. Then the old man crawled inside.

Now he began the important work, he laid out his several dirty blankets, used and reused over the years. Lastly, he withdrew his cheap 22-caliber rifle still wrapped in a blanket and slid it in against the inside corner of the box, covering it with more blankets.

It didn’t take him very long to fall asleep, after finishing.

Late afternoon, and the old man was awakened. The sound of voices, yelling and screaming, “Fuck the police,” had brought him out of a dreamless sleep.

Raising up on his elbow, the old man looked beyond his feet. Nothing. The street, though now in full shadow, was empty of people and vehicles.

He turned and looked west, through the square opening he’d prepared when he first found this box. It was an opening where the flap should have been, but wasn’t, because he’d removed it so that he might be able to see out if need be.

Here was that need.

The old man watched as a large crowd of young men and women gathered in front of city hall. Then it began, the vandalism, the looting, the arson and the beating of an innocent passersby.

Rolling over he found his rifle and attached the homemade silencer he’d fashioned to it’s muzzle.

“My precious little chihuahua’s tiny, but she’s gotta ferocious bite,” he chuckled.

It took him very little time to bring the rifle around to his ‘gun loop,’ and find one of the marauding and unsuspecting targets through his 4-by-32 scope. He had 13-rounds before needing to reload.

The old man planned to make each one count as the report of the rifle went completely unnoticed.

This is going to be controversial to some, on point to others and a mystery to those who cannot understand the situation, because they’ve never operated under tremendous stress as offered in the video evidence provided by both the City of Minneapolis, through police cams and bystanders using their cellphones.

While I am not going to get into the personal behavior of personnel on the scene, I am going to point out at least two things that make me question the professional training of both the law enforcement officers and emergency medical technicians from that day. So please bare with me as I lay all this out.

Along with kneeling on the subject long after he had been subdued, other problems I see with the George Floyd case is how the Emergency Medical Services responded to his unconsciousness. They failed to provide basic life saving techniques including a cervical neck brace as Mr. Floyd was unconscious, there was no 12-lead provided to check for a heat beat and oxygen was not provided immediately.

Now, it is hazy as to when Mr. Floyd actually died. Was he dead at the scene, en route to the hospital or at the hospital? If he were dead at the scene, his body should never have been removed and a police investigation should have been establish right then. However without anyway of actually accessing whether he had a heartbeat or not is is impossible to know if he’d were dead at the side of the squad car.

Then I have to ask, why no cervical collar to protect his airway? If he were already deceased, no collar is needed and we return to the original supposition that a police investigation needed to be opened and his body should have remained in place.

If he were still alive, but unconscious, taking the time to secure his airway, via a cervical collar may have prevent him from dying. But since none was administered, I must assume he was already known to be dead and thus an investigation into his death, was actually thwarted by both law enforcement and emergency medical personnel on that scene.

It’s my conclusion that the City of Minneapolis failed Mr. Floyd and poses a serious risk to every person that it serves. Their actions on the day in question, show neglect and a lack of responsibility.

Prove me wrong.

Maktub found gaining entry in the human’s habitat easy. All it needed to do is reduce it’s physical structure to an ‘ooze,’ slipping through the crack beneath the main door.

It did this for the simple purpose of learning what it could about the strange and violent specie that called itself: Homo Sapien. Quietly, it had watched from the woods edge, the comings and goings of these strange bipeds.

From where Maktub hid, all he could discern when comparing its species to this odd specie, is the fact that each walked upright. But that was it – so it decided a closer look was needed in order to ascertain more information.

Once fully reorganized, Maktub stood up, immediately striking its large head on the ceiling, “Humans are much smaller creatures than we first believed.”

It moved about the front room, examining the furniture, a folded newspaper and a glossy magazine. Using its eidetic memory skills, Maktub collected images of each item for further processing.

Then it ducked through the very low doorway, into the kitchen. It opened the stove and the microwave, learning nothing, but upon opening the refrigerator it was horrified to see eggs in cartons.

“They know who we are,” Maktub thought, “And they harvest us for food.”

It felt a sudden rush of fear coat its tall, thin grey body. But knowing there was more to do, it fought back the instinct to rush back to its ship and race away from the blue planet.

From the kitchen area, it moved towards a long hallway. As it did this, Maktub halted in mid-step.

In front of it sat a calm, but unknown life-force, a creature certain to be the being-in-charge. When it spoke, a frightened Maktub melted and hastily retreated towards the door from which it had passed under.

Curious about Maktub, two-year-old ‘Tabby’ the cat, pawed at the indigo-colored goo that Maktub had become as the alien made its escape.

You know common sense is lost when a dozen eggs come in a flimsy Styrofoam carton, but you need a chainsaw to open a package of batteries.

She stood at her open door
Unwilling to venture forth
Trapped by the new ritual

Her cloth virus mask
Rendered useless
By a broken strap

Her emotional undoing
And exterminating Angel
Kissing her impolitely

Limped into our local ice cream parlor, yesterday and ordered a banana split.

“Crushed nuts?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“No, bad back.”

I misunderstood the question.

It was bacon cooking that brought him from his room. He took it in, wishing for a taste.

Then she screamed, “SPIDER!”

He spun around to see where. Seeing nothing, he turned back.

She had the newspaper advertisements rolled up and was swinging away. In a panic, he raced to his left, darted to his right, before scurrying back to his corner of the house.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened, as he’d managed to survive yet another of her fits. Too bad he didn’t understand that he was the ‘spider’ and she wasn’t jus’ his house mate.

As of late, I’ve been going out into our backyard, to sit during the early evening hours where I enjoy the slight evening breeze and warm air. During this time, I tend to listen to a podcast or two, sometimes an audio book and stare up at the soon-glowing stars.

From time to time, I see lights speeding across the open expanse. Often I can tell that these are aircraft from their intermittent flashes of red, green and white lights.

Other times, they are simply a white light, that zooms by in a straight-line. Some of these lights will wink out should the craft be making a banking movement and likewise, blink in during the same kind of maneuver.

My belief is that these are often random objects, debris flaming in or out as they skip through the upper atmosphere. I’m also certain that some are meteors crashing towards the earth, burning up as the drop and tumble.

Then there are those times where something I see has no category in which to place it. To wit, last night, as I watched in silence while a light, moving from left to right and slightly southerly, halted and then making a sharp left angle, came north.

As a kid, I used to see the same thing — lights that would suddenly stop and take off at an angle far too sharp for the average aircraft. Even more exciting were the lights that didn’t stop before making a sharp directional change.

These were usually off-set by jet fighters attempting to catch up with them. I never saw any of those fighters get anywhere near whatever those lights might have been.

But last night was different…

Seconds after moving north this particular light divided in to three ‘smaller’ lights. Each of them, as if synchronized, zipped in three differing directions (northeast, southeast and southwest) before blinking completely from sight.

I’ll leave it up to you to call it what you will, but for me, I’ll be out there again, sitting, listening, watching and enthralled.