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.

If you kneel like the cop knelt on George Floyd’s neck as a way to honor Floyd’s memory, then you jus’ might be a sheeple.

That unscratchable itch over came him again and Clay Rollins found himself loading his nondescript, white 1974 Chevy van with all the necessaries. As he sat behind the wheel, he glanced in the mirror and saw the six dolls, all hand-crafted to look like the popular Cabbage Patch dolls, each neatly seated and properly restrained on the side seats.

“They still creep me the fuck out,” he thought.

He’d bought them at a church’s craft fair during last years big Christmas push for the authentic item. He’s seen the many national TV news stories of ‘grown ass-adults,’ as he called them, fist-fighting one another for the last remaining doll on the shelf.

“Don’t want any part of that stupid shit.”

Tonight, if successful, he would make his sixth kill. After murdering the child, he’d offer an incantation, transferring the youngsters soul into one of the dolls. While he hadn’t seen any results from his black magic spells, he continued the practice anyway.

“Besides, it kinda satisfies my obsessive-compulsiveness.”

The hunt underway, he found his victim only a few minutes after the sun had officially set. The girl was playing hop-scotch on the sidewalk in front of her home.

He slowed the van, stopped lifting one of the dolls up, it appeared to be peeking over the edge of the open passenger window at the child. Within a minute, the little girl noticed and came happily skipping up to his van.

“I have five more in back, wanna see’um?”

He popped the door open and she willingly crawled in. Within a second Clay had his large hand over her tiny mouth and was nonchalantly driving away.

That night, a few minutes before midnight, after performing his incantation, Clay buried the now-dead child in the gray sand dunes of the beach, near his other five victims.

“My own cabbage patch of kids,” he chuckled at his joke.

He returned to his van and lay on the floor between the two row of seats, reliving the nights events. To his way of thinking, “It had been a good night.”

The was sound was so small, that even had Clay had recognized it, he would have had no chance to react.

About seven-thirty, the following morning, a police officer noted the van. He’d seen it the night before, but because he’d been busy on other calls, it has sat there the entire time, in violation of city ordinances.

“Come on, time to get your ass outta here,” the cop shouted as he rapped his night stick along the van’s side.

With no answer, he looked through one of the rear windows, where the curtain was partly drawn back. The officer discovered Chase Rollins, covered in dried blood, dead.

In the seats, properly belted in, sat six look-a-like Cabbage Patch dolls, also soaked in drying blood.

Being out of a paying job again has put me on the road to a stress attack. Elevated blood pressure, headache, sickly stomach and a case of anger, have been my companions for the last few days.

And before you start giving me remedies (not to discount your caring for me and my health,) know that I’m doing everything my mental health doctor is recommending. This includes no booze and to get my ass outside for a daily walk.

She suggests that I also avoid watching the evening news on television. She knows how I end up yelling at the various talking heads and all the lies, propaganda and fake news they spew.

I add to this the viewing of videos shared on other social media platforms, including this one among many:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1266921821653385225

Talk about pissing me off. I’d be willing to die on my porch standing up against this sort of UNCONSTITUTIONAL thuggery.

These people were doing nothing unlawful on their private property and for the cops and National Guard to threaten and then fire weapons at them is beyond the pale. I don’t care if they were paint ball and they felt they had a duty to act; unconstitutional is unconstitutional.

Anyway, the attempted sharing of this video has led me to stop using Facebook. I posted it and somehow the social networking platform’s algorithm made it practically invisible on my wall.

As for the loss of my employment: the COVID-19 scare and the bankruptcy of a couple of national store chains during these state mandated closures has left the image processing plant in Reno closed for good. The place had been in operation for over 30-plus years and it’s a shame to see it shuttered. (Pun intended.)

With this, my wife has been sending me applications she finds online, for me to fill out. We had a little tiff over an application for the position of COVID-19 Contact Tracer.

She saw the ‘$17/hour’ tag on the job-site ad, and got excited, wanting me to fill out everything as fast as possible and get an interview set up. On the other hand, I didn’t want to to because I’m not even sure I believe in all the hype surrounding the ‘virus,’ and I don’t feel it would be a ‘good fit,’ since I couldn’t honestly say my heart isn’t into it.

This has, along with this ongoing and needless situation, caused me to reassess my position on a lot of the information coming from so-called ‘trustworthy’ sources. Okay, that really isn’t true – I’ve never fully trusted these sources as I’ve found many to be wanting and dishonest over the years.

And as this stuff continues, I continue to write. I am trying to use all this crap to my advantage by integrating it into various stories, something I don’t think enough writers – especially ‘horror’ genre authors – are visiting.

Further, and I swear that though I’ve been blogging for around 20-years there is always something to learn about the Internet and posting, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t matter the length of the story, it’ll only be visited by jus’ so many people. So whether 100-words or less, or a thousand words, I’m posting my stories as one and will endeavor to avoid parting them out.

(I’m posted out through June 13 already, so those will not count under this missive.)

Lastly, my frustration over the ‘lack’ of readership is gone to the wayside. I understand that don’t write about food, health and beauty, music, history or massive amounts of poetry, which are by far more popular than my faux ‘horror’ genre and other odds-and-ends — so I’m cool on it – jus’ as long and you and I keep writing.

Boy, I needed to vent…and it’s almost better than sex! NOT!

I can’t believe it’s already riot season. I still have my murder hornet and COVID-19 decorations up.