While at the local market, I happened to see the Hindu goddess Durga Ji, in her mask and buying hand lotion. She didn’t look happy.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She held up all eight of her dried and cracked hands, grumbling, “Fucking virus.”

Kevin watched as the old man struggled to reach his untied shoe. He offered to help him.

As he knelt down and began, he didn’t see the long knife secreted inside the old man’s long coat. He had only to stab Kevin once to score his 102^nd murder.

As Kevin lay on the vacant sidewalk, unconscious and bleeding out, the old man got up and walked away. As he did, he withdrew a cellphone from his pocket and dialed a number.

“People are such suckers,” he smiled, “It’s your turn and you’re still behind. Call me when you score. Ciao.”

I had a Peek-a-Boo accident. Currently in the I.C.U.

It seemed as if it were only yesterday that Scott had been fishing. But for the life of him, he couldn’t really recall when that was.

Instead, he found himself sitting idly along the bank of the river he loved so well, fishing line in and its red and white bobber floating gently down the stream. Life was great for the young teen.

He could see the men, some in uniforms passing up and down the river’s bank on the far side, as if searching for something. Scott watched as two small boats, one wood, the other aluminum, slipped by trolling the waters.

“No fishing poles,” he thought, “No fishing line in the water. What are they doing?”

He felt a slight tug on the end of his line. The smallish jerk caused the colorful float to momentarily disappear beneath the water and reappear again.

Methodically and patiently, he reeled in his line. He was slow and purposeful in his actions, bringing whatever had taken his bait, to the bank without a fight.

It was a skill that he’d learned from his grandfather when he was child.

A voice shouted, garnering Scott’s attention, “Found him! He’s over here!”

“Found what?” Scott asked himself.

This was followed by a sudden and violent yanking to his once quiet fishing line. One of the nearby boats had snagged it as it passed by.

Then Scott remembered how he’d been fishing three days before, how he had slipped in the mud, how he had struck his head on a rock and toppled into the water. He remembered it all, that very moment he saw them pull his lifeless body from the river.

The burst of luminescence and its warmth was both brief and immediate.

As if crap couldn’t get any tighter, our dryer decided to take a shit this morning. I can’t make up my mind if this is more hobo, redneck or white trash of me. One 50-foot length of nylon rope, several heavy binder clips, a TV satellite, one truck, and a broken tree branch make for a good ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-britches’ temporary clothes line. Thankful for ‘adapt and overcome,’ plus having the tools to do it.

The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light at the end of that tunnel, the realist sees a train on the tracks of that tunnel, the train’s engineer sees three idiots standing on those tracks.

Winslow Dunnigan spoke to the dead.

He had done so since the age of seven, after a mule had kicked him in the head, knocking him utterly senseless. He never recovered from it and by the time he was ten, his parents had pulled him out of school.

He eventually inherited his family’s farm.

Edwin LeDoux made it a point to check on him regularly. One afternoon he found Winslow sitting at the kitchen table, pale-faced, sweating, confused and eyes wide.

“What’s the matter, Win?”

“Something dead wants to return.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“How?”

Before Winslow could speak, he stood and went rigid, eyes rolling up, and body shaking violently.

“Win?!”

A second later, the old farm house was rocked by a deafening explosion and Edwin was slammed through the kitchen wall into the side yard. From where he lay, he could see the viscous blood and bits of Winslow Dunnigan dripping from the ceiling slats, counter top, stove and what remained of the walls.

In the center of that now-vacuous kitchen stood three obscene figures, each torn, twisted and deformed, each out of phase, blinking and shivering, each covered in Winslow’s earthly gore and each shrieking like the unholy Demons that they were.

Edwin LeDoux’s mind never stood a chance.

Having a tough time deciding which is more worrisome: taking my temperature or weighing myself.

same old moon
but a new moon
in our night sky

tonight we reminisce
about the old us
and all things new

At a distance, he looked old, bent, off-balance. Up close, not much changed about him, save for what he hauled on his back: a metal lawn chair.

It was loaded with a bed roll, a cooking pan and a canteen, that swung precariously from the left corner of the chair. He had fashioned a set of shoulder straps to the frame, which made his already gaunt body seem as if he were a walking skeleton.

“‘So-very-on-the-road,’” I thought.

Once home, I pulled out a lawn chair, set it in our yard, where I relaxed, feeling kingly and it promptly collapsed.