He watched from the top of a tree in his backyard as the space craft landed. To his surprise, they were not the lizards, nor the grays he’d been taught to expect.

Quickly, he rushed inside and instructed his wife to get out the salt, “We have an alien invasion to fight off!”

Then he realized that even if he might kill every one of them, some people would probably welcome them with open arms. The though both disgusted and dismayed him.

“What’s wrong, hon,” she asked, seeing the dejected look on his face.

He sighed, “The French love escargot.”

This recounting has been years — actually decades — in the making after struggling over how to tell it. The main problem has been that there was nothing to contrast it too – that is until now.

Long before the ‘Mandela Effect,’ or the theory that monsters can be realized simply by the fear they generate, as in the cases of the Rake or Slenderman, there was the ‘Deene Denouement.’

His 75-year-old body was racked with cancer when I met him. He was gaunt, pale and skin so fragile that the vasculature of his face and upper body looked like a fold-up Rand McNally’s road map, but his mind was sharp and he wanted, needed some company.

As an on-call nurse’s aide, assigned to his wing of the nursing home, I spent as much time with Nick Deene as possible, without neglecting my other patients. He sat in a chair rather than lay in bed and so I’d pulled up a stool and we chatted.

“So, you’re a radio-man, too?” he asked with a pleasant surprise in his voice.

“Yeah, but I’m between gigs right now,” I explained, ” So I’m doing this for the while.”

“Oh, I understand,” he offered.

“Figured you would,” I returned.

“I was a pretty well known radio show host back east in the late 30’s and early 40’s, New York to Miami,” he told me, “Had a pretty popular show called “So-Pure Soaps presents Dare Danger with Deene.”

“So, what happened – did you quit, get fired, find another career or something?”

“My fall from grace began in September 1940. I was 27 and we were doing a live broadcast in southern Connecticut when I was snatched up by something,” he said. “Woke up in a swamp and had to crawl to a nearby road to get help. That’s how I eventually lost my foot.”

Deene lifted his right leg to show where his foot was missing along with his ankle and about four inches of his lower calf, “Had a handcuff attached to it and it got tightened down to the point that it cut off the circulation, and along with being broken, had to be amputated.”

“By something?” I asked.

“Something,” he frowned, “To this day, I don’t really know what it was, but I have a theory.”

“I’d love to hear it,” I offered.

“I think that the fear created by my show caused the audience to generate enough energy to spontaneously create the monster I’d described during the broadcast,” he told me.

“That sounds frightening,” I responded, not buying a word of it.

“I also think that once the fear subsided,” he continued, “That energy subsided and the monster dissolved, evaporated, disappeared, whatever you want to call it, and left my laying in the swamp where it first originated.”

“That sound even more frightening,” I said.

“Gets worse,” he chuckled, “Tried to explain what happened and got myself locked up for nearly a year in the loony bin and then the war broke out. Ended up coming out here to Reno, Nevada to see if I could get a fresh start. Never happened. Ended up repairing radios and later televisions for a living.”

“So, did anyone ever believe you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, “One fella wrote about what happened to me, but he only went so far, and then the story was published in some pulp fiction magazine in June ‘41, which only made things worse. So once out of the hospital, I hightailed it west.”

“That’s some story,” I said, adding, “You ought to write all this down, get the truth out there.”

“Nope, done trying,” he stated, “I’ll leave it to someone else to do.”

Nick Deene passed away early the following morning. And that ‘someone’ he spoke of, turned out to be me, a believer.

https://soundcloud.com/sierra-tom-darby/in-20200325

From time to time, Brady turned back in his saddle to look. Every time, he’d see the coyote following at a distance.

He thought about shooting it as he dropped into one of the many low spots and it cresting the rise behind him. But he decided not too.

That evening, he saw the same coyote as it rested on its haunches watching him intently. By now he knew the animal was an omen, a visitor or perhaps both.

As he fell asleep, he once again heard the nearby singing. And though he recognized the soft, yet jagged melody, he could not distinguish a single word of that peculiar song.

That night, he slept soundly and once he’d risen the following morning, he check outside for his inquisitive visitor. It was gone and he set about fixing breakfast and getting set to go into Beowawe for supplies.

The sun was up less than an hour and a half when he headed towards the stable for his horse. Half way across the open yard, he saw a shadowy movement and in a diving motion, he drew his pistol and aimed.

She’d been dead several years by now. In fact, he’d not been walking long as a toddler, when she had died and the sight of her standing in the clearing between him and his house left him nearly speechless.

Finally, he asked, “Mother?”

The difference between whiskey and your opinion…is that I asked for whiskey.

Sex should be so good that the clapper keeps turning the lights on and off.

It was a nondescript turn out along the highway in Eastern Nevada. I parked my car, put on my backpack and headed up the trail onto the hillside and into a copse of trees.

Four hours and a roll of film later, I dropped down into a beautiful little basin with one of the bluest lakes I’d ever seen in my life. After snapping a couple of frames of the sight, I tramps down to the waters edge and decided that this is where I’d establish my camp for the night.

While exploring the lake bank, I burned through another three rolls. By four in the afternoon, I figured it was a good idea to build myself a fire ring, collect as much dead-fall as possible, and to pitch my tent.

That evening I enjoyed a can of beans, mixed with a precooked sandwich bag-sized helping of white rice. I followed it up with a cup of hot coffee topped with a touch of one of those airplane-sized bottles of Jim Beams.

Sleep came quickly after I crawled into my sleeping bag and tucked my pack under my head as a pillow. However, I woke near sunrise, very cold, with my exhalations having become miniature icicles hanging from the top beam of my tent.

Opening my bivy, I saw that a layer of snow had fallen and even though I was chilled to the bone, I stayed in my tent and bag until the sun began to warm the eastern side of my shelter. Once outside, I quickly packed up my campsite, ate two or three handfuls of granola and started up and out of the valley.

It was somewhere around the rise that I took the wrong trail, a small but easily corrected error, that lead me down into a wide meadow. However, I made a monumental mistake by becoming over-confident and headstrong by deciding not to check my bearings using the compass I had stowed in my pack.

About three-hours into my return trip, I realized I was very much off course. Rather than worrying about getting back to the trail-head, checking and double checking my surroundings, I had been too busy taking pictures.

It was nearly five in the evening and the sun was quickly sinking, taking the light with it, when another snow storm swooped in. The winds swirled the large flakes in every direction, leaving me dizzy as I tried to find a place to set up a camp.

Fortune was on my side though, as I saw in the distance what looked to be a small out-building. As I drew closer, I realized it was an abandoned, ‘Karro Kampos,’ or a Basque Sheep Wagon.

It had been modernized as seen by it’s flat and weathered rubber tires and rusting metal chassis. The wood tongue was broken in half and the steps were missing, but this didn’t matter as I scrabbled up onto the rear porch and scampered inside.

The potbelly stove and its pipe were missing, obviously salvaged or even scavenged, leaving a hole in the roof, that lead to the walls of that corner having come undone over the years of neglect the wagon had seen. I also had to struggle to get the door to close and remain close as darkness fell.

From that point on I would used my headlamp to see by, as I laid out my ground cover on the floor, to use as an extra layer of warmth, and unrolled my sleeping bag atop it. I ate my beans cold, and directly from the can, before I decided to finally get out my compass and then search my camera bag for the possibility of another roll of film.

There was no more to be had, so I repacked my bag, loaded it into my pack and turned in for the night. The following morning, the storm had broke and the snow was beginning to melt, when I finally pulled my compass from my jacket and learned that I was heading three or four degrees off course.

It took me less than two-and-a-half hours to find my way back to the trail and finally the trail-head and my car. That night, after a hot meal and a warm shower, I slept like a log in my comfortable bed and next to my wife.

The following day, I pulled my gear from the car and laid it out, drying, vacuuming and cleaning dirt and debris from the pack, the sleeping bag and my tent. Once finished, I hauled out my camera bag, unpacking everything, with the intent of giving my photo equipment a good overhaul.

That’s when I realized I was missing my 50mm lens and all the exposed film I had shot the previous two days. Maddeningly, I’ve never been able to find that ‘nondescript’ roadside turnout since that day and I continue to suppose that my film and lens are still there or have been scavenged by now.

There were five or six of them in the pasture, square and pink, held to the ground with a metal stake.
If you grew up around cattle and horses, you probably already know what they are: salt blocks or licks.
As kids we would not, could not leave them well enough alone, and that’s why they were set to the ground like they were.
And as gross as it might sound, it began innocently enough as a dare: “Lick it.”
Who did it first, I cannot recall, but soon we would each hack small chips from the blocks and suck on them throughout the day.
Once our parents learned of this behavior, they’d tell us, “You’re gonna sick,” and such.

This is some 50 years in my past…

Looking to where I’m sitting now — 2020 — isolated from work, family, neighbors, waiting in line at the grocery stores, six feet apart, I’m struggling with a profound sadness that we’ve fallen into this ‘wont helplessness.’
There’s a deep longing in my soul, spirit, my heart, my head, for those days so long ago.
And would you like to know a funny fact?
Not one kid in my neighborhood ever got sick or died from licking a used salt block.

Wells
Orwell
Heinlein and
Rand

Of ‘old’ letters
Of ‘knew’ letters
Of ‘new’ letters
Of ‘current’ letters

Primer of the coming years
Lessons for days of apocalypse
Burning piles of dystopia
And ‘it can’t happen here’

in my anger
and frustration
i stood on the sidewalk
waiting my turn to enter
the grocery store
our new bread line
then i saw it
hope
in the form
of a small blade of grass
pushing its way up
through a crack in
the unyielding asphalt
i am renewed

Where will the next Checkpoint Charlie be located?
Not the one we’ll stand on in order to peek over the wall,
The place where the federal elite will keep an eye on us,
The Checkpoint Charlie they’ll be able to shoot us from?
Yeah, some called for a wall to protect the American
From the foreigner, but it turns out we are the foreigner.
We are the foreign, we are not elite, we are expendable.