It’s only a five minute walk to the bar from my house.
However, it’s a 35 minute walk when returning to my house from that same bar.
Aye, the difference is staggering.

Remember
The next time
I say the word
Fuck
I stutter too
Jus’ like that
Mother Fucker
Samuel L. Jackson
But
No one
Pays me
To do it

Brady rode up Peavine Mountain with the easy cadence of a man who’d spent too many mornings in a saddle. The Mustang ate the uneven slope without complaint; the sky above Reno unrolled itself like an old map.

He came upon a trickle of water and beside it, the ghosts of a fire, a ring of scorched stone guarding charred splinters and bone fragments that looked older than memory. An old hunting camp, Brady thought, and untied the horse.

He gathered deadfall, dried sage, the cracked coins of cow chips, and coaxed a small, obedient flame from the tinder. The sun slid toward the west, and the air thinned and cooled so that the heat of the fire felt like a private sun against his face. He ate bacon and beans, drank coffee black as obsidian, rolled a cigarette, and lay back, saddle for a pillow, watching stars prick themselves into the long, dark dome.

Sleep came because the body always gives up first. Brady flicked the cigarette into the embers, blinking, half-lidded, and then scrambled upright because a thing had come out of the black.

It was easily eight feet tall. Naked but for a loincloth, a coat of rough red hair like splintered copper, a thick frame that made the Mustang look childish in the dark.

In its left hand, it waved a stone axe as a man might wave a greeting card. In its mouth, between terrible teeth, its smile was wide enough to swallow the campfire.

Brady reached for the reins, and the horse bolted into the night. The giant only watched, amused. It spoke, not grunts but clear, fluent English that slipped from its throat as if learning language were the easiest work in the world.

“There is nowhere to run, my child,” it said, chuckling.

Brady had heard talk, once, of red-headed people in the old stories: a nursery rhyme like a stone that keeps rolling downhill. The giant said its name as though it were a door: “I am Baker.”

“Baker?” Brady said.

“As in the rhyme,” the giant sang. “Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread…”

Recognition was a hot wire. The rhyme was a hinge through which a hundred old terrors swung.

Brady did not wait. He drew his Colt and poured metal into the chest that filled the night.

The beast staggered back, hair whipped by the light, the grin becoming a retracted memory, the axe clattering to the stones. It collapsed like aged lumber.

Brady breathed as if struck.

“Damned horse,” he muttered, reloaded with fingers that shook, and set off after the Mustang’s spoor.

The trail made sense at first, hoof prints and the pale tracks of a man with a gun, and then the world began to warp. The stars rearranged themselves into angles that did not belong to Euclid: a compass rose of cold lights that pointed away from the valley and into the bones of the mountain.

The sage underfoot smelled not of herb but of cooked marrow and old bread. He told himself he was tired. He believed the shot had scattered his mind.

He found the horse where the tracks ended, not grazing but staring at the ground as if watching something breathe beneath the dust. Around the old fire-ring, the charred bones had shifted of their own accord; they had leaned against one another and formed a crude, serried wall.

Between the bones, hairless faces, not quite faces, peered with coal-fired hollows. When Brady moved, they moved in a subtle, inevitable ballet.

“Baker?” he said, because the mouth wants to name the teeth of a storm.

From the bone wall, a voice answered not the guttural hum of the fallen giant but its afterimage, like a whisper threaded through rock and marrow. “Be he live or be he dead…”

The rhyme filled the air like flour dust. It was everywhere and nowhere, in the crackle of gunpowder, in the Mustang’s flaring nostrils, in the ache of his hands. Through the syllables, Brady felt a pressure like a meal ground between two enormous stones.

The world rearranged around that pressure. The sky was not empty but a lid, and something beneath it had begun to stir.

The bones along the ring scraped like teeth, aligning into the silhouette of a head turned away from him. The hair on the head was not hair at all but the rusted ends of a million tiny axes. Where the giant had fallen, earth bled black soot.

Brady backed away until his boot struck the lip of the firepit. Behind him, the Mustang whinnied, not fear but invitation.

Its eyes were like polished bone. The campfire, a moment ago a refuge, flared with a light that showed what the night had been hiding: not an Indian camp, not any human hearth, but an apparatus, rings of bone sharpened into grinders, old skulls lashed into a hopper, the circumference of the place laid out like a mill.

“You can run,” said the voice, not from a throat but from everywhere. “You can live. You can die. The grind is the same.”

Brady aimed his pistol one last time at the bone-mouth that formed where the giant should have been. He fired until the cylinder was empty.

For a breath that stretched until it might have been a year, the sounds of his life, the crackle of the fire, the rattle of a saddle, the hollow thud of a name falling, held together like spun glass. When the noise stopped, the Mustang leaned its head against his chest.

He felt the hardness there, and then, impossibly, mercifully, felt the warm thrum of a heart. The giant’s red hair lay spread about the fire like coals. The bones had settled back into the earth and seemed at first like any other stones.

Somewhere behind the comforting logic of his breath, the rhyme continued, softer now and threaded through the valley wind: Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

Brady put the horse in its halter and mounted in a motion that was more muscle than will. He rode down under a sky that might have been the same one he’d left, though altered just enough that when he looked back over his shoulder, the mountain’s silhouette carried a notch he had not seen before, the impression of a long, grinding tooth.

He told himself he had killed a thing and that the world, as before, would remain stubbornly human. But the cigarette he tucked away between his teeth tasted suddenly of flour, and in the back of his mouth, where the taste was worst, a small, ancient grinding began to echo.

Quick question: dropped my toothbrush in the toilet bowl…five-second rule still counts, right?

A long while back, my friend Stella asked if I could write a sonnet. I told her that I didn’t know how to do that, but I would teach myself and try to pen one for her. So, after much trial and a lot of error…

My sad Stella, you inspire me to write.
How I dream the way you sleep, walk and bathe,
Invading my mind day and through the night,
Always feeling about your endless scathe.

Let me compare you to the Superi?
You are more loving, glorious and kind.
Snow chills the berries of January,
And wintertime has the clad frame of mind.

How do I see you? Let me shout the ways.
I see your perfected eyes, mouth and breasts.
Thinking of your naked heart fills my days.
My bent for you is the intended crests.

Now I must depart with a tender heart,
Remember my glad words whilst we be apart.

As you can see, Stella — I still gotta a lot to learn about crafting a sonnet.

It’s been half-a-century now, fifty-years, since I encountered him or at least something that claimed to be him. Forget Slenderman, for I knew that creature by a different name, an older name, his biblical long before the Internet was a thing.

It was a bright blue morning in early August 1969, jus’ passed my younger brothers’ birthday and we had less than a month left of summer vacation before returning to school. Dad had jus’ left for his fourth and final tour of duty in Vietnam and mom was already at work.

The world somehow seemed safer when…

Grabbing up one of the many salmon rods my dad had hanging in our garage, I hopped on my bicycle and raced towards the river. My path to the Klamath River took me south on Highway 101 and westerly on Requa Road

It had been less than 120-years since my childhood stomping grounds had been known by their native names, the river, Tlametl and the settlement south of the river’s mouth Rekwoi. There was still a sense of mystery and mysticism in the land, even for the White settlers of the area.

There was a line of sports fishermen spread out along the sandy shore, south of the mouth as I rode beyond Larson’s boat dock and ditching my bike, climbed over the base of Oregos Rock. There I spooled out the heavy filament into the breaking waves.

Quietly, I sat reeling in my line and then like a fly-fishermen in shallow stream, casting it out again. Much to my surprise, I felt a solid tug on my pole and found myself fighting to haul a heavy fish to the embankment.

Never had I felt something so strong fighting me at the end of the line. Up till now, all I had ever caught were a couple of trout and a few catfish from the old sawmill pond north of the Trees of Mystery.

Never in my wildest nine-year-old imaginings would I have dreamed how this day would turn out as it did.

Minutes seem to be hours as I pulled back and then relaxed my pole, reeling in line each time I drooped the tip of the thick fiberglass shaft down towards the surf. Soon I saw the splash of the salmon I had on the end of my line and I had to fight back my excitement to keep battling it and to not screw up and have the fish break the line and escape.

At last I had it up on the bank of the river. I had landed the biggest fish I had ever seen and I estimated it was nearly as long as I was tall. That’s when I smelled the awful odor of sulfur and heard the snapping of brush from behind and to the right of me.

As I turned, there stood an impeccably dressed figure, very tall and thin, wearing a crisp black suit, white button down shirt, thin black tie and glossy black dress shoes. I knew instantly, he was not human as he had no face and his arms were monsterably long.

His skin was sickly pale, to the point beyond white, and he was devoid of eye sockets, lips or a nose. This skin of his, it was leathery and scales so fine that they were nearly imperceptible.

I froze in utter fear.

Then from out of where his mouth should have been I heard, the deep rumble, “Nice big fish, child!”

My body trembled, my blood ran cold, and try as hard as I might, I could not will my body to move, run or even breathe.

“Wha…who are you?”

“Why, you do you not recognize me, child?”

“No!”

“I am Lucifer,” he laughed, “and I am starving, so I think I will rip your little stomach open right here and eat your guts, heart and all.”

Locked in fear, I watched his long arms reached for me. Seeing his hands, there claw-like appendages for fingers, snapped me out of my trance and I stepped back.

I fell, peeing myself and trying again to cry out.

Still he kept reaching and not wanting to be his meal, I grabbed the salmon and though weighing more than me, shoved it towards him.

“Here, take my fish and eat it, if you’re hungry,” I heard my voice quivering say, as he grabbed it from my shaking hands.

“Ahh…” he boomed, snatching it.

Suddenly, where there had been no mouth, I watched his ‘jaw,’ unhinge into an unnatural proportion and the fish disappear, head first down it’s gullet, like a seabird. As the salmon slipped from sight, I heard the crackle of a blaze and watched in horror as the fish began to broil.

The heat felt like a blast from my grandparents furnace. The cycloid scales of the salmon buckled and curled upward as did the fishes two pectoral fins and the dorsal.

Still finding it hard to move, I was surprised as the thing stopped mid-swallow, only a third of the fish was visible, and began to gag. The dagger-like fingers had also stopped reaching for me and where now clawing at his throat and trying to withdraw the remaining portion of fish from his mouth.

The hideous sounds the Devil made were beyond anything I had ever heard and to this day, I have no ability to even begin describing what awful noises emanated from his evil self. It suddenly occurred to me that he was now choking; suffocating on the many bones of the salmon.

Quickly, I backed away as he flailed wildly, struggling to dislodge the fish from his fiendish airway. Finally, he dropped to its knees and slowly pitched over onto his face.

“Die you son-of-a-bitch!” I shrieked, though I’d never used such language before in my young life.

The smell and smoke of burning brush and decaying flesh overwhelmed me and I fainted. When I awoke, I sat up and looked about me, only to find myself alone.

My pole lay beside me, untouched, filament still spooled in the reel. Also beside me was a patch of ground blacken and deeply scorched to the bedrock.

Wasting no time, I scrambled from where I lay, back around the base of the sacred rock and without looking back raced my bike all the way home. I have never returned to that spot, that sacred place where I watched the Devil choke to death on the bones of an ill-gotten salmon.

Now that the matter has been officially cleared up, the story can be told: I got in severe trouble after my wording was misunderstood on Facebook.

In the post, I wrote: “Going to the mall with my Canon to shoot people.” (The past few days I had been using my new cellphone, experimenting, seeing how it compared to a standard camera set-up.)

Three things happened to and following that post: auto-correct changed ‘Canon’ to ‘Cannon,’ someone reported the post and I found myself confronted by law enforcement shortly after I arrived at the mall. Since I only had my ‘Canon,’ and not my ‘cannon,’ the responding LEO-in-charge realized that there had been a misinterpretation of my posting and released me.

Not trusting the situation though, I called my attorney immediately and she said, “Keep your mouth shut and let me take care of it.”

I did and she did.

If it weren’t for using FB to stay in touch with my friends across the country and around the world, I would’ve deleted it the moment I got home. What a two-edged sword social media has become.

“What in the hell was that, Doc?”

“It was me.”

“Yeah, I know! But why?”

“I’m afraid of spiders, Sarge.”

“Oh, for chrissakes — gonna have to take your man-card away from you if you keep that shit up!”

No longer was I paying attention to unnecessary ass-chewing. Instead my eyes were focused on the tile floor at the sergeant’s feet. He looked down and saw the large black tarantula-like spider slowly passing between his highly glossed boots.

With an ungodly yelp, he tried to join me on the commode I was inhabiting. Nearly falling off, I pushed him back and demanded, “Get your own fucking toilet…this one’s presently occupied.”

Without touching the ground, the sergeant sprang from my perch to an adjacent one. As he did so, his left foot slipped and he dipped that boot ankle deep in toilet water.

He glared at me as I watched the spider slip away to places unknown through a small crack between the wall and floor, below the far sink. Five minutes later Sarge was on the horn demanding that our area be fumigated.

While playing the air drums to Metallica in my truck, I accidentally flipped one of the sticks out the window. Had to switch to Def Leppard.

My thought on today’s interview is as follows: I got all dressed up to meet a man who didn’t wanna be there interviewing people for the position. So perhaps a little levity will break the disappointment…

Well, Hell’s bell
That interview
Didn’t go well.

My other thought is that perhaps I ought to dress like a ragged-assed schlub as many others do. I may wear blue jeans, but at least mine are clean, pressed and hole-free.

It’s a battle maintaining the positive when one feels the bite of defeatism creeping into one’s brain. Anyway, I gotta keep trying because as my folks used to say: ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’