“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”

― Rachel Carson

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Saturday, April 22, 2000

Out of Shape

Daingerfield State Park has a beautiful little lake at its center. The deep forest comes right down to the shore making the water look like a little cup of crystal in the greenery. It is lined with little coves covered in the green disks of lily pads. These were blooming with giant white explosions of water flowers. There is a swimming area marked off with a couple of foam buoys and a wooden platform floating out in the middle of the lake.

It was barely warm enough to swim and we spent a good part of the days sitting on the shore or throwing tennis balls for the Giant Killer Dog, while Nick swam. He would paddle out to the platform and climb up, pace back and forth, shivering in the cool breeze, until he was rested enough to swim back. He is so skinny it hurts sometimes to look at him.

The concession was open for the weekend and they had paddle boats for rent. Somewhere I have a photo album with a picture of a paddle boat I rented as a child. It was an elaborate all-steel affair, two torpedo shaped pontoons, a high bench seat, bicycle style pedals and a chain transmission to a real, visible paddle and a steering wheel. Today, paddle boats aren’t as well made. They are plastic and foam, bright molded-in colors, low-slung, a bent pipe with wooden pedals directly driving a completely enclosed paddle assembly. They are steered with a little pipe sticking up behind the seats.

Still, Nick wanted to rent one, so we paid our seven dollars and put on the ubiquitous red life vests, tattered and moldy-smelling, marked S, M, or L with fading Magic Marker. The boat was a bit too big for him and too small for me, making for inefficient propulsion. I am in such bad shape, my legs burned terribly as soon as we moved away from the dock. I could only paddle for a few minutes before I’d have to give up and take a rest. It took us what seemed like a long time to move across the lake (although we never completely used up our rented hour).

The breeze was light and the lake was even more beautiful from the center. Nicholas said, “Everything is blue or green, the only colors.” He pointed out how tall the forest was, it undulated into the distance, up from the water, and you couldn’t tell where the real hills were or where the trees were simply tending to be taller or shorter. Ducks and geese floated around looking for handouts. Black turtles sunned themselves on logs in the center of the lily pad seas, plopping into the water to swim away, sticking their heads out to peer out at us if we paddled too close.

When we looked down into the calm water with the sun at our backs we could see shafts of yellow and green extending downward, pulsing with the gentle waves. The trick of perspective made the water look miles deep, cold and clean.

Even with my legs burning, the sun heating up the uncomfortable clumsy life jacket, it was a pretty nice way to spend an hour and seven dollars.

When we reached shore, the kids shot some baskets at a hoop above the parking lot and hooted around in the playground for awhile. I examined some immature bald cypress trees growing in the shallow water and decided, for sure, that I was given an incorrect tree for my front yard. It is definitely a pine and not a cypress.

Nick, Candy, and The Giant Killer Dog drove back to the campsite while Lee wanted to walk back with me along the trail – a bit of a shortcut as opposed to the park road.

“Let’s race them!” Lee shouted, and took off along the trail.

It’s true, that in your mind’s eye, you see yourself as you were when you were… maybe sixteen years old. I could see myself running down that trail with Lee. I couldn’t do it. A few hundred yards and I was out of breath, side splitting, slowing to a walk. The MiniVan made it back to the campsite before Lee and I did.

But not by much.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

Pier by Fernando Sdrigotti

from The London Magazine

Fernando Sdrigotti Twitter

Fernando Sdrigotti Instagram

“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”

― Coco Chanel

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

― Frederick Douglass

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Tuesday, December 01, 1998

Illustrated Woman

After work, Candy took the kids down to the school for some function, I drove off to the club to work out.

Now, don’t think I’m exercising as an excuse to watch other people. I’m serious about this, I’m working hard; but the first part of my program is to do a half hour on the stepper. There isn’t much to do for thirty minutes except look around at the other folks working out.

I try to do the stepper right. I stand as upright as possible, keeping my weight on my feet, using my hands only for balance. A couple machines down some guy was flopped over forwards, resting his chest on the control panel, his arms on the handles. His entire weight was supported there, his blue spandex-covered butt stuck up in the back. I don’t think he’s gets any exercise that way and it must be killing his back.

In front of the steppers, past the always-busy treadmills is a warm-up area, where people do their stretching. This club is a pretty serious place, not a lot of socializing, and although there is a wide variety of customers, a lot of serious bodybuilders hang out there.

I couldn’t help but notice one woman on the mat bending herself around, stretching. Tall and thin, almost gaunt, wearing wire-rim glasses and medium length blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore white shorts, a gray athletic bra-top, black workout shoes and weightlifting gloves. She must have had some Yoga training, those were serious stretches. She stood, feet far apart, and keeping her torso and legs straight and locked bent over and touched her cheek to the inside of each calf. Then she rolled around and tapped the back of her head on the padded floor between her feet.

What caught my eye wasn’t her extraordinary flexibility, it was her tattoo. Not a small, ordinary tattoo, but a big design. She was illustrated. The illustration was a vine, I guess a climbing wild rose. I thought I could make out red blossoms and maybe even thorns among the thick green leaves. It started as a spiral tendril between her breasts and grew into an arc over her left shoulder. It continued down her back in undulating curves and finally ended… well, I couldn’t really tell exactly where it ended.

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of tattoos, but I liked this one. It looked like a real part of her, not some odd design picked out in a drunken haze and buzzed in on an ankle in a whim. Jeez, though, that must have hurt. A good two or three square feet of skin under that electric needle.

I finished my stepper and walked some laps to cool down before I started working on the weight machines. Down on one end of the club is the free weight area where the serious bodybuilders work. One woman was sitting, doing concentration curls with a dumbbell. The biceps on her arm literally popped out like a hank of thick cords, you could almost see every muscle strand. She was like a sculptor in flesh. The sculptor and the sculpture too. Slow carving with sweat and plates of steel.

For the most part, the men down there had unmarked skin. I had never noticed before, though, that over half of the women had large complex tattoos. Abstract patterns across their bellies. One had a tiger looking out of its lair drawn across her shoulder blades.

I thought back to something I heard on TV as a child, during the Olympics, I suppose it was the 1968 games in Mexico City. The announcer was talking about the East German women’s swimming team. She said something like, “The Communist Bloc girls have a big advantage over the American women because they have a weight lifting program. American women won’t lift weights because they are afraid they will look too manly .”

Thirty years ago. It’s odd that I remember that from so long ago; I have no idea why it made such an impression. Things have changed a bit since then, though, haven’t they.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

Relax Said the Nightman by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

from Newfound

Melissa Llanes Brownlee Webpage

Melissa Llanes Brownlee Twitter

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Wednesday, January 16, 2002

Spreading north

I’m continuously amazed at how the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is vomiting itself northward, spreading across the cotton fields and mesquite scrublands like a virulent plywood fungus.

The houses are enormous, stuck right up next to each other, and virtually identical. Cheap brick veneer, wooden shake shingles, monstrously large bathrooms, two-story entryways, full of odd corners of wasted space.

The streets are full of smells of cut pinewood, wet concrete, and hot asphalt. Even in the winter, the Texas sun beats down unhindered by any trees to bake the brick and kill the fresh-laid sod. You never see any residents out on the streets or sidewalks – I have to imagine there are sometimes children behind the eight foot wooden privacy fences enclosing a tiny polygon of ex-prairie – sometimes I can see a piece of custom-made play equipment sticking up over the fence. The only humans ever visible in the new suburbs are crews of Mexican workers cutting grass or building walls. Sometimes they have leaf blowers – though I have no idea where any leaves would come from.

The eternal question is, of course, who lives in these things. Did a crack dealer and his stripper girlfriend save their money, get married, clean up and move to the suburbs? Did some guy invent the battery-powered inside-the-egg egg-scrambler and spend his millions gleaned from late night television advertisements on that brand spankin’ new house and shiny black SUV?

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

What I Owned by Michelle Ross

from Monkeybicycle

Michelle Ross Webpage

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Wednesday, March 26, 1997. I used to look at posts from my old blog that were twenty years old. Now… I’m looking at posts I wrote a quarter-century ago.

May I check your oil, ma’am?

I’ve been issued a new lab coat at work. We have to wear flame resistant clothing in the plant, the chemists wear these blue coats instead of uniforms. When mine came it had my name on it. White stitching on a little blue label, “Bill.” The guy who brought it told me that I could cut the label off, but I thought I’d let it be. It’ll help keep the darn thing from getting “borrowed” during the night shift.

I went out to buy lunch, I’m too busy, so I was going to bring it back to eat at my desk. I went out to the little sandwich shop for a “Californian” – avocado, lettuce, cheese, in a pita. It was a nice day, but cool, so I kept my lab coat on. The girl took my order and then said, “The name, it’s Bill isn’t it?” I had a moment of confusion over how she knew my name, suddenly I realized that she read it off my coat. I was yanked back twenty three years, I was a teenager again, working at a gas station, with my first name on my uniform. I looked at the girl behind the counter, she was looking at me with that look, the look you give someone that’s making minimum wage, and will always be making minimum wage.

People used to look at me like that all the time when I was pumping gas. I was in college at the time, only working over the summer or on holidays, but they didn’t know that. I’d usually have school books with me, I’d study between cars, trying to get a jump on the next year. There was a blackboard inside the station, It was usually covered with equations, formulae, but nobody noticed that (or recognized what it was). Occasionally a customer would give me a little lecture, “Son, you need to be thinkin’ about what you’re going to do with your life.” I’d nod my head, ring up their gas (I could gas six cars, remember all six amounts- dollars and gallons, their license tag numbers, and what person went with what car, I’d worked out a mnemonic system, I could gas and charge everyone without asking any questions, only a few people noticed that). Of course I had plans, I was getting an education, this gas station job and its three bucks an hour was a part of it, but only a part.

Of course, after all these efforts, after all my sound and fury, here I am, middle aged, still wearing my name over my breast.

I think I’ll cut that label off.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

Baby Dolls by Becky Robison

from PANK

Becky Robison Twitter

Becky Robison Webpage

“What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?”
― Mary Shelley, The Last Man

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Tuesday, May 20, 1997

Morning from hell

Last night, driving home, I needed to stop for gas. As I was pulling up to the Texaco a good song (Nightswimming) came on the radio, so I kept driving. I knew I had enough fuel (barely) to get home, I’d buy a tank before work the next day. This was an omen of am impending morning from hell.

Candy and I left for work at the same time; she had the kids to take to school. I walked out to the piece of crap Mazda and turned the key. Nothing. Now this weekend the battery in the van had gone out (as my faithful readers know) and I had left my jumper cables in the van in case the problem was more than the battery. So out of my car I dashed, across the two inches of leftover stormwater covering my yard, around the house in time to see the van’s taillights make the curve from the alley into the street.

No problem, I have a battery charger in the garage; I’ll hook it up to the Mazda, charge the battery, get on my way, worry about what’s wrong later. But the extension cord was too short, it wouldn’t reach halfway across the front yard. My neighbor was leaving for work, she asked if she could help, but she had no jumper cables either. I thought for a minute and realized I have a longer cord up in the attic. I had left it there from the last time I was working on the cable TV. The end of the cord was hanging down in the attic access panel in the garage, I climbed up, grabbed it, and pulled. About two feet of cord came down along with a big wad of fiberglass insulation, but no more.

So I pulled out the aluminum ladder and leaned it up to the hatch. Our house is of the more or less modern construction using roof trusses. Instead of grand beams supporting the roof, leaving plenty of headroom; a truss of 2×4’s fastened by metal plates in fractal triangles fill the attic. Cheap, light, strong, and almost impossible to move through. I’m way too old and fat for the climbing, kneeling, crawling needed to get through the maze of beams. But I had no choice.

I tied a snakelight to a beam and fought my way through; realizing too late that I needed to turn a corner and the flashlight wouldn’t reach. So back I crawled to get the light, twisting it around my neck. I clambered through the dirty labyrinth around the corner clear back to the end of the house where I’d tied the cord to an old lamp I once used to work on the coax; it was caught on some wires. I untied it and began to work my way back to the garage.

I had to stop for a minute to get a grip. I was so frustrated – late for work, a dead car – claustrophobic, stuck in the dirty, hot, cramped attic trying to get a stupid extension cord that may or may not help me get my car started and get to work. I shook for a minute with emotion and paranoia. I felt completely alone; there was no one to help me. It was still only seven thirty in the morning and I had had all the crap I could stand.

But as always, I realized I had no other choice, and continued crawling through the beams back to the garage hatchway, flashlight around my neck, pulling the extension cord with me.

I set up the charger on the long cord and attached it to the terminals. The ammeter showed the battery was low, it quickly went to fully charged; and the car still wouldn’t start. Something wasn’t right. I removed the terminal clamps from the battery and noticed that the posts were black and corroded. Back to the garage for some sandpaper which I tore in little strips. I used these to clean the terminals and the clamps. Presto, the car starts right up. I called in to say I’d be twenty minutes late and drove to the gas station and on in to work.

All day I couldn’t shake that moment of fear and panic in the attic:

Car problems again, I had already lost half a day on Candy’s van, now another battery, those zinc plates soaking in sulfuric acid, the same thing again.

The terrible time pressures, I have to be in to work. I want to sit down, take some time off, I don’t want to go. I’m behind, the clock’s ticking, I can’t be late – primal, childhood images, late late late, sent to the office, walking through the quiet, empty hall, feeling – no being – out of place, looking in through that little window at the kids seated the teacher talking – the dreaded walk from the door to my seat.

Discomfort. Cramped, fighting back the welling claustrophobia, dark, dirty, hot, I have to balance on the edges of the ceiling beams or I’ll crash through the sheetrock, itchy – a world of fiberglass insulation. How did I get here? What the hell am I doing? What sort of terrible mistake is this?

Alone, lonely. Nobody to call. Candy has patients, she can’t leave work, isn’t even there yet. I have to figure this out myself. Once, I want somebody else to handle something. Take care of it. Fix it for me.

And the screwup guilt. Why did I oversleep? Why didn’t I get gas last night? Why didn’t I get jumper cables for the van and Mazda? Why did I leave this extension cord up here in the attic? Why haven’t I cleaned those terminals on a periodic basis?

So I’m a screwup; that’s why I’m being punished . But this is only a random bad day isn’t it? The fates or whatever; are they , out to punish me? To extract payment for every transgression? Or is this paranoia? That’s not important, nobody cares if you’re paranoid. What really matters is if they really are out for you or not, paranoid or no.

Another day.

So lets belly up to the bar, mates. Get that cute barmaid to pour us up some mugs of icy foam. We’ll put our arms on each other’s shoulders and Maria’ll play a tune on the Farfisa while we stamp out the rhythm with our feet on the peanutshells and sing:

We losers, we happy losers – hear us saying;
time is passing us by,
there’s a party ’round here somewhere,
we can hear the band playing

but we’ve lost our invitations.
The stuck in the muds,
the if only ifs,
the full ‘o lamentations.

Don’t laugh now, ’cause I’ll wager
you are one too.
Don’t ya worry, there’s plenty of room,
Plenty of floor, plenty of lager

now everybody….

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

The Last Man on Earth Looks for a Friend—A Mini-Novel by John Guzlowski

from Flash Fiction Online

John Guzlowski Wikipedia

John Guzlowski Twitter

Guzlowski’s personal blog – about his parents and their experiences

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks of a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

—-Honore de Balzac

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Saturday, February 16, 2002

Cooking on my Birthday

I guess most people want somebody to cook some special meal for their birthday. What I wanted, though, was to cook my own.

Some close friends of ours have started their own catering business. They have leased a storefront and outfitted it with commercial cooking equipment – big ovens and a huge gas stove, giant refrigerator and freezers, and massive stainless steel tables for food organization and preparation. They gave me a key and I went down there the other week to set up their computer and I fell in love with the place. I guess my favorite thing is the commercial gas range – it looks like what the chefs on all the cooking shows use – an acre of massive black iron pan supports with tiny blue pilot lights sprinkling the area. Turn a heavy steel knob and a get-engine rush of gas throws out some serious heat. It’s something you can actually cook on – not like the wimpy weak glowing electric coils in my home kitchen.

When they called and asked what I wanted for my birthday dinner I replied that I wanted to cook in their commercial kitchen. They said sure so I prepared a menu and went down to the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market to buy my supplies (I won’t shop at Albertson’s any more, even though it’s closer to my house, in protest of their new 1984 Big Brother Card).

I drove down to the place a couple hours early, put a CD in the boom box and started cooking. I made onions cut in half and hollowed out, wrapped with a strip of bacon and stuffed with wilted spinach and a dollop of feta cheese on top. I marinated some sliced fresh mozzarella in sour cream and spices, then melted this over some crusty bread with a slice of tomato and an orange sprinkle of some powdered chile de arbol. For my main course I put chicken breasts, mushrooms, potatoes, white wine, and a fistful of chopped fresh herbs into bags made of carefully folded heavy foil (the basic recipe came from TV, from the Naked Chef) and baked the mess. Candy made a chocolate cake and I added a baby spinach salad.

We had six folks for diner and a sitter for everybody’s kids (we knew there wouldn’t be anything to keep the little ones occupied at the catering place). There weren’t any good places to sit, but there was plenty of wine, so that didn’t matter.

I think the food came out fine (the one thing I didn’t have was a good toaster or a salamander so the bread turned out a soggy – the stuffed onions were too tough, though the stuffing was good), especially the chicken. The foil bag is a great technique to learn. I can imagine baking stuff at home and taking it to a picnic. The foil puffs up like a Jiffy Pop and it’s great when you pierce the package and all that fragrant steam puffs out. Easy clean-up, too.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

The Appliance Crisis by Beth Goder

from Flash Fiction Online

Beth Goder Webpage

Beth Goder Twitter

“What’s your name,’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?’

‘Cats don’t have names,’ it said.

‘No?’ said Coraline.

‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Wednesday, October 07, 1998

Hail

I started out for work in the morning just a little bit late, having to rush. Candy, watching the morning news, warned me of impending weather. I glanced at the television as I walked out the door and saw that familiar ominous radar image of the metroplex with an irregular diagonal orange line of thunderstorms slashed across it.

I hadn’t driven very far before fat blobs of rain started slamming into my car. It didn’t look that threatening – no large dark caterwauling thunderheads or blasting cold wind of an advancing squall line. Only the usual gray skies with a few darker patches. There was an occasional rumble or crash of thunder and a bright laser flash, thin crooked line of lightning, however, to indicate more powerful forces at work.

The plop sound of the big soft drops soon took on a strange clicking noise as they struck the steel skin of the Taurus. The water quickly turned to ice. I was caught in an unusual early March, early morning, dawn really, hail storm.

It’s a helpless feeling to sit there, stuck in traffic, as chunks of ice scream across the sky to slam into your vehicle and the cars all around. I looked for a place to pull over and get some shelter from the storm; unfortunately with morning rush hour all available overhangs were quickly snatched up by aggressive drivers in expensive new Sports Utility Vehicles or Dual-Axle Pickups. The gas stations, fast food emporiums or any other structure with a modicum of cover were full before I could even move forward an inch in the backed-up street.

So there was nothing to do except wait in the backup of cars on the road behind the spot where a crew was digging out some potholes and using orange cones to narrow the way from three lanes to two. That caused the slow backup in the left two lanes of good citizens like me, patiently waiting our turns while obnoxious morons in the right hand lane zipped by to asshole their way back into the queue at the very cones themselves, thereby holding everybody up.

Nothing except sit there and hope the ice didn’t get big enough, the wind strong enough, to put unsightly dents in my car. Which it didn’t. It only lasted a minute or two. Although the hail did look fairly large it was soft and misshapen, fluffy; not a very effective weapon. As the spring goes on into summer I’m sure the tornadic thunderheads roaring in out of the great plains will get better at it and have some good damaging hail.

It must have been bad somewhere, though, because, hours later, on the way home from work in the parking lot of the abandoned movie theater near my house (eleven screens, all of them within a couple miles of my house, closed when the new stadium seating 30 theater multiplex emporium opened a few miles south in the long vacant field that for a decade held a single real estate sign “ZONED COMMERCIAL,” off of the interstate loop) had appeared a large white tent open at each end. Cones were set out to direct cars through the open maw of the tent. Next to it was a large recreational vehicle painted a bright blue and white and bearing the brazen logo ALLSTATE – Catastrophe Emergency Response Unit.

So the insurance companies were all ready to start taking hail damage claims. The storm may have been worse in areas near here but it couldn’t have been too bad because I didn’t see anyone queued up for their estimates.

Across the street, in the parking lot of another abandoned theater was a small carnival. Only a few steel rides and a smattering of booths; the bright lights were coming on as the sun set. One attraction was a huge slide, an inflatable structure that looked like a giant cruise ship, listing forward at an acute angle. At the stern, pointing high in the air were two inflatable propellers and, of course, the legend TITANIC.

I turned right, into the neighborhood, putting my back to these omens of disaster and drove on home.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

She Titles the Email “Things are Moving Along” by Caitlin Scarano

from Brevity

Caitlin Scarano Webpage

“The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.”

― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Wednesday, October 07, 1998

Monarch

After work today I drove over to the health club and had a good, tough workout. It was a gorgeous day and I felt like staying outside for awhile so I drove across Sunnyvale to Lake Ray Hubbard and a little park at the end of Barnes Bridge road. This is the place with the two wooden crosses, I wrote an entry about it back in June.

The two crosses are still there. I was glad to see that someone had repaired Jason Farmer’s cross. From the look of how it was done, it might be the same people working on the other cross.

Michelle Lemay Self’s cross is still kept up with a little plot of plastic flowers. The white wood is covered with messages written in what looks like black magic marker.

Wife, Mother, Daughter
Granddaughter
Sister Beloved
"Friend"

We Don't know you
but visit all the time.
STEF

There is a little line drawn about eighteen inches up from the ground. It is labeled, “Austin’s height when She left him.”

At about three feet there is another line. “Austin’s height, 7/9/98, 2 1/2 years old.”

I
Love U
always
Your Husband
Chris Self

Nearby, in crude but legible hand,

I love you
MOMA
Austin 7/19/98

Along one side was a longer, more ominous message. I present it here as I copied it down, I don’t think it’s my place to make any comment.

For those of U that come
and see this 1 and Lonely cross
I hope u all have took the time
and understand are pain & are loss.
This 1 man I'd Love too c out
here 1 sunny summer day.
So I can end his sorry LIFE,
AND then be on my happy
way to go & tell my loving wife that
he has finally paid.
u know who u are
I'm coming soon.
Gregg

The park is as poorly-developed as always. Some run down playground equipment and an arc of shoddy grass, a bit of woods, along the shore of the lake. I walked on down a path away from the parking lot.

All the lakes in North Texas threatened to dry up with this summer’s drought. The recent deluge has helped, but the lake is still down. Instead of these little cliffs of mud-rock along the shore, there is a little stretch of sand, which used to be lake bottom. I sat along this poor man’s beach and watched the gold sunset sky, the hazy distant opposite shore with its expensive homes and developments. A lone sailboat fought against the waves, a flock of white seabirds dove for fish.

The wind was blowing stoutly and that was enough to build waves from across the big lake. They came rolling in, miniature breakers. With a bit of imagination it was like being at the ocean. It even smelt a little like the sea, mostly because of a mat of drying and rotting seaweed.

I walked on down the curl of the park ’til the stretch of public property ended in a steel barrier and “No Trespassing” signs. Away from the water was a thick grove of trees and a path. I walked back into a little grotto, my legs brushing away last night’s spider webs, nobody had been there all day. I looked up into the trees, still illuminated by the afterglow of the set sun and saw motion. The trees were full of Monarch Butterflies.

It was a beautiful sight. The green and yellow trees, orange sky, red and black flapping wings. The branches were lousy with them, many came fluttering down, disturbed by my approach. They flew in a cloud around me, close enough to reach out and touch.

They must be stopping over on their annual migration. It was an unexpected treat, a special pleasure, to have them decorate this remote speck of shabby forest.

I needed to get home so I walked back to my car. The return drive was slow and fun, I was stuck behind a peloton, maybe thirty riders. A local club was finishing up a ride, trying to get back before dark. I especially liked slowing down on the uphills, watching them all come out of the saddle, black shorts and colorful jerseys, pumping legs and bobbing helmets.

I had worked out hard enough, it had been a long, tough enough day that I was content to sit in the bucket seat and steer, listen to a tape, let them all do the work for once.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

Abyss by Lois Hibbert

from Flash Fiction Magazine

“. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Monday, September 29, 1997

Let’s go skate

After another mind-numbing day at work I took the kids down to the parking lot by the school. Candy took off to run some errands with her friend that’s staying with us.

Lee wore his in-line skates, elbow and knee pads, and his helmet. Nicholas rode his new bicycle, sans training wheels, and his helmet, of course.

Lee had a lot of trouble with his skates. He doesn’t actually skate as much as run on the wheels; his little bow legs splayed out, blades akimbo. I don’t think the eight little yellow polyurethane disks turn at all. They are cheap lil’ kid’s skates and they don’t fit very well. Part of the plastic shell kept digging into his ankles. I worked with it as best as I could, tucking and adjusting.

Meanwhile Nick was looping around the parking lot with no trouble. He only fell once, when he couldn’t avoid a little pink bike one of the cheerleaders (I guess drill team is the proper term, a bunch of ’em practice on the lot every day; they were all down at the other end). I worked with him for a minute on his braking. He had been stopping by sticking his feet out. I helped him learn the joys of backpedaling into the coaster brake, leaving a stripe of black rubber on the tarmac.

And that was it, the high point of my day. Hours of grinding uselessness at work. Dinner, baths, writing practice (I helped Lee write out “don’t open until Sunday” – I don’t know why he wanted to write that, he said “sure are a lot of O’s in here”), then bedtime at home.

A father taking his kids out for a skate, a bike ride; it’s a cliché, a television commercial; life insurance, some new vitamin maybe. Except in the commercial the youngest kid isn’t whining about needing to go to the bathroom every two minutes. The skates always fit. The kids don’t fall. The father on the TV isn’t so worn out from work that every minute is a struggle to maintain contact with reality. They don’t show how your arms ache after carrying a heavy bicycle, a pair of skates, two helmets, a set of pads, all in your arms up the hill back to the house.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

Hock by Michael Kozart

from Flash Fiction Magazine

Michael Kozart Webpage

“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Thursday, December 10, 1998

Magic trick

Candy went out with some friends tonight, I stayed home with Nick and Lee.

I worked for a few hours, organizing the room. It used to be Lee’s but now is an office and guest room (Lee has moved into Nick’s room, Nick into the TV room). I am very happy to have a space with my computer, two big bookcases, fold out couch, and no television. I used the rearrangement as an excuse to try and get organized.

The books are now sorted. All the writing reference books; dictionaries, thesauri, quote books, books on grammar, books with ideas to help plow through writer’s block, are all arranged on one shelf that I can reach from my desk. Computer programming references are in another place, fiction that I intend to read in another, books I never intend to read are boxed, ready to send charity.

My computer desk is now neat and organized. I have too many floppy disks. I make these wooden boxes that hold a hundred or so each, I still didn’t have enough and bought some plastic boxes too. Floppies are like National Geographics, I can’t bear to throw them away ’til they go bad. You never know what ancient text file will become absolutely necessary to world peace some day.

Meanwhile Nicholas and Lee were up to something out in the living room. I kept checking on them, and they seemed to be alright. Things were quiet. Too quiet.

It was fine, they were devising a magic trick. They came back to fetch me, brought me to the living room, and had me sit in a certain chair, facing another large overstuffed chair that came with our couch. Nick was wearing a rust sweatsuit, Lee was shirtless with blue sweatpants. Nick wore Lee’s alien mask, Lee wore a hockey mask, both left over from Halloween.

The trick commenced. Nicholas tucked his brother down behind the other chair and began solemnly walking in circles around the furniture. He would have to climb over one arm each time before he dropped down behind.

It was a good trick, after awhile I noticed that it wasn’t Nick walking around anymore, it was Lee. They look enough alike that with the mask, you can’t easily tell them apart. Lee is shorter and had more trouble climbing over the arm of the chair, or I might not have noticed. Of course then I heard a lot of noise as Nick struggled to change his clothes unseen behind the other chair.

Sure enough, after what seemed like an eternity, the shirtless kid with the hockey mask jumped out and both took off their masks. I acted surprised to see they were switched.

I heated up some dinner for them and Nicholas explained, complete with diagrams on a piece of scrap paper, the inner workings of the complex trick. He said he had seen this on the Masked Magician’s show on television. “We can’t do most of his tricks,” Nick went on, “They are too dangerous.”

Now it’s late, I’m back typing in my newly organized room; I can see more open desk space than I’ve viewed in awhile. The kids are finally asleep and I will be soon. I guess we all have to look for magic wherever we can find it.

And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:

[title]: an excerpt By [name of author]

from 3:AM Magazine