Sand

The desert stretched behind them as far as they could see. They’d been walking through it for ages, waiting and hoping for the sight of just one tree, maybe a shrub, something that wasn’t dry and dead.

There had to be something better beyond the desert, but they’d run out of desert now, and this didn’t seem to be much of an improvement.

Sand.

They were sick to death of sand in their shoes.

Standing silently, they stared out at the ocean.

Beach sand and desert sand were the same damn sand.

The sharks swam lazily in the undrinkable water.  

Spider

 

The spider waved its front legs like it was waving down a taxi.

Its human noticed and peered into the habitat.

“How in the world did that get in there?” the human asked. The spider kept waving its front legs in alarm.

It wasn’t a velvet ant, but it looked similar. Whatever it was, it could have absolutely attacked and eaten the spider.

Carefully, the human removed the offending insect and released it outside.

“You’ve had a hard morning! Here’s a cricket.” The human dropped a cricket into the spider’s lair and walked away, not noticing the cricket’s frantic waving.

 

Feral Cat

 

The feral cat darted in and out, skirting the edge of her peripheral vision. She knew it was there, but she’d never acknowledge it. Let the tiny tiger think it was being stealthy.

Life was hard enough when you weigh six pounds.

She’d seen it skitter out to grab a mouthful of dog food and race back into the forest, watching for the dogs who would be happy to chase it down and kill it.

Born wild to a wild mother, it would always balance on that razor’s edge that separated wild and domestic things, neither one nor the other.  

Lava

 

The floor was lava!

He didn’t know what that was, exactly, but his siblings were panicking, so he leapt up onto a chair and stared at the floor.

The floor looked like it always did, so after a minute, he tentatively got off of the chair, to the shrieks of his brothers.

“How stupid,” he thought as he went into the kitchen to see if his mom had any snacks.

There was obviously no such thing as lava.

Sixty years later, his children placed a memorial where he and his house had sat, before being engulfed by the volcano’s eruption.

She Knows

 

She knew things.

Vowing to only use her knowledge for good, never evil, was a challenge sometimes.

People who didn’t even know her name had no idea the things she knew about them, because they never thought about it.

She knew who ate a lot of vegetables, and who ate a lot of junk food.

She knew before they did what they needed at any given moment.

She could tell when someone was sick, or when someone was going on vacation, or when someone was having company over.

She was, of course, the curbside shopper at the local grocery store.

Compassion

 

“Oh, my god! You look so hungry and cold! Let me help you!”

He couldn’t believe his ears.

He must be dreaming. No one ever talked to him or offered him any sort of kindness.

The old man slowly opened his eyes and peered out from under his knit cap and untrimmed hair. He was hungry and cold. The old moving blanket he’d found did precious little to keep the chill out.

For years, now, he’d given up hoping for some human compassion.

His eyes found the woman who’d spoken.

She was walking away, a bedraggled kitten in her arms.

Bad Luck

 

The last thing she needed was a flat tire.

Already late for her first date with the perfect man she’d been talking to online, she sat there in her car, watching the rain pour down outside.

“Fuck my luck” she whispered.

She called roadside assistance and waited for the tow truck to arrive and change her tire.

Her date didn’t answer her calls or texts.

 She was on her third date with the tow truck driver when a mug shot of her missed date flashed onto the tv in the bar.

He’d been arrested for assaulting women he met online.

 

So Misunderstood

 

He sat at the end of the bar, where he sat every day.

Retired and divorced, his grown kids didn’t want anything to do with him, which he couldn’t understand.

Hadn’t he given them everything, them and their mom?

He’d worked hard, long hours, coming home exhausted; of course he missed all their school events, birthdays, anniversaries. Of course, he just wanted to be left alone when he finally got home at night.

The man is supposed to be the Provider. Well, he’d provided, and they’d all abandoned him.

Ingrates.

He stared owlishly into his beer glass, eternally defiantly clueless.

 

Garden

 

The kids were all afraid of him; the old man who lived in the big house with the yard that took up half of the block, with a ramshackle privacy fence that separated it from the smaller, lesser houses.

After finding the opening in the fence and peeking through it for days, the little girl finally slipped through and into the carefully tended gardens.

Looming above her, he glared down at her and waited for her to scream and run like the others did.

“I like your flowers” she glared back at him.

They remained best friends until he died.

Cookie

 

The dog sat like a pretty girl and waited patiently for her cookie.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the clerk. “I’m all out of cookies.”

How could that be?

Every time they went into the farm store, the dog knew there would be smells to sniff, people who would pet her, and cookies at the checkout counter.

That was the routine and those were the rules.

The dog’s human said, “It’s OK. I keep spares in the car,” and both she and the clerk chuckled.

Car cookie was not store cookie.

The dog ate it, but she did not enjoy it.

Much.

Bravery

 

His world was black and white. He was a good guy with a gun.

She asked him what he would do if confronted by “a bad guy” and he didn’t hesitate. “I’d shoot him.”

“Just like that?” she seemed skeptical.

“Just like that” and he laughed. She couldn’t possibly understand bravery.

She asked him if he’d ever been in a physical fight, and he hadn’t. No one had ever laid a hand on him in violence.

Quietly, she said, “I’ve only been physically hurt by men I loved and trusted” and she shook her head. He couldn’t possibly understand bravery.

Bigfoot

 

She couldn’t believe her eyes.

These things were supposed to be just folklore.

Holding her breath, she peeked carefully through the trees for a better look.

It was real, all right.

The creature was a little shorter than she was, so probably a juvenile.

All the stories she’d heard about them seemed to be true.

It walked upright and seemed to be at least marginally intelligent.

But the smell of it was super-rancid and she almost gagged when the breeze brought its scent her direction.

Suddenly afraid, the little Bigfoot turned and ran back to the safety of her family.

 

Veteran

 

 He was one of the men who didn’t talk about it.

A quiet man, he’d just shake his head if asked about it.

When he returned home, he’d told his wife to put his uniform away, in the back of the closet, where he’d never have to look at it again. He’d preferred to have burned it, but that seemed wrong, somehow.

One of his brothers never came back, one was ruined by gas he’d been exposed to, and the last one came home, crawled into a bottle, and never came out.

There’d been nothing heroic about any of it.

The Perfect House

 

They’d bought the house because it was built in the traditional Southwestern style and it was on a river. They never thought they’d find the perfect house.

The first night in their new home it started raining, then storming.

They woke up the next morning downstream, covered in mud. Their house had washed into the river.

Shivering and squelching adobe, they headed for the town’s storm shelter.

Inside, they didn’t have blankets, so they gave everyone inflatable T-Rex costumes.

When the tornado hit the shelter, the costumes provided no protection, but the news footage of an actual Sharknado was spectacular.

Dishes

 

 He proudly did the most dangerous construction jobs.

His co-workers called him Sin Miedo.

Coming home after dark, having a beer or three and eating dinner, he was dog-tired and just wanted to crawl into bed after a long hot shower.

But the dishes.

The dishes in the sink could not be ignored.

He remembered his abuela scolding him, “Never leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight! The things, the things that are bad energy will come and eat the crumbs! Then they will get stronger, and when you are asleep, they will come for you!”

He did the dishes.

Hobbies

 

“Can you believe it? Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?” she asked.

She’d met a new employee at work that morning, who’d told her she collected antique handkerchiefs.

“Seriously, what a stupid hobby. Who would want a bunch of old snot rags? I don’t care how lovely the embroidery is on them; they were all used to blow someone’s nose.”

She waited for an answer, knowing it wouldn’t come, but she waited all the same.

In the dim lighting of her living room, her little army of carefully-preserved cicada sheds listened without ears, and watched her without eyeballs.  

The Observer

 

He saw it all, day to day.

And the glorious thing was, no one ever saw him back.

Birds and small wild things went about their business with seriousness and intent. Humans ridiculously anthropomorphized all other creatures without even realizing it.

Birds did not sing out of joy. They were announcing territory boundaries or mating availability.

Squirrels did not frolic with abandon. Well, maybe a little bit. Squirrel intelligence was a crap shoot.

Humans were actually the least human of all, when they thought no one was looking.

The old tom cat narrowed his eyes and disappeared into the shrubbery.

Sleepless II

 

He lay in bed, exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come.

The problem was, the problem was, he couldn’t go to sleep because he was thinking about going to sleep.

What triggered sleep?

Was it a certain level of relaxation?

How was that different from regular relaxation?

He’d tried willfully letting go of any tension in all his limbs, from the ends of his fingers and toes all the way into his torso.

The more he tried to go to sleep, the more exhausted he became, but sleep evaded him.

Counting sheep filled the room with sheep, and finally, they suffocated him.

Sleepless

 

There was no way she could sleep like this.

One scrunched underneath her, the other draped awkwardly over the top of her.

She tried rearranging them with no improvement.

Flipping onto her other side, she tried again.

It was the same.

One was pushing into her ribs and side of her face, the other one couldn’t decide if it was going to flop in front of her, behind her or tenuously perch on top.

Even on her back, there was an unnatural uncertainty of where they should go.

Sighing in frustration, she wished arms could just screw off at night.  

Tooth

 

Tooth

 

The crunch was alarming.

Her brows knitted together in consternation as she chewed.

She swallowed and her tongue probed her mouth cautiously, and yep, there it was.

At her age, proof of her decrepitude looked back at her every time she looked into the mirror.

She saw her brown hair turning silver, and the “smile lines” around her eyes and mouth, and what the fuck was going on with her neck?

Gravity was clawing at her figure, and for some reason, her feet were getting bigger.

But nothing made her feel older than a tooth imploding while she was eating.

Swamps and Deserts

 

Swamps and Deserts

 

She loved swamps the best, but deserts came in a close second.

Most people looked out over acres of either one, said, “Well, that’s a whole lot of nothing” and turned away.

Turning away was the preferred reaction, in her opinion, rather than the dreaded, “Look at all that nothing! Seems like a great place to make noise and tear shit up!”

Swamps and deserts.

Two of the most delicate eco-systems in the world, and also two of the most misunderstood.

Because of course, if you couldn’t build on it or farm it, what the hell good was it, anyway?

Marriage

 

Marriage

 

She stared at the phone number for the Women’s Crisis Center, and knew she’d never call it.

After 45 years together, everyone looked at her marriage as a blessing, but she knew better.

Early on, she’d tried talking to her mother, and then a friend, and finally the pastor at her church, and they’d all said the same thing.

“The good Lord made you to be submissive to your husband. If you are having questions about that, you just need to pray harder.”

So, she’d covered her bruises and prayed harder.

“Sweet Jesus, please take him before he kills me.”

Matinee

 

Matinee

 

The lights came up in the movie theater, and everyone filed out, moving on to the next part of their day.

The usher nodded to them as they left, then methodically swept the floor clean of dropped popcorn and candy wrappers and picked up empty paper cups.

The last thing she did was gently tap the dozing old man on the shoulder. “The movie is over, sir.” And she smiled at him.

He smiled back, gently tucking the photo of his late wife back into his lapel pocket.

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon” he said.

“We always loved the matinees.”

Bookstore

 

Bookstore

 

He’d always loved the smell of a bookstore.

It was the smell of magic and knowledge, history and recipes.

Real life is messy and unorganized, frightening and unpredictable.

In a bookstore, you knew just where everything was, and it was there whenever you needed it.

His whole life, going to the bookstore was stepping out of chaos and into order, and it calmed him just thinking about it.

The bookshelves at home were not as well-organized, but they were still an anchor for his soul in a world filled with betrayal.

You can absolutely tell a book by its cover.

Petsmart

 

Petsmart

 

It seemed to be Little Old Lady Day at Petsmart. There were four of them in line at the checkout, all wearing stretchy pants and nice errand-running shirts.

As the last in line, she had time to analyze the contents of the other three’s carts.  

The first one had three cases of canned cat food and a feather toy.

The second one had three squeaky toys and a newly-groomed Yorkie in the basket.

The old lady in front of her was holding a container of fruit flies and a bag of annoyed-looking crickets.

Without thinking, she took a step back.

Cookies

 

Cookies

 

“Let’s go around the circle and share something about ourselves.”

She despised icebreaker bullshit, especially at work.

As they all spoke, she wasn’t even listening, because she was trying to think of something respectable to say.

“I like to bake cookies for the neighborhood children” she blurted out when it was her turn, and she managed to smile shyly. At least that’s what she hoped it looked like.

She thought of her collection of bones, stones, and feathers, and the totems she made out of them to use in her various spells.

She’d never baked a cookie in her life.