Cattle

 

“What the Sam Hell?” he said out loud, staring at his empty field.

He should have been looking at his herd of cattle, milling around the gate, waiting for their breakfast.

But they weren’t there.

He quickly walked the fenceline to see if the fence was down. It was not.

Getting more perplexed by the minute, he looked for signs that someone had come in with a trailer and stolen them overnight, but the ground just inside and outside of the gate was undisturbed except for the tracks his truck had just made.

Then he looked up and whispered, “Aliens.”

Kevin

 

 She’d promised to take him home with her, the giant slug on the rental patio.

His name was Kevin, and she saw him every night when she called her husband at home in Texas.

But on the night before they left, Kevin was not on the patio. She looked under leaves and behind vines, but he was not there.

They left California the next morning, and she thought about Kevin all the way home.

Two years later, on her farm in Texas, something on the ground caught her eye.

Looking down, she squawked, “Kevin???”

Kevin was exhausted, and not amused.

Everything Hurts

 

The body hit the ground with a sickening *splat*.

Amazingly, it awkwardly pulled itself back into a standing position.

“Again!” came a gleeful call, and the body blindly climbed the tree and walked off the end of the branch…again.

After a while, it got boring, and besides, it was getting close to morning.

Several hours later, she woke up, confused and pissed off. Every inch of her felt like she’d been repeatedly tossed from a tall tree.

“What. The hell. Did you do to me last night?”

“Nothing” the demon under the bed said, sounding offended. But it was grinning.

Trash Day

 

Puzzled, he squinted to see if he could make sense of it.

When he’d rounded the corner, there it was- a large black hulk that looked like the Grim Reaper, just chillin’ on the side of the road.

But then, he’d noticed the two full trash cans next to it, and as he drove slowly past, it became clear that it was several stacked trash bags with a pile of dark detritus balanced on top.

Chuckling, he accelerated back to the speed limit, completely forgetting the upcoming stoplight.

As the UPS truck t-boned his small Kia, the black figure disappeared.

Birds

 

The large black bird circled lazily in a vivid blue sky.

Shading her eyes from the sun, she glanced up at it as she walked, then she stopped and really looked at it.

There was a sharpness to the wings’ edges with no uniform scallops of feathers.

As she watched it glide, her peripheral vision caught something.

It was white, about the same size as the black “bird”, but this was obviously mechanical. A drone, maybe?

It was on a collision course with the black object.

There was no sound.

Just a brief blinding light, and they were both gone.

Squirrel

 

Walking from his truck to the house, he stopped in alarm.

Something was in the woods, it was big, and it was headed right for him.

He quickly scrolled through the possible critters in his head: deer, bobcat, feral hog, coyote, bear, cougar…and he strained his eyes to see through the thick forest.

The squirrel broke through the underbrush and blinked at him, twitching its whiskers.

Laughing at his foolishness, the man climbed his porch steps and went into the house.

Watching him go inside, the squirrel backed slowly into the trees before changing back into its true, terrifying form.

Prayer

 

It had been a long time since he’d thought of god. He’d stopped believing in the god of his childhood Sunday School when he was a teenager and had never looked back.

It hadn’t been anything dramatic; none of it just made any sense anymore.

But now.

Now his life was in shambles and someone he loved was in trouble.

He’d tried everything he knew of to help them.  It was time for extreme measures.

Bowing his head and clasping his hands, he whispered, “Please help them.”

With a *plink* something fell gently onto his hands.

It was a scorpion.

Cobble- Part Two

 

Over the next few weeks, she lifted several more of the odd little creatures out of the cobbles.

Finally, she asked a local friend if she’d ever seen them and knew where they came from and her friend turned pale as a ghost. “Chicka, you shouldn’t mess with them. Just leave them be.”

Laughing, she dismissed her friend.

Seriously, her friend said, “Don’t let them scratch you.”

She remembered this the day she felt a small prick on her finger as she lifted one out.

As it waddled away, she felt herself shrinking, shrinking, till she dropped between the cobbles.

Cobble- Part One

 

She always walked carefully on the cobbled roads.

Concentrating on the cobbles, she stopped suddenly, one of them not looking quite like the others.

One was a little rounder, a little more terracotta-colored, and a little…softer looking.

Looking around the deserted street, she shrugged and gently put her fingers on the cobble.

She pulled upwards.

It was not a cobble.

Filled with a curious trepidation, she set the small figure down on the street.

Its hat was what she’d thought was a cobble, but otherwise it was a perfect, stout little person.

It blinked up at her and waddled away.

Handprint

 

He had a vague idea, as everyone does, about the behind-the-scenes workings at his local post office.

It seemed a herculean, impossible and tedious task to go through literally thousands of pieces of mail every day, trying to read people’s handwriting or smudged labels, sorting everything, and distributing it all to the appropriate receptacles.

Elves? Maybe elves.

How the hell do you get elves? Traps?

He smiled to himself as he imagined tiny elves working away feverishly in the back room.

Collecting his packages from one of the parcel lockers, he never saw the small bloody handprint on the wall.

Crumbs

 

She looked at the table, irritated.

There were crumbs on the clean tablecloth.

Luckily, it wasn’t stained or greasy, just the area of pale crumbs, like from sugar cookies.

Brushing them off the table, she sat down to her morning coffee and yogurt, glancing through the news on her phone while absentmindedly petting the dog.

When she was done, she took her spoon and cup to the sink, and tossed her yogurt container into the trash.

Later, she tried to think of the last time anyone ate something crumbly at the table.

Definitely not since she’d last washed it. Huh.

Language Class

 He laughed when she dropped her head to the table in despair.

“No. No grammar. Por favor! I don’t need grammar. I need survival Spanish. I need rudimentary conversational Spanish. Por favor!”

So he, sitting in Costa Rica, and she, sitting in Texas, compromised.  

He wrote down phrases she’d need-

Podria ayudarme por favor.

Donde esta el bano?

And seemed surprised, but pleased when she asked for two more;

Como puedo ayudarte?

Me gusta estar ocupada, necesito hacer algo

Then, They just talked about their farms and their families, and living alone, in a friendly mash-up of English and Spanish.

Sunny Day

 

It was coming through the forest towards her.

She couldn’t see it yet, and suspected that she wouldn’t get a chance to see it at all.

Gears grinding, smoke billowing, with groans of complaint and whispers of rust, trees bent and shattered in its wake.

When would it appear in the clearing, and why weren’t the dogs barking at it? She glanced at her dogs in their pen and they were sound asleep, upside down, tummies basking in the sun.

And then it thundered; a rolling physical thing that demanded she look up.

The sky was bright robins’ egg blue.

Lotta Birds

 

 He heard them before he saw them, and he stepped out onto his porch to get a good view.

The starlings.

They had not been there one moment, and then, with a harsh din of an entire flock of tiny lungs screeching obscenities at each other, they were there.

His cat stared at the sky with huge, alarmed eyes.

Chuckling, he said reassuringly, “It’s just birds. Just a lotta birds.”

They filled the sky, then his yard, blocking out the sun, his vision, his breath.

The cat streaked away, flat to the ground, as he lay gasping his last.

“Lotta…birds.”

 

Tickle

 

 It was the tiniest tickling on the bottom of her foot, not all the time, just every once in a while.

And it only happened when she was in the shower, like something was reaching up from under the slats of the teak shower mat.

Of course, that was crazy. Nothing could live under there.

Her dog glared at the shower mat off and on all day, but she had told him to “leave it alone”, so he did, choosing instead to unroll the toilet paper, cascading it through the house like unruly teenagers after a high school football game.

Treasure

 

It was named Treasure Island for a reason, everyone reasoned.

No one knew who had named it, but many had dug for treasure, using whatever technology they had at hand, and some interesting things had been uncovered. Interesting enough to keep interest in the treasure high over the next several hundred years.

At last, men with money and technology to burn descended on the island.

They deforested the land for ease of access, and drained wetlands for the same reason.

By chance, one day, they found a rock with words crudely chiseled into it.

“This beautiful island is a treasure.”

Forest Friends

 

Leaves scraped and crunched and became airborne for just a moment while the black squirrel hummed happily to himself, digging the hole that had to be deep enough; as deep as forever.

Suddenly, the house door opened, and the human looked out. She spotted him and they locked eyes for just a moment. The human looked unsure, then alarmed.

Quickly, the squirrel rubbed his face in the leaves, wiping off the blood, and re-emerged, blinking and twitching his whiskers adorably.

The human smiled and went back inside.

From up in a nearby tree, the one-eyed squirrel shuddered and turned away.

 

Breathe

 

Some days, he forgot to breathe.

Life was busy and hard, and there was so much to remember, surely no one could blame him.

Eventually, he’d wonder why he felt compressed, anxious, and light-headed, and he’d pause and think, “Of course. I need to breathe.”

Then, he’d go outside, close his eyes, and breathe.

At times, he’d go days, maybe weeks, without breathing, and he’d suddenly hurl himself out the nearest door and gasp in air like a drowning man.

Which he was, right then.

“In-through-your-toes-out through-your-fingers” he’d think, the oxygen flowing through his body, reminding him he was alive.

Safety First

 

She made the mistake of telling people she’d taken a mouthful of fish water while siphoning her little tank.

“So gross! Get an electric one!”

So, she bought the electric one. It vacuumed the floor of the tank. But after she got it, she realized the siphon hose had to be bought separately.

When the siphon hose came in, it did not fit.

The man at the hardware store gave her the correct size.

Finally, she attached the hose and turned it on.

The ¾” hose sucked the entire 4-gallon tank dry in 5 seconds.

The fish was not amused.

Still on Duty

 

On Tuesdays, she got home after dark, which she hated.

It was easier when her farm dog Hercules was alive, and followed her everywhere, ready to rush forward and protect her from anything.

But now, it was just her, and it seemed darker than ever.

Tonight, as she approached the bridge between the house and the barn, she saw tendrils of darker-than-dark climbing up onto the treads, and a soft pressure on her back steered her to the edge and the long drop to below.

Then she heard the unmistakable padding of Hercules’ feet behind her, and everything was fine.

Listener

 

The women called her.

They called her from their cars, from their backyards, even a few while hiding inside their closets.

Quietly, urgently, desperately, they uttered the words they could not to anyone else.

“My husband hits me.”

“I’m pregnant again, and we cannot afford it.”

“I’m afraid.”
“I’m afraid.”

“I’m afraid.”

There in the shiny buckle of the Bible Belt, such things were not said aloud, were not allowed to be said.

They knew she’d never tell anyone.

She knew their men would burn her if they could get away with it.

And the women would turn away, silent.

Miscommunication

 

“You’re just being silly” she said to the dog, who was trying to reach under the bed for something. “I already moved the bed once today so you could retrieve your ball. If you let it go under there again, too bad so sad.”

Cocking his head at his human, the dog let out a snort, like a horse, which he did when he was frustrated with her.

Snorting was a common occurrence.

He reached again under the bed, his long legs not quite long enough.

“Goodness, you’d think there was a monster under there.”

The monster startled and blinked.  

Intruder

 

 Everyone was sound asleep, minding their own business, when it happened.

The quiet neighborhood erupted in blinding light and the raucous cacophony of powerful motors.

Diving for safety, the residents slowly and cautiously emerged, barely peeking out to see what was going on.

There was a crash, and all but the unlucky one disappeared again into the protection of the water.

On board the boat, the zoologist held up the gasping young gator to the camera, pointing out the reptile’s ancient attributes and congratulating himself for remaining safe yet victorious in this “gator-infested swamp”.

Also known as “their living room”.

Time

 

The land had held her tightly for over two decades, ever since the day she’d fallen in love with it.

It was Hope for a time when she could bring her family to it, after the bad times.

It was Joy at the building of a home and a homestead growing as quickly as their son.

The son grew up and moved away, as they do, and her husband died after a summer of one damn thing after another, and after that its hold loosened with each subsequent loss: gently, kindly, quietly, till one day…

It was time to go.