Vondenbash Hollow

Things seem less important down here
in Vondenbash Hollow.
The ear-piercing scream of
white-knuckle sirens
don't wake you from your sleep
en route to a seventy-year-old
dying man.
Instead, frost breaks the weakest
branches of an old sycamore
that lurches tiredly over
a spring, sending that part noiselessly into
watery solitude.
In Vondenbash Hollow there are no
thunder-like exclamations that
signal the end
of a seventeen-year-old life
because of a back alley scuffle.
There are, instead, the snowfalls.
Cold; indifferent to the outside
awning,
which whines under the
weight and cracks, landing
safely into the numbing cold
below.
In Vondenbash Hollow we
mourn the insignificant.

Long Day is Gone

This day is long. It winds
and winds, cold
in its deliberate attempt to abase
those who are imprudent
enough to face it.
Its brief victories
against me are
suffocating in enormity,
but when the long day is gone
there is you.

To Sing the Song of Acceptance

The boy sat on the horse for a long time. He blacked out for a while - he didn't know how long - but when he came-to he was still enveloped in a thick, velvet dark. He was losing circulation below the waist and his crotch and legs were numb; partly from the saddle, but it had become so cold he was shivering violently. When he had opened his eyes there was only the soupy darkness to greet him - a long, black worm stretching eternally into an even deeper caliginosity. Primeval darkness. Starless and moonless - bereft of sight, his eyes darted around for some point of contact, some form that would give comfort and ease the panic that sent waves of terror though his mind. His eyes strained until burning. There were no familiarities here in the dark New Mexico desert. No comforts or reliefs. Especially for a killer.

There had been a girl in La Palotada with warm, light-brown skin. He had kissed her damp brow and loved her. Possibly. He did not know. How could he? He was all of nineteen and full of the bravado of youth that stomps from a body too small to inflict the damage that it threatens. Too nervous and unsure and shaking, touching a soft body for the first time after a life of touching only rough, ugly things.

The rope around his neck had become as familiar to him as his own body. At first, when The Man with the Green Eyes had placed the rope tenderly over his head, he had squirmed and fought the unfamiliarity of the tightness. He had wanted to tear the rope from his neck and curse the texture of the hemp and how it had abrade his skin. Now the rope was part of him, it sank into his neck like a familiar friend comforting him with an embrace. It assured an end. Before the rope there was uncertainty. Now there was a goal; a steadily-approaching final chapter that had sang a song of acceptance into his ear. It was an exquisite sound - like a band of angels - which had brought a tear and sank his heart.

He was eight - before the anger of The Man with the Green Eyes - when he had helped his father track a missing calf on the ranch where they were hands. They had found it, crying and up to its crops in the swollen flood-waters of La Cinta Creek. He had felt the cutting embrace of the frayed hemp on his hands then, as he and his father roped the calf and tried to pull it from the violent waters. They had not succeeded. This is the last thought he would have before he died.

The horse strayed forward slowly at first, almost as if testing the tensile strength of the rope in the preparation of being the unknowing executioner of a nineteen-year-old murderer. The rope, for all the closeness it had shared with its new friend, bit severely into the boy's neck as it pulled taught - tied securely to the highest, sturdiest branch of an acacia tree - and restricted the air entering his windpipe. The horse stopped, almost knowingly, and then started a hard trot West. The boy's legs went wide, he fell backward, kicking and swinging around violently for a moment and fighting for a breath of air. Then the boy hung lifelessly from the acacia tree.

Dave Kozlowski and the Haunted Pants

It had been six years since Dave Kozlowski had lost his partner. Six years of living with the guilt that the bullet which had severed the spine of the only friend he ever had, had been meant for him. He had visited Catherine and the kids every Sunday since the funeral, but the guilt still clung to him like a very sticky baby who works the midnight shift at a glue factory and has a penchant for kleptomania.

My Cat Has Gained the Ability to Speak and Fashion Rudementary Weapons

August 3, 1999

The refrigerator was acting up today. I opened the freezer and there was a bunch of melted water, which was odd enough, but in the back there was a hole I'd never noticed before. All I could see was a bright, shining red light. It was weird. It seemed like it was pulsing or something. Anyway, there was a lot of heat coming from the hole so I unplugged the fridge.

August 4, 1999

Came into the kitchen today and found Smoochers, my gray tabby, licking at a puddle of blue shit on the floor! I kicked him away and he ran into the bedroom. It looks like the stuff ran from the back of the fridge where the freezer is. Weird thing is that it's been unplugged for a day now and there's nothing on the inside. Gotta make sure to get the landlord to take a look.

August 8, 1999

Smoochers is acting kind of strange. He's been secreting a strange substance from his butt for a couple of days now. I took him to the vet but he said he looked fine.

The Distinct Aroma of Time-Travel

Abraham Lincoln was dead. Not because of John Wilkes Booth. No, he had failed his assassination attempt in 1865 and instead met the business end of a samurai sword. Lincoln had succumbed to the irradiated wastelands of 2056. Unfortunately for Mr. Lincoln his hazmat suit had received a small tear from one of the many borehounds that scouted the wastes for fresh meat.

Now the group sat mourning at a dive bar in 1965 Chicago; Bernie's Tavern. Nikola Tesla, a 20-year-old Goldie Hawn, and Ernest Hemingway sat at the table nursing various drinks. I had immediately started to regret picking up any of these people in my time-adventures. Although I had fostered delusions of grandeur about Tesla, it did no good when I couldn't speak Austrian, or whatever it was he spoke. All day he would just point and things and mumble something I didn't understand, or look really scared at some irradiated creature in the future and try to hit it with a stick. He was basically worthless. Hawn I had picked up for my own reasons. I had envisioned her becoming my damsel in distress during the time shenanigans, but all she did was sit in the corner and cry. She did talk to Lincoln for a while, but then he was torn apart by those hounds. Now all she does is cry and look really terrible; it wasn't even a turn-on any more. Hemingway was a real jerk. I picked him up because I thought I could use him in a fight, or maybe if we went big game hunting in the Triassic and needed to take down a stegosaurus or something. All he did was drink whiskey all day and awkwardly hit on Goldie Hawn, who was so catatonic we had to drag her around.

The Time I Almost Destroyed Rob Thomas

It was mid-November in Wasilla, Alaska. I had been waiting for about three hours on a rocky outcropping overlooking a small natural lake. Surrounded by endless miles of trees I listened to the soft whisper of the wind as it blew through the nothingness. I checked my watch. It was almost time. I listened through the wind, sharpening my ears against the growing howl and finally heard it. The thump, thump, thump of what sounded like an old HH-65 Dolphin. Now it was unmistakable. I could see the small dot in the distance as it drew nearer to me. My vengeance was at hand.

I had given Mr. Thomas the following:

-1 six-inch full tang survival knife

-1 parka

-1 pillowcase of raccoon jerky

With this he would hopefully give me the satisfaction I had craved since I heard "3 AM" for the first time. His bindings would be cut at the last minute, he would be lowered to a safe height, and then thrown from the helicopter. I had explicitly told the pilot to be careful, if Thomas was hurt I would personally come after him instead.

I saw the body drop from the helicopter, hit a small bank of snow and go into a controlled roll. This was it. From my vantage point on the outcropping I could see that Thomas was scared. He looked around wildly after removing the bandanna from his eyes. I raised the war-horn to my lips and blew. Boooooooorooooooo. He looked in my direction but I knew that he didn't see me. His terror was showing through his face; the chase was on.

The sky was a dusky purple. This part of the world was plunged into thirty days of darkness once a year, but the encroaching dark would be days away yet. Thomas had started running west through a large pocket of trees, away from the frozen lake. I stood from my crouched position on the outcropping, exposing my naked chest to the bitter winds. I took the blood from an earlier kill, a doe that had wandered into my hiding place, and smeared it ceremoniously in the form of an eagle across my sternum and abdomen. I screamed into the wind as I ran from my vantage point.

I could spot the tracks from a mile away. Thomas had been stumbling around randomly for over an hour. At this point he would be tired and dehydrated, perfectly ripe for the vengeance that awaited him. I am the wolf, I thought to myself as I raced through the thicket, limbs lashing my face. I took the pain, welcomed it. Like a loving mistress punishing her slave I laughed maniacally as I ran into the cold loneliness. These are the times that try men's souls. Rob Thomas' soul to be exact, and I would soon steal it away like a small gremlin, or a really smart baby who could steal things.

I came through a break in the Alaskan Pines and saw, collapsed on the ground, the body of Rob Thomas. For a moment I thought I had been robbed of my vengeance by the wild Alaskan wilderness, but I only had a moment to contemplate this. Before I knew it, the trap was sprung. My foot slid from beneath me and there was a great pressure on my ankle as I was swept off my feet and upward. What the hell?! My mind was reeling, spinning... or maybe that was just because I was dangling from a pine, caught in a snare trap. I had let myself become too cocksure about Mr. Thomas. I hung there, spinning, until finally I met the upside-down gaze of Thomas himself.

He was now shirtless and bald, having shaven all his hair off with a sharpened piece of clamshell that lay in a pocket of bloody snow. The tables had turned.