Mel had been dithering for an hour, which annoyed him. He had been so decisive when he was younger.
“God, how my kids will complain,” he told Rufus. “And it probably won’t be long before some helpful neighbor comes over or sends a grumbling kid to do it for me.”
He thought a moment longer. Then he snapped his fingers.
“But I’m going to do this whether anyone approves or not.”
early fall afternoon –
dog romps in the
cornfield’s stubble
squawking —
chicken struggles
in dog’s mouth
The storm had taken out a power substation and Max and more than 1,500 others were without electricity. The summer afternoon darkened quickly and the storm was upon Max’s home.
Having nothing else to do, Max sat and watched the storm through the bay window. He saw the lightning briefly illuminate the cloud-dimmed windows in long and short bursts.
“It looks like an old signal lamp,” he said to his old dog, Freda. “Just like I used back in the Navy. I wonder what this storm is trying to tell me.”
Posted in fiction
Tagged dog, fiction, gods, light, lightning, lightning bug, message, Morse code, self-importance, storm
Lewis had worked out a simple plan: Load the old propane tank on the ton truck. Back over the gas pump by the old barn. The truck’s hot tailpipe and some fortunate sparks ignite both the gasoline storage tank and the fume-filled propane tank. Half the farm goes up in a massive explosion.
It should be a quick death, he figured, and best of all it would look like an accident; the insurance company would pay off.
Lorna would be at work at the diner, and Sarah would be in school. They wouldn’t get hurt, and they wouldn’t be around to see it happen. He’d sent them both off that morning with smiles and hugs and kisses, so there would be no reason to suspect he’d taken his own life. And they’d have a last happy memory of him.
The Food and Drug Administration today issued a consumer update warning dog owners not to give their canine friends bones. The list of possible complications is long and unpleasant. Read the FDA’s warning here, and dispose of the bones where the dog can’t get at them.
cornfields grow
purple with henbit —
first ticks on the dog
woodpecker
snatches a snack
from the dog’s dish
watching the dog
watching the possum
playing possum
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Copyright © 2008-2011 Bryon Cannon.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
