Happy Halloween: is it no surprise that maps show Ohio is the epicenter of Elvis, Bigfoot and UFO sightings? These things are born of landscape: when you’re in THE HEART OF IT ALL! and your horizon line is corn, corn, and more corn, well, sometimes magical thinking feels like your only means of escape…
Found some old animations on a disc dug out of dust:
Last night in my dreams, a brown bear broke into our log cabin. I screamed for my dad to kill it. He shot it in the guts with the old double-barreled shotgun he kept loaded in the corner. The bear slumped to the floor. I walked up to it and saw it was still breathing.
“It’s still alive!”
“Let him be.”
But I couldn’t. I walked to the corner. The gun was big and heavy in my arms. There was a shot left. I put the muzzle into the bear’s heart. The bear pleaded to me. The kick from the blast sent me across the room.
The bear was dead now, no chance of him coming back, and I began to cry–ashamed at my fear.
PRINT OUT AND PRACTICE YOUR OWN:
I was walking back from the library through Cain Park when I came up on a herd of pre-schoolers running around the playground. A few teachers observed the mass from a safe distance, but a group of four little black boys had wandered from their sight and were hanging out behind the restrooms by the walking path. They couldn’t have been older than five. They were picking acorns up off the ground and throwing them at a trashcan.
They saw me coming and stopped. I smiled at them, but they didn’t smile back. Their leader stepped forward. He wore a Superman t-shirt. He picked up an acorn and launched it at me.
“Whoa! Watch it there, killer!”
He ignored me, and picked up another acorn. The other three joined in. Little acorns bounced off my arms and legs.
“Hey now! That’s not very nice!”
The attack continued. I caught a couple acorns in midair. I squeezed them in my fists. When I got close, the other three backed off, but Superman stood his ground. I thought about wringing his little neck, but I held the acorns out in my hand, and tried to give him my meanest, most threatening look, and then I let the acorns drop one by one to the asphault. He let me pass.
As I walked away, the four started laughing at me! They decided to follow and taunt me through the park. One of their friends called out from the playground. “What you chasin’ that white man for?”
The laughter followed me for a good thirty yards, and then it stopped, and I heard a voice say, “Yo, dude!”
I turned around, and it was Superman. He waved at me as if we were old friends.
I waved back.
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