February 2010 Archives

I have not yet finished the story yet.  I have no excuse but I can perhaps soothe the hurt by sharing with you some visual delights sent to me my Mr. Chappy H. Rammer, a dear friend and global citizen living in Japan.  Enjoy.

Her name was Clarissa, or at least that was what Michael wanted it to be.  He didn't know anyone with that name, but that was OK.  In fact, it was better than OK.  This Clarissa would be the original, and the one who could never be equaled.

He saw her on BART every morning and most evenings.  Michael would start his commute at the Pleasant Hill station.  She would already be on the train and he would make it a point to board the car she was in.  They would ride together until she got off at the Embarcadero station in  San Francisco.  His stop was one further down, at Montgomery.  He would ride that last part of the trip with his eyes closed, keeping the image of her fresh in his mind.

Clarissa was a fairly tall woman, about five-eight, with shoulder-length brown hair with a few streaks of gray.  She was attractive, not drop-dead gorgeous like a model but pretty in an accessible sort of way.  She dressed somewhat conservatively, business casual but with the librarian touch.  And through her near-transparent body, Michael could the lights outside passing through her.

Clarissa was a reflection, an image on the window of the BART car that was most visible when in a darkened tunnel.  The flesh-and-blood person who created the image probably wasn't called Clarissa.  Michael did not know what her name was, nor did he care.  It was Clarissa the reflection that commanded his attention and he could stare at her the whole time with impunity.  If he tried that with the other woman, she would notice.  She would make a scene.

Michael worked in a cubicle on the ninth floor of a twenty-story building in the Financial District.  The nearest window was down the hall and to the left.  It faced a light well.  The break room near the elevators had vending machines selling off-brand cans of soda for a buck fifty and candy bars for two dollars.  The free office coffee was discontinued.  It was a casualty of recent cutbacks that had also claimed ten percent of the company's workforce.

His job was to match his fellow employees with project codes that had been budgeted for that month so they could use them for their time sheets.  To do this, he used a piece of software called "Streaming P."  P was supposed to stand for project.  What made the program streaming was that the projects would show up on Michael's computer screen as soon as they were approved by the money people upstairs.

"Unleash the power of the stream!" read the bold text below the bright yellow arc on the splash screen as he loaded the application each morning.  In reality, project approval was such a slow process that the stream was more like a trickle.

As each pay period drew to a close, Michael would do his best to assign people codes for projects in a way that actually made some sense.  With so few projects approved, he would have to make do with what was on his list.  People would complain and demand he fix the problem so there would be some rhyme or reason to their time sheets.  Michael was not authorized to fix these problems.  He was only authorized to take the blame.

Most of the time though, he spent the day pretending to be busy and thinking about Clarissa.  He imagined himself going all sorts of places with her.  They would visit art museums and go to ball games.  They would eat at fancy restaurants and take walks along the moonlit waterfront.  They would do all these things not in San Francisco, certainly not in Pleasant Hill, but in a city of his own devising.

When Michael finished his workday, he would usually go have dinner at a Sizzler not far from his home.  He picked this particular place because the service was slow and he wanted to kill as much time as he could.  For the same reason, he ordered his steaks well done because the meat toughened by overcooking would take longer to chew.

Back at his apartment, he would watch TV.  His cable service had over 400 channels and each night, he managed to watch a little bit of almost all of them.  He would then fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the morning with pain shooting up his arm from the repetitive stress of his thumb hitting buttons on the remote.

This was Michael's life, day after day, month after month.  It continued like this until one overcast Tuesday morning.  Michael had not slept well the night before and did something he promised himself he would never do.  He let his eyes wander and they  fell upon Clarissa's counterpart. 

Fortunately, she was reading a book and did not notice him.  But then he looked at her left hand.  She was wearing a wedding ring.  Michael shut his eyes and tried to wipe that image from his mind.

It wouldn't go away.  He first felt angry and betrayed, but soon he just felt sad.  He took a few deep breaths and opened his eyes.  He took what he thought would be his last look at Clarissa and mouthed the word "goodbye."

Then he noticed something.  Clarissa was wearing no ring.  Since she was a reflection and he thought he might be looking at the wrong hand, he checked the other one.  There was no ring there either.

Clarissa looked straight at Michael and gave him a little smile.   Fearing he had been caught, he looked away.  He glanced back at the other woman and she was still engrossed in the book she was reading, a wedding ring quite visible on her finger.

The train pulled into Embarcadero station.  Clarissa and the other woman got up and left.  The doors on the car shut and the train moved forward.  Michael closed his eyes again.

Humphrey Bogart once said, "The whole world is about three drinks behind."  That quote had resonated with me over the years, often when I was sitting at the bar and should have gone home at least two drinks ago.

I was sitting at the bar last night, nursing a second drink in no hurry to finish.  My friends sitting next to me had been there for a while.  They were rambling on about this and that.  Most of what they said was unintelligible but it sure was important to them.

At that moment, I found myself on the flip side of Bogart's wisdom.  I didn't like it there so I polished off my drink and ordered a third.

I stopped after three drinks and headed home, a little numb but not completely blotto.  I refrained from embarrassing myself, which isn't too surprising.  I have no problem behaving when I'm moderately buzzed and am usually not an asshole even when I'm absolutely hammered.  There have been exceptions of course, horrible low points I'd rather not think about.  But for the most part, I do OK.  And thanks to my selfish and callous nature, I hardly ever have to worry about getting sloppy either.

So for the most part, I'm a regular Dean Martin.  Excellent.  Well, not really.  I wish I could be happy as a work-hard-play-harder sort of guy, but I can't.  I don't like my current job and never really cared much for my career.  I need something outside work to validate my existence.  Booze alone is not a good way to do this.

Last fall, I swore off liquor completely for over two months.  I had no set time limit for the duration of my sobriety.  I didn't know if it was going to last a week or forever.  Overall, the time off did me some lasting good.  My weekly alcohol intake is about half what it was in September.

So now I'm a moderate drinker, sort of.  Still, that isn't good enough. 

(At this point, I started in on some tiresome blather that was equal parts rationalization and self pity.  I'll spare you.  New story coming Monday).

No,the blog isn't going away.  At least I hope it isn't. It will be moving though.  When and where are still unknown.

My friend Alex has provided me with free hosting since 2006.  Other than a server crash two years ago, Poison Spur has given uninterrupted access to my blatherings to its 30 or so readers worldwide.

That's all over now.  Or to be more precise, it will be very soon.  Alex is moving on to the next stage of his career.  That work computer that hosts my blog will not be available for very much longer.

I owe Alex a huge debt of gratitude but knowing him, he'll just shrug and say if I buy him a drink, we'll call it even.

With luck, I'll be able to switch providers with nary a hiccup.  But if for some reason Poison Spur goes silent for a while, you'll know why.

I sat in the back seat of the Toyota four-wheel drive.  We were at an air station, a necessary part of road travel in Bolivia.  With all the different elevations, there is no single tire pressure that works everywhere.  If you're heading toward lower ground, you need to add air so you don't lose traction driving on tires that are half flat.  If you're heading higher, you need to have air taken out so the tires don't blow out.

Steve, the driver and organizer of our trip, made arrangements with the kids who worked the valves and air pumps.  A couple of American dollars for a tip bought you a serious level of professionalism.

Off in the distance, smaller children played in a puddle of gray water fed by a pipe from a nearby chemical plant.

I watched all this while taking swigs from a plastic canteen filled with what had to be the vilest-tasting liquid known to man.  It was a liter of boiled water mixed with a packet of rehydration salts and I was expected to drink it all.

The diarrhea that had stricken me was my own damn fault.  It came from good intentions trumping common sense.

Three days earlier, I was at an orphanage in Cochabamba.  I shook the hand of a small child in the infirmary.  The kid didn't look too happy.  Considering he was both sick and an orphan, I didn't expect him to.  Still, I wanted to try to cheer him up.  My Spanish wasn't very good so I made funny faces at him and hoped that would do the trick.

The kid gave me a puzzled look as I stared back at him with my fingers in the corner of my mouth. Some of those fingers were used to shake his hands just moments ago.  His germs were now my germs.

Two days later, the diarrhea hit me.

My traveling companions and I had spent most of that day going from Cochabamba to La Paz and arrived in the late afternoon.  You don't drive on Bolivian highways at night, that is not unless you want to end up as one of those crosses that seemed to adorn every curve and intersection we passed.

Local motorists, worried about getting rear ended, made it a habit of building a pile of rocks on the road behind them when they stopped to change a tire.  When they were done, they drove off, leaving the pile there.

This was just one of the surprises limiting your driving to broad daylight would help you avoid.

So we arrived safely in the capitol, got some cheap accommodations, and went out for a bite to eat.  At this point, I wasn't feeling too bad, just a little nauseous.

That night was a different matter.  For once in my life, I'll spare you readers the disgusting details.  Suffice it to say I spent less time in my dormitory bed than I did on the toilet down the hall.

So by the time we made it to the air station on the way out of town, I was gulping down the foul-tasting water so I wouldn't shit myself to death.  The road ahead would take us high into the Andes.  I had no idea what we would find there..  Would there be charming villages full of charming and quaint Quechua folk?  Or would we encounter cannibal plane-crash survivors?  Or perhaps we'd find Shangri-la? (I know, I know, wrong continent.)  As sick as I felt, I was absolutely elated.  My immediate future was one big glorious question mark.

These days, I go on much smaller excursions.  My looming horizons are not the snow-topped peaks of the Andes.  They are the windmill-topped foothills of Livermore.

Don't get me wrong.  I like my life these days pretty well.  It just that there's that bit of Don Quixote that still lives inside me.  I want that great adventure in my life.  Realistically, I'll have to wait on that but I won't do that for too long.  I can see the clock ticking on the wall.

Seymour salivated like one of Pavlov's dogs when the girls' field-hockey team got on Caltrain.  Accompanied by their coach, Ms. Van Dyke, the dozen plus teenagers from Saint Xena's Academy had just boarded in Palo Alto for a league tournament in San Francisco.

The coach and most of the girls managed to find seats next to each other.  Sally, aged 15, was the odd one out and the only seat left for her was next to Seymour.

He was sitting next to the aisle and made no effort to slide over toward the window.  As she stepped over him, his eyes drank in the tanned young thighs bared between Sally's white knee socks and tartan skirt.

After she sat down, Seymour began to look her up and down.  He took his time.  He was in no rush.  He liked the way her blonde hair was pulled back tight into a ponytail, leaving a clear view of her high cheekbones, upturned nose, and pouty lips.  He liked how she sat with her shoulders squared and back straight, showing off a bit of the adolescent pertness beneath her white-and-gold school jersey.  He liked her calves and knees, as well as her thighs.  He really liked her thighs.

Sally stared out the window of the train, never looking at Seymour.  He sensed that she knew he was looking at her.  She probably didn't like it but figured there was nothing she could do to stop him.

Seymour liked that too.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cell phone.  The phone had a camera.  Seymour extended his arm down between her legs and pointed the lens up her skirt.  He started taking pictures.

At that very moment down in San Jose, Seymour's wife noticed that she was almost out of cigarettes.  She called her husband to ask if he could pick up a carton on the way home.

Seymour's cell phone rang.  Before he could pull his hand away, Sally's knees came together and clamped onto it like a steel trap.  When he found he could not free himself from her grasp, he realized that he was no longer the predator.  He was now the prey.  His beseeching eyes, full of fear, met hers, full of hate.

"Pervert!" she snarled and delivered two powerful elbow smashes to his face.  The first knocked him back in his seat.  The second broke his nose.  She then relaxed her knees and shoved the hapless Seymour out into the center aisle of the train car.

He went sprawling face down.  His cell phone skidded down the aisle and came to rest at the feet of Ms. Van Dyke, who had gotten up to see what all the commotion was about.  The jostling had put the phone in slideshow mode and its upturned display clicked through its owner's vast upskirt collection as a woman's voice on its speaker said, "Seymour?  Seymour?"

Ms. Van Dyke raised her foot, and with elephantine pile-driver force, she brought it down upon the phone.  The call from the wife was disconnected.  The device that had stolen so much innocence was destroyed.

"Get him, girls," said Ms. Van Dyke.

With that, the entire team were out of their seats and descended upon Seymour.  He had raised himself up to his feet but quickly fell flat again as punches, kicks, and blows from hockey sticks rained down upon him.  The assault continued until it was halted by Ms. Van Dyke blowing her whistle.

"That's enough, girls," she said.  "Now throw this piece of garbage off the train."

Seymour felt hands grabbing him from all side.  He was hoisted up above the girls' heads and they began to march him toward the exit doors in the middle of the car.

A conductor came in and tried to intervene.  Ms. Van Dyke moved to intercept him.

"Federal labor law entitles you to a fifteen-minute break," she said.  I suggest you take yours now."

After sizing up both her bulk and her determination, the conductor decided to take her advice and quickly made his exit.

The train doors swung open.  Seymour looked out at the ugly, squat tract homes whizzing by and the Tanforan mall off in the distance.

"San Bruno?  I hate this town," he said.

"So do we," said the girls in unison and they tossed him off the train.

Seymour landed on the pile of rocks running along the side of the railroad tracks.  After bouncing twice, he rolled to a stop on a dirt path between the tracks and the back fence to someone's yard.  He tried to get up but every attempt to move revealed yet another broken bone.

High overhead, none other than Superman was on a routine patrol of the region.  He saw the man thrown from the train and swooped down to investigate.

"What seems to be the problem, citizen?" he asked after landing and placing his hands firmly on his hips.

"Oh Superman, you've got to help me," pleaded Seymour.  "Females have run amok.  All I did was a little harmless upskirt and they've gone and taken the law into their own hands.  From one man to another, I beg of you.  Do something!"

"You have a valid point," said the crime-fighting Kryptonian.  "But I have thought the matter over and decided not to care."

"Why not?"

"Well citizen, I have X-ray vision.  I don't need upskirt."

And with a hearty "Up, up, and away!" the Man of Steel soared skyward, leaving poor Seymour to suffer and long for a simpler time when a man could quench his thirst for beauty without fear.

I finished Monday's blog entry and posted it shortly before going to work.  I was glad I was keeping up the bargain I had made with myself to update Poison Spur every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I was also glad that I had gotten over whatever bug had hit me on Sunday.

The latter gladness proved to be a tad premature.

I had slept well the night before (a couple of shots of Nyquil will do that) and woke up feeling a lot better than I did the previous day.  As I walked toward BART, I felt a little out of it but attributed this to getting too much sleep rather than genuine fatigue.

I rolled into work a gentlemanly ten minutes late.  This is a perfectly reasonable arrival time because there is a route from the elevator to my desk that goes nowhere near the offices of the few people who would give a shit.

I got to my cubicle and realized that I had left my laptop home.  The monitor, keyboard, mouse, and that gizmo that connects all those peripherals to it lay on my desk missing that one crucial part.

 I went home, got the laptop, and came back to work as fast as I could (on the off chance any of my employers are reading this, I stayed late that day to make up the time, so there).  The extra exertion all but exhausted me.  Fortunately, I have a lot of experience showing up to work with the sort of hangovers that make mere influenza pale by comparison.  Making it through the day feeling like a coyote shat me over a cliff has become almost second nature.

I picked up some crackers and orange juice on the way home and then curled up on the couch under a pile of blankets.  I was in no condition to think, let alone write.

Yesterday, I felt better.  Not great, but better.  My MWF commitment was still firm and if all I had to share was some lame excuse tarted up with self pity, so be it.

I promise something better on Friday.  You, not-so-gentle reader, shall be both amused and impressed.

This update to Poison Spur is going to be lame.  it is completely going to suck.  In fact, if you've managed to read this far, you're probably regretting it already.

I apologize.  I know you've come to expect better.  You usually have one hand wrapped around the neck of a gin bottle and another stuffed down your pants when you read my blog.  That's how much you like it.

And it should have been no different this time.  I had source material.  Oh boy, did I ever.  I went to Stockton on Saturday with Paula.  Stockton, CA, God's country, or at least where God squatted down after subsisting for a week on a diet of pork rinds and Schlitz.

Sunday, we met up with friends of hers and wandered SF's Chinatown at a street fair for Chinese New Year.  Frank Chu was there.  So was half the planet, it seemed.  I should have been able to come up with something clever from that experience as well.

Then a flu bug hit me.  At least I thought it was the flu.  My only symptoms were feeling feverish and fatigued.  This was not normal.  I just wanted to go home, lie down, and feel sorry for myself.  This is plenty normal though yesterday, it was in excess of what I'm used to.

So I went home.  My head hurt too much to read so I watched TV.  Larry the Cable Guy was doing stand-up on Comedy Central.  He still wasn't funny.  Perhaps I was not so far gone after all.

I ended up sleeping a lot, ten hours at least.  That definitely helped.  I feel much better today.  Unfortunately, I didn't have much chance to write. 

But write I must.  I made a promise to myself that I was going to be less of a loser from here on out.  I committed myself to writing more and posting to Poison Spur every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  No excuses, not even when I feel off. 

So there you have it.  I'm keeping up my end of the bargain, for good or ill. 

Mandy was taken from her home on a winding road that made its way along high ridges and deep canyons.  The mountains gave way to foothills and beyond that lay a valley that spread as far as the eye could see.

Out in the valley, places that had once been towns and cities were now just remnants of buildings that had been bulldozed flat or gutted by fire.  Most people had moved to refugee settlements, away from the metropolitan areas.  These were made up of mobile homes along with camping tents and tool sheds repurposed as domiciles that sat tightly packed and surrounded with high fences topped with barbed wire.  A recently privatized state prison nearby had evicted its entire inmate population and now advertised cells for rent to those who could afford something a little more upscale than settlement living.

One unmistakable feature of the valley was the prevalence of open-air crematoria.  By a long-standing executive order, all corpses were to be burned in these facilities.  The fluids from the bodies of zombies, which did not burn, flowed outward from the bonfires and killed all vegetation they touched.  From the elevation of the foothills, the toxic rivulets that stained the earth around the fire pits looked like strands of coarse black hair.

The truck descended into the valley and continued along a main highway that had, like everything else, fallen into disrepair.  Potholes were unavoidable and large metal pieces of former automobiles were a common sight along the shoulder and out in the middle of the road.  Driving here in the day was dangerous.  Attempting it at night would be suicidal.

After a while, the truck pulled off the highway.  It drove up a dirt road bisecting two fields sloping gently upward on either side where lettuce had once been grown but now yielded a crop of weeds.

The truck came up to where there were a dozen steel cages lining the side of the road, stopped, and then backed up against the last of them.  Carl got out of the vehicle, trotted over to the cage, and opened it.  He then drew his sidearm, slid open the back door of the truck, and stood back.

At the same time, Dan lit a highway flare and climbed through the door that went from the cab of the truck into the main cargo area.  Mandy stood at a slight crouch and grunted at him.  She had freed herself of the net during the journey and was completely naked, the few strips of clothing she had on her after 15 years caught in the nylon.

Mandy was hungry.  She had been unable to hold onto the arm that lured her when she was trapped.  A much larger meal was now close to her but she was kept away by a red hissing flame.  She greedily eyed his love handles.

Dan waved the flare back and forth as he approached.

"How would you like me to shove this right up your ass?" he asked her, rhetorically of course.

Her dislike of fire outweighed her hunger and she retreated.  Dan moved toward her steadily and soon she was out of the back of the door and into the cage.  Carl swung the cage door shut and latched it.  For the second time in one day, Mandy was trapped.

Carl took a few of photographs of Mandy in her cage then the two men got back into the truck and drove away.  

A few of the other cages were occupied.  There was a fat man, an old woman, and a young man who had lost both his legs.  They were all zombies.  Mandy had no interest in them.

She spent the next three weeks in her cage.  She was given nothing to eat and it rained on her twice.  This continued until one cold Saturday morning.  Mandy was crouched motionless in the corner of the cage, a layer of frost covering her body.  A red light flashed in a small electronic box in an upper corner of the cage.  There was an audible click and an entire side of Mandy's prison came loose and fell flat onto the cold hard earth.

She did not respond to her newfound freedom until the scent of human flesh carried by the morning breeze found its way to her nostrils.  She got out of the cage and stood upright, then walked toward the origin of the smell, which came from somewhere beyond the barren field on the other side of the road.

When she crested the low hill, she walked toward three men standing about 50 yards away.  They were a few paces back from the severed arm that had first lured her and now was put out as bait again, thawing atop a picnic cooler. 

Two of the men were Carl and Dan.  The third man was taller than the others.  He wore a leather bomber jacket and camouflage pants that been ironed so there was a sharp crease running down each leg. He was also carrying a hunting rifle, which he pointed at Mandy and fired.

The shot was wide of its mark and the bullet sailed past her several feet away.  The next shot was better aimed but too low, hitting the dirt several feet in front of Mandy.

Carl walked over to the man and flipped a switch on the side of rifle, turning on the laser sight.  The man pointed the rifle so the red dot was directly over Mandy's heart and pulled the trigger.  The shot would have killed any living person.  Mandy didn't even slow down. He put another bullet into her right thigh, which gave her a slight limp.

"You've got to aim for the head, Mr. Madison," Dan called out.

Mr. Madison put the red dot in the middle of Mandy's forehead and fired one last shot.  The bullet entered Mandy's brain and she fell backward.  She lay very still in the shadow of a sign facing the road that said:

Zombie Hunter Safari

Where the savior of humanity is you!

Carl looked at Mandy through a pair of binoculars and then gave the all-clear signal.  The three men walked over to her.

"I got her! I sent her back to hell!" said Mr. Madison.

"You certainly did, sir," said Carl.

"You know," said Mr. Madison.  "I envy you guys.  I spent the whole war in my gated community and never saw any action.  Our private security took care of everything."

"We certainly could have used you," said Carl.  Isn't that right, Dan?"

Dan nodded.

Fluid seeped from Mandy's wounds, killing the surrounding weeds.

Mandy Banks was either 19 or 34 years old, depending how you looked at it.  She and her older brother Richard had run a gas station together along a road high in the mountains.  They never did a whole lot of business due to their remote location, but it had been enough to pay the bills. 

One afternoon fifteen years ago, Richard drove to the nearest town to buy supplies, leaving Mandy to mind the station.  A couple of hours later, she saw his pickup truck coming fast back up the road.    The truck skidded to a stop on the gravel out front of the gas pumps.  The driver-side door swung open and Richard piled out.  He was holding his hand over the side of his head.  Blood ran thick between his fingers and was all over the collar and shoulder of his shirt.

"My God, Richard!  What happened to you?" Mandy said.

"The whole town has gone nuts," Richard said.  "People were just attacking each other on the street.  And remember Mrs. Berryhill, your old piano teacher?  She came out of nowhere and tackled me.  Took damn near half my ear off with her teeth."

Mandy helped her brother into the office where they kept the first-aid kit.  As she cleaned and dressed his wound, she said she should take him to see a doctor.  He said the nearest doctor was in town and there was no way he was going back there until things calmed down.

That evening at the dinner table, Richard began to feel ill.  He held his arms around his sides and shivered.  When Mandy put her hand against his forehead, there was no sign of fever.  If anything, he was cold to the touch.

She put him to bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep.  He didn't look good.  Town full of crazies or no, she swore to herself that she would take him to see a doctor the next day.

When Mandy went to check on Richard in the morning, he was dead.  She dropped to her knees, took his hand in hers, and sobbed.  She knelt by his side and cried for a long time, blaming herself for not getting him medical attention right away.

Then Richard's eyes opened and he bit her on the arm.

The bite was deep enough to break the skin and draw blood.

"Damn it, Richard.  That hurt," she said.

She expected an apology from him but he didn't say anything.  He just stared at her with eyes that didn't know her anymore.  He reached with one of his hands and tried to grab her.  She batted it out of the way.  He then lunged at her with both hands but she dodged his attack and ran out of the bedroom.

She kept moving until she was out of the house and on the path back toward the gas station.  He looked over over her shoulder and saw Richard standing in in the doorway, drool running down his chin and that same empty look in his eyes.

Her first thought was to drive away in the pickup truck but the keys were in the house, with him.  Mandy was a good runner so her next plan was to head down the road on foot as quickly as she could and flag down the first car that came along.

As she ran along the side of the road, her heart pounded and blood pulsed through her veins.  The cold numbness of the bite wound on her arm quickly began to spread and her entire body started to shiver.  She felt exhausted, more so than she ever had in her life.  Mandy stumbled a few more steps then leaned against a tree and slid to the ground.

By the time the first car appeared, she lay there out of its view and unconscious.

That afternoon, she got up and walked back to the gas station.  The car that had passed her was parked in front of one of the pumps.  There was the sound of an infant crying in the back seat.  The driver of the car, a woman in her thirties lay on the gravel with her throat ripped away.  Richard crouched next to her.  He had managed to tear open her abdominal cavity and was greedily shoving sections of small intestine into his mouth.

When he heard his sister's feet scuff along the gravel, he looked up at her for a moment and then resumed his meal.  Mandy paid even less attention to him.  She walked to the car and opened the back door.  The baby's crying stopped and Mandy had herself a late lunch.

The plague that had turned Mandy and Richard into zombie cannibals was ravaging much of the country.  This led to a war between the living, who wished to remain that way, and the living dead, who kept trying to eat the living.

The battles continued for years.  The living soon found themselves to be a dwindling minority as people reluctant to shoot their zombie loved ones in the head were either devoured or infected and turned into zombies themselves.

In the end though, the army of the living prevailed.  Once people became accustomed to the idea that butting a bullet between your mother's eyes did not necessarily make you a bad person, the zombies never had a chance.  After that, it came down to a contest between gnashing teeth and firearms.  Countless species on the planet had already learned the painful lesson that it is really no contest at all.

Humanity, with their survival assured, then set about the tasks of putting corpses to the torch and building their world anew.

Mandy and Richard missed most of the excitement because the war never came to them.  They fed on wild game and the occasion outdoorsman or stranded motorist, letting one day drift into the next without a care in the world.

They lived (or rather, dwelled) at the gas station for over a decade, making forays into the wilderness periodically in search of food.  This went on until one evening when Richard was struck by lightning while chasing a raccoon across an open field.  He was filthy with motor oil from clumsily tripping and knocking over drums of the stuff back at the station so when the lightning bolt hit him, he went up like a torch.  He took two steps and then collapsed face forward, the flames coming off him licking the night sky.

Mandy was standing no more than 20 feet from her brother when this happened.

"Hnnngggh, mnnngggh," she said, expressing a disdain for fire common among zombies and wandered off to start her solo career.

The next five years were as uneventful for Mandy as the previous ten.  The only real difference was that the decline in numbers of the human population had brought the availability of their meat down to almost zero.  Mandy fed on possum, skunk, whatever else she could get her hands on and did so willingly, albeit with less enthusiasm than when she had the chance to bite into a hiking-firmed buttock of a Sierra Clubber.

Then one day, Mandy was walking along trail in a wooded area and saw a human arm hanging on a rope from a tree branch overhead.  She salivated, let out a little hiss, and marched toward the severed limb.

When her hand grasped the arm, she triggered a trap.  She was hauled up in a net made from thick nylon mesh.  Mandy thrashed about but was unable to free herself.

Two men approached.  They smelled of beer and being alive.

"Carl, I think we just recuped our expenses for gas and that arm," said one of them.

Mandy continued to writhe and strain against the nylon.

"Yeah we did," said Carl.  "She's got plenty of fight in her.  I bet our man'll like that."

"As long as she doesn't have too much fight."

"She could be Lucy fucking Liu and it won't matter one goddamn bit.  Come on, Dan.  Let's cut this bitch down and throw her ass in the truck."

I spent much of this past weekend trying to come up with a new story idea.  I wasn't tying for anything that would win me an award or even be publishable anywhere but in my blog.  I just wanted a story that could hold a reader's interest for 500 words or so.

I looked through a spiral notebook that I've used to jot down stuff that pops into my head when I was at work or some other place where I couldn't take an idea and run with it.  I thought there would be an absolute gem in there somewhere since I have all this untapped genius that has been sitting there waiting to get out for almost half a century.

Alas, there were no gems, and not even what would rate a cubic zirconium.  This is what I found instead:

• What the Retard Saw (murder-mystery title)
• He had sleepy creepy Baldwin eyes. (character description)
• "That's just God's way of telling you your faith doesn't mean shit to him." (Advice to the unfortunate)
• Watching stump fucking on "Darfur's Got Talent" (Pithy satire of mass entertainment)
• Women are like onion rings.  If you batter them, they won't make you cry. (Pearl of misogynist wisdom)

Not even my standards are that low.

I ended up spending most of Sunday morning staring at the ceiling in my bedroom and brainstorming.  I had a few premises with potential but nothing concrete.  Finally, I came up with something I could use.  Unfortunately, it not the kind of idea where the story writes itself.  To produce narrative that doesn't completely suck, I'm going to have to work with this one.

I should have something knocked out by Wednesday.  If I don't, expect another filler entry like this one.

Oh, if you're wondering what the photo has to do with this entry, the short answer is "nothing."  I just liked the pic and thought it might spice up my prose.  Naked mannequins, I mean, what's not to like?