The Night

The road winds, twists and turns. It runs over hills, down valleys and cuts across the arid flats like a scalpel, two lanes bisecting the deserts sandy body. He looks out the car windshield, knowing where the road will take him but not the night. His only reassurances are the comforting weight of the .45 on his hip, and the sound of the modified V8 as it roars down the road, the car as black as the night it rips through.

The engine roars a little louder through the pipes as he presses down on the gas pedal.

The Ghost of Tom Joad comes through the speakers.

Leather on leather, his holster creaks against his gun belt.

He doesn’t know how the night will end, only that one it will end.

Monsters

You know how when you are a kid you are afraid of the dark? Your imagination would populate the shadows and the night with all manner of monsters. Some would be things you saw on television, read or heard in stories, or just things you saw that scared you that your child’s imagination would morph in to some shapeless boogy man.

I’m here to tell you that those monsters are real.

They live inside you waiting to take control, scratching away at your brain and conscience every day. Every mean thought and every dark impulse is theirs. Some people are better at fighting their inner monsters than others. For some, the monsters are just too big. Others have to maintain a daily fight against the growing darkness inside them! Building a virtual Hadrain’s Wall between them and the monsters, populating the garrisons with every mental defense and offense imaginable to wage mental war. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, for some it’s a stalemate.

The monsters are real, they are you.

Rain Day

He stood there outside his front door, looking up in to the sky. The rain washed over his face, through his beard and down his neck, cleaning the dust of the day off his skin. He took his grease stained gloves off and shut the garage door; a cement floor was not a place to be lying on when the temperature started to drop. Besides, the day was called because of rain. Rain days were few and far between, they were days for sitting on the porch with a hot cup of coffee and looking out across the desert to the mountains.

The desert is a hard place, he thought as he gazed at the landscape that surrounded his home, full of jagged and sharp edges. In the summer it was hot, dry, dusty and shades of brown as far as you can see, if your not looking closely that is. In the winter, cold, dry, and dusty. Not as cold as other places, but still colder than most people realized and of course, windy. It didn’t matter what time of the year it was, it was almost always windy. Normally just breezy, but it could change to the kind of wind that blows over telephone poles and rips the roofs off houses. But today wasn’t windy, today was rain.

The rain would be welcome by everyone, especially if it were to be a rainy winter. A rainy winter meant that wildflowers and desert grasses would be abounded in the spring. The desert wildlife might have a chance to live a little easier this next year, instead of coming in to the towns for food and water. He didn’t know how many cats and dogs the people in town had lost to the coyotes this year, but he knew it had been a lot. Just the other day he read that a bobcat was actually seen in town carrying off a small dog. The animals were desperate if they were getting that close to people. He hoped this was the sign of a rainy winter, to change all that.

In his own way he was like the animals that lived in the desert; wary of other people, only going in to town when he had to and full of scars from a hard life. He gave a small smile and shook his head at that thought; the things he thought of when stopping to enjoy the rain. He walked under the porch, wiping the water off his face and kicking the mud off his boots before going in the house. It was time for that coffee.

You can’t go home again

The other evening I walked the silent streets of the neighborhood I grew up in. The streetlights gave a dull yellow light, throwing small anemic pools of light on each corner that brought the shadows in instead of driving them back. A few porch light’s tried to drive back the night that the street lights wouldn’t. They were fighting a losing battle, most of the houses stood dark and silent. Some families were away to celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend with family in other places, but most houses just sit empty. The former residents have either died or moved away. The only living things that I saw were a few dogs, guarding their owner’s yards from the increasing crime. The night was still and silent, no cars passed by, no television sets or radio’s carried their sounds from houses where there used to be life, to train rumble or horn; just an almost malevolent silence that followed me back to the warmth and glow of my grandparent’s home. A shrinking oasis of light in an ever increasing desert of dark.