Prey

As I drove slowly towards the mob of angry protestors and my meeting with 200, I thought of 199. The ashes of a once hard man, staring at me with wide eyes that pleaded for hope like a dog begging for treats. I’d somehow found a way to give him that hope. But I remembered the stench on him when he first came in. A man who had not bathed or changed clothes in who knew how long. Even when he did clean up, halfway through our sessions, I could still smell the decay. And even after that final session, he left a waft of it clinging to the floor.

My car purred almost soundlessly as it drove itself forwards, inching toward the chanting ranks of people and their placards. A cop who looked ready to fall asleep motioned me through the barricade as other officers stood at alert and kept the crowd parted. The picketers screamed the usual insults at me as I drove through them: murderer, bitch, slut, and worse. They had no idea who I was. I could have been any female employee—a janitor, a nurse, an office junior—but they didn’t care. They were hurting and they wanted someone else to feel it. They didn’t know how many lives I had saved. Maybe if I posted my save numbers on the car, I’d be greeted with less rancor.

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Take-em!

“OK Dad, I’ll come for the long weekend, but I’m not sure I want to hunt with you,” Joey said as he wound up his longest conversation with his father in years. “Those couple of hunts you took me on when I was thirteen didn’t make a hunter out of me. I just remember being cold and that we didn’t shoot much. Anyway, I don’t know that I’m the type to enjoy killing things.”

Joey’s parents had divorced six years ago and his mother had moved them to a busy metropolitan area on the east coast. During those years, he’d seen very little of his father whose work as a petroleum engineer required extensive periods of foreign travel and residency. Joey’s experiences of nature and wildlife were limited to the local parks of Chevy Chase, Maryland, where hunting was neither encouraged or tolerated, camo clothing was regarded as a symbol of ignorance, and most people didn’t know a mallard from a mockingbird. Through deep immersion in urban life, he’d acquired the belief that hunting for sure and maybe fishing too were at best questionable activities not suited to the modern age of growing population, environmental problems of all sorts, and scarce resources. But he respected his father as a well-educated man, known as a staunch environmentalist of his community, who had hunted from boyhood on. What was the appeal of it? Why was he still doing it at the age of fifty? Now nineteen and starting his junior year of college, Joey really wanted to reestablish a relationship with his father, man to man, as he envisioned it, and he would explain his reasons for doubt about the proposed hunt, now just a few weeks away. Whether he hunted or not, Joey hoped they would become close again by the experience. And maybe he would even find something positive about hunting if he gave it a chance.

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StarStuck

They thought the boy odd from the day he was born. He had two eyes, two hands, two ears, two feet, but what confused the Great Purveyors of Reason to no end was that he giggled, even when no one was looking, even without cause.

He was the first baby born in one thousand years in the Great Sky of Reason, so they had forgotten what youth was truly like. There, above Earth’s mountains and deserts and beaches, all lived by the strict dictates of logic, and the slightest flickering of impulsiveness, of emotion was pounced upon and dissected until it was reasoned away. The Great Purveyors could not risk allowing feelings to get the better of anyone for it caused people to act irrationally or without forethought. Such behaviors were the bane of Reason, and thereby had to be eliminated to maintain equilibrium of the mind, which was by far the most commonsensical way to live.

The boy grew older and his smiles only increased as he discovered the world around him. His oddity became more apparent as he delighted in obscure, little things; like the feel of grass between his toes, the trickle of rainwater through his hair, the squish of mud between his palms. He chased after fireflies without a jar, he built castles in the sand even though waves washed them away. His parents struggled to understand their eccentric little boy, who laughed even though he had no knowledge or philosophy or understanding of pleasure, joy, and happiness. Even once the boy was old enough to walk and talk and ask reasonable questions, his imagination remained unhindered.

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The Mind Reader

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An outspoken bar patron runs an experiment to see if the world can be divided into the “weak” and the “strong” in attempt to prove he’s not an authoritarian fascist.

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