Two Shots, Extra Sugar - Portland

He handed me crumpled page, hand written, both sides - "just a memory of mine. Was just so, I tell you three times".

I'm sitting inside Powell’s Books, in World Cup Coffee, and I think it must be summer, and some year not yet long past. A young woman in a Pokemon t-shirt sits poring through an overstuffed binder of game cards next to two guys who are discussing Stephen Hawking as to quantum graphics.  

The two men speak of "Project Xanadu", and what a fiasco that was. Another guy is talking to a kid who has a Canadian flag sticking out of his tartan plaid day-pack. The man is telling him about selling his BMW and buying the cargo bicycle of his dreams. It will have laser-filigreed meteorite-alloy disk brakes. The Xanadu-Hawking guys shake hands and leave, each drawing a phone as he goes. 


I'm watching Bob watching out the window, as a sidewalk river-current of humans, mostly, moves steadily by. Across from me, out of the blue, Pokemon girl says the cards go in a story she's writing. “Writing is good,” I say. She doesn’t say anything in response but her eyes look up towards me without looking at me. I worry that I’ve intruded or perhaps just said something stupid. I feel the otherness wafting off her, coming in waves, and I feel my own place in this realm shift again, just a bit. 

Outside, a girl with magenta hair and bright green cat-eye glasses stops on the sidewalk. Her bracelet matches her glasses as she reaches in a pocket of her orange dress to give a couple of folded bills to a guy in a wheelchair. He is wearing a POW/MIA ball cap. He smiles at her and they exchange a couple of sentences before moving on. As she starts off her stride catches, just a half-beat, as she’s thinking she’s just heard an owl, right here downtown of all places. Looking around I see eight laptops and six pads being used along the counter that sits against the big windows. There are way too many books being read in here to count. It is Powell's Books after all. No one else in here has seen her, or heard her wondering that.


"Today is a good day to wear green" Pokemon girl says to the young guy with the flag as he’s passing by. She asks him where the flag is from so he explains it's from Quebec, and worn in support of school loan debt protesters there. She blinks at him, that slow hardworking blink that signals shifting gears, jumping tracks, or coming to an abrupt halt and says “Something is coming.”

He quick, looks around behind him, thinking someone wants to pass. There’s no one there. “Excuse me?” he asks her - “Something is coming, something slow and huuuge” she says drawing it out making it huge-er, and then goes back to flipping the album's pages. Flag-kid glances around, catches my eye, gives me a questioning look. I try to give him one back that says “Hey, I’d listen to her”.


He looks back down at her. She's now inspecting a card with a magnifying glass, and he tells her to have a nice day. She just looks up, smiles and nods, as people sometimes do when they’re immersed in something on headphones. She is not wearing headphones.  All this time, Bob, he hasn't said a thing, made a motion, maybe breathed. He gets up now from his book, stretches a leg down and out behind him, then the other, like some big old bird of prey, then pats me on the shoulder, heading off to Mysteries. 

I wonder if all that just happened. Then I realize nothing unusual has just occurred, because this is Powell's, this is Portland. I take that impression out and roll it around to look at it. I wonder if part of that feeling comes from my Native American genes, or if it just means I truly belong here now. Either way “Something Big is coming”, said as one might speak of major geologic events or whole cultures disappearing, and yet said absolutely casually? It's really not much more of a surprise to us than “Tomorrow is another day”.

I pick up my coffee, pressed Sumatran, two shots, extra sugar, and go. Something large flies by overhead, on silent wings.

Heres a video from Portland:  Thomas Dolby, live at the Kink.FM Bing lounge - She Blinded Me With Science

Where I Have Just Come From - Letting Go & Holding On

    

Little Head-Bob ducked his head against the blowing rain, dug his talons into the bark of the elm bough, and leaned against the broad tree trunk. 

He could see into the house by a lamp left on in a bedroom. Something about the young man sleeping there seemed familiar or important, like an itch he couldn't reach to scratch. He sat and stared, mesmerized by the rising and falling as the boy breathed. Gradually the young owl began to doze, puffed up against the wind and rain.

Bob slept deeply, gone a long ways back in time, walking down his hometown street. It was probably about 1966, before they had moved out to the country, the old trees, and the owls. 

Walking home from school, he gazed at the Elm trees that lined the street, fingertip-twigs just touching as the branches arched completely across. He looked down the street and he knew right then that all this was going away. The sunlit leaf patterns on the street, the smell of tiger-lilies in a yard, the humming bird that kept stopping to stare in his face - the way it all was, would be gone in just a while.

He walked on down his street to the house he had lived in all through grade school, in the little town he had lived in all of his life. As he walked he said to himself, to the humming bird, and to the trees: "I promise, I will remember you".

Something startled the owl awake there in the quiet woods, nearly dawn, by the little house where the young man lived. The owl looked in at the bed. The boy wasn’t there. Little Head-Bob looked around him. He knew, and watched himself knowing; that the boy was gone and not coming back. All his people might not be coming back. This place would remain a while and then, it wouldn’t, at least not as he saw it now. 

And Little Head-Bob the owl began to see time.

As the morning sun warmed the woods Little Head-Bob dreamt he was a young man long ago, one of The People, standing in a place not far from where a young owl dozed. 

He looked down the hill. He saw a herd of deer grazing. Once or twice one of the bucks would stop and lift its head to look his way before turning again to the new grass. Farther over, down close to the river he saw the woods, recognized each tree there, and knew them by names only the breeze could say.

And then he knew that something was coming, something big like the wind. All this that had been for as long as The People had known, would soon be gone.

The young owl barely heard the man whisper: “I promise, I will remember you”.

Things Found While Cleaning Out the Garage

Bob hadn't intended this to be the day he cleaned the garage, but looking at the heavy rain falling outside the open overhead door, he supposed it was as good as any. Uncommonly heavy rain for here, for this season, it reminded him of the fall downpours back home.

Gradually he passed through the stacks of boxes and upon shifting the layers of flat materials leaning up against the wall he was surprised to find the deer skull hanging there. It seemed undamaged by all that stuff he had just moved, but he felt guilty, for not having been more careful.

He reached out and took it from the wall and…

Little Head-Bob watched in awe as the rain came down in nearly solid sheets, the trees lit up by the lightning that flashed over and over. He had never seen a storm like this in his young life and he instinctively backed up to the far wall of the nest hole, against the warm living part of the old tree. It had shielded his family from the weather all his life, perhaps it would still do.

Over the rain and the roaring of the creek, now a surging smashing thing he did not recognize, his keen owl ears picked up the sound of something running down the hill. It crashed through the brush toward him as though in flight or panic.  He could hear it coming, leaping and darting, changing direction every time the lightning flashed or the thunder struck.

Terrified, the doe came so fast it never had a chance to stop before it got to the raging creek. Now twenty feet wide and over twelve feet deep, the once tiny creek was carrying everything in its path downstream with it. 

Watching from his nest, Little Head-Bob's eyes flashed wide, shocked, as the deer's reflexive leap carried it high up, out over the creek and almost to the bank on his side. Then plunging into the roaring water the deer tumbled out of sight and was just - gone.

Lightning flashed and across the creek he saw a shadowy thing standing as though looking his way. He shivered and blinked but then the shadow was gone, obscured by darkness, as the lightning faded.

Another flash of lightning and Bob looked up from the skull in his hands and there out through the rain across the street, where the water ran swift through the ditch, he thought he saw a shadow. Something with four legs, something there… and then gone.

Little Head-Bob blinked in the sun, drying his feathers as he dozed, dreaming of a man who walked along the creek bank. The man stopped, looked at the pile of dead brush stuck under the tree fallen across the creek, and caught the glint of light off something there.

Bob waded into the knee-deep creek, careful of the slick moss that covered rock bottom, trying to watch where he was going while still keeping an eye on that spot in the brush.  Hedge thorns raked the back of his hand as he tunneled it into the pile, back almost to his full arm's-length, before finally catching hold of the thing. Carefully bringing it out he was surprised to be holding a perfectly intact deer skull, too small for a buck, staring back at him.

Little Head-Bob watched as the man climbed backed up out of the creek, the skull of the storm-killed doe in his hand.

Standing in his garage Bob jumped, startled out of his reverie, when his wife poked her head in to call him to dinner. He looked down absently at the skull in his hand.

"Are you still hanging on to that thing?" she asked.

"Uh-huh. Be there in just a minute, Hon" he replied.

She cocked her head and looked at him kind of side-ways like she did sometimes. Then half grinning, she turned back to the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

Bob found a push pin there in the tray and reaching up high on the wall stuck it in.  He hung the skull and his memories far up this time, out of everyday life's range, not quite so easily covered.

It just seemed to matter somehow.

"My World", Bob said, "Not Thurber's, and Welcome To It"

Bob was somewhere in a dream, moving, no — driving, in a car, somehow having just come down from some great height with a jolt yet surprisingly still intact, sort of, and into a landscape — no a road, no not a road — sand and dunes, others all racing around him, and

*FLASH!*

Little Head-Bob awoke.  Something felt, no — something WAS wrong. He couldn’t focus his eyes. There was something, sand perhaps, in the wind—in a wind that was blowing into his eyes and — there was no wind.  Maybe not even his eyes, but still, something was not right. Something was wrong. The young owl could not get his eyes to focus, his. . . smell wasn’t working, the leaves of the tree, his tree, an ancient black oak, a black jack, they wouldn’t come right. They just weren’t right.

Something seemed to strike him in the head — on the inside of his head. He tilted his head, and tilted it some more and one of his feet, he couldn’t tell which one, let go of the branch. It lifted of its own accord. He couldn’t make it come back down, couldn’t make his strong talons grip again the branch. He listed farther to one side, the leg kept lifting. In a panic he shook and fell, down and down and, so fast the ground came up, he knew he was dying and

*FLASH!*

Bob woke, something felt, no — something WAS — wrong. He couldn’t get his mind to focus. Someone was talking, he could hear words, coming across the room — he was in a room, and he could hear her speaking. He knew he should be able to understand the sounds she was making. . . words. She was speaking words. He could tell. And she was upset. He knew this, but still he could not make the words come into focus.
Reality was. . . not right. Time was moving wrong. It wasn’t moving backwards, but wasn’t flowing right, either. It was like sitting in a meadow, when the warm spring breeze that was drifting from behind was suddenly a stiff wind in your face, full of sand. And screwing your eyes shut tight, you suddenly couldn’t tell where you were and

*FLASH!*

It wasn’t that time, that reality, was moving backwards, it was more like reality was a cat. Reality was a cat being petted, but the wrong way, against the lay of its fur, and the woman, she was upset. She was speaking, weeping, and he could not understand her words and. . . 

He was walking, outside. He had just passed one of Claire’s vineyards, was coming up on Maeve’s orchard, he could smell the peaches, ripe and almost overripe. The thing was there again, just over his shoulder, his. . . left shoulder, he could feel it there, keeping pace with him, not pouncing, but just, almost, ready to.  He was alone. No, I — I was alone. I am alone. Where am I? What day is this? 

 “Friday,” the thing, keeping pace with me, just over my left shoulder, says.

*FLASH!*

Bob blinked. Something had just happened. He wasn’t sure what. He couldn’t get a bead on where he was, when he was. Time, it wasn’t moving backward, exactly. It was more that time, that reality, was a stream flowing around him, and he was spinning out of control, moving, no the stream, the river of time, it was moving, at break-neck speed, and Bob was staying in one place, but spinning. 

“It’s all right,” she said, there, just over his left shoulder.

He was walking past Maeve’s Orchard, coming up on one of Claire’s vineyards. There, sitting on a branch in one of the peach trees, no – in a black jack tree, a young owl blinked, was looking at him and… just fell off its branch.

*flash*

This piece originally appeared on Amwriting.org

One Tuesday On the Farm – True Story 

(Well, Maybe) by John Ross Barnes

As Bob drank his coffee with only the stove light on he wondered why he was even sitting there in the kitchen at four in the morning, but something had made him get up. Perhaps he was just excited to be on spring break, his last before graduating high school, and not a moment too soon for him.

Through the screen door the usual chirping of crickets was loud in the dark so he noticed when they just stopped, all at once. It was like something had flipped a switch. A little shiver ran down his spine and he started to wonder what that was about, but there were chickens to tend, eggs to collect, and before that the dogs to feed and turn out for the day.

Out the back door, across the walk, to the old canning shed. Something, just there, dashing into the english ivy, small thrashings through, making a B-line towards the creek below. What would move like that? Not a rabbit—too loud, too big. Not a cat—wouldn’t be staying under the tight vines that way. Whatever it was, now silent, had gone to ground and waited to see if Bob was coming after it.

It wasn’t the first time Bob couldn’t figure out what an animal was by its stirrings. Still, this felt. . . different. “Never get between a bear and its cub,” he said to himself. He wondered why—certainly no bears in South East Kansas.

Carrying the two big old coffee cans of dry food balanced in his left hand, he curled the five gallon water bucket up with his right to where he could lock his elbow. Halfway through the sprawling back yard, he stopped, set the bucket down (same place as always), carefully switched the dog food to his right hand (without spilling it), and picked up the bucket with his left. When his elbow started to hurt, he grunted slightly and gritted his teeth. It was still easier to walk carrying it this way than it would have been to hold it down at arm’s length, swinging and sloshing all the way.

It was then he realized the dogs weren’t doing their normal good morning yelping and prancing. They were standing inside the fence, shoulders hunched and heads held forward as though at point. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Something was wrong here, something that drew the dogs attention—something that held them, barely in check, staring at—no through—Bob, to a point somewhere behind him.

He kept walking, not wanting to stop and upset his arm loads like a goofy kid, and more, not wanting to look behind. “Whatever you do,” he thought, “don’t look.” Twenty feet to the door of the dogs’ shed, he knew he had to get in. Fifteen feet, now ten, five, he didn’t care that the water bucket splashed all over him. He almost threw it down, reaching for the door, swinging it open. The dogs, now growling, burst out and past him at full speed. As soon as they cleared the doorway, he dove through it, into the shed, and slammed himself in. He threw the bolt fast and crouched down, his back against the door, his eyes scrunched tight, grimacing.

He could feel through his insides, the charging of the two big labs, practically roaring as they went, the sound pushing out of them hard with each stride they made. Little bits of dirt and sod ripped up by their claws pelted the door of the shed as they tore back the way he had just come

Bob realized his ribs hurt where he still clutched the big cans, too hard against his side, forgotten just as he had forgotten to breathe. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale, inhale. He set the cans down. Still crouched there, shaking, he could hear the dogs fighting now, fighting with something big.  A bark, a yelp, another, more angry than hurt, and then charging off again.

He finally rose and looked out the wire mesh window. He could barely see them, going faster than he’d ever seen them go. Whatever they were after was faster still, out of sight, in the dark, over the bank and splashing now, loud as a horse, down the creek and under the bridge—sounds echoing off the cement and then gone.

He started to open the door to go after them and then right away thought “To Hell with THAT.” Whatever it was, the block-head twins were way more capable of handling it than he. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty minutes, however much longer it was, before he got up the nerve to venture out. He left the door to the shed open as he went, something he never did.

Three hours later the retrievers came back, panting heavily and bounding to him as though they hadn’t seen him in years. They knocked him down in their haste. He didn’t mind the being licked all over the face until he noticed the blood on their muzzles. Not theirs he saw with relief, but then he was hit by the smell. What the Hell was that smell?! Like a skunk, but not. Like an old snapping turtle he recalled, fresh drug from the bottom of the neighbor’s pond, reeking of things half rotted, found and eaten there. . . but not. It was like nothing he could name, and nothing he realized, that he wanted to.

Later in the day the “boys” each got a bath. Big haunches barely fitting in the old galvanized tub, and rinsed down with the hose in the yard. They were always happy for any excuse to get wet. Yet they would stop, cast furtive glances over coal black shoulders towards the creek, nearly inaudible growls deep in their throats.

That night, behind locks checked and checked again, Bob slept, but not well. He left on the big mercury light next to the twins’ pen. It was shining through his bedroom window, but it didn’t give much peace of mind.

Little Head-Bob woke with a start. There was something moving, snuffling around the bottom of the young owl’s tree. It was something big, much bigger even than the coyotes or the calves they sat and watched so keenly in the twilight. Something there insatiably hungry and more, possessed of a terrible, vicious need to kill. It carried a smell of death unlike anything he had known. His brothers and sisters in the nest hole shook and ruffled their feathers as though cold, even though the spring night was warm. They all waited. They all listened. Neither he nor any of those owls hunted that night.

Even the biggest Great Horned Owls didn’t cross some things.