Some Days are a Slow Crash against a Concrete Wall

I wake from a bad dream about my car not starting only to discover a housecat sprawled across my neck and feeling like a noose tightening.  When I look for breakfast I find only two gala apples in my refrigerator and a half-empty bag of corn chips in the cupboard.

The chips are stale.

News.  Barely surviving in the Philippines.  Tornadoes purpling across the Midwest and dismantling whole towns in seconds.  Something about somebody that shot somebody else.  Talk about healthcare is making me sick.  

I drive to town for a meeting.

By lunchtime I have missed three important phone calls, somebody shot somebody else somewhere, wind and snow are raking across the valley and the temperature has plummeted into the teens.

In the late afternoon I retrieve mail at my remote mailbox—finding three advertisements and a mailer meant for my long-gone wife.  One of the advertisement flyers slips from my hand.  By the time the flyer hits the ground, the wind has brought the fucking thing alive.  The flyer leaps away, bounds across the road, somehow clears the fence, and then trots off to join some horses huddled together like a dark shadow at the far end of the pasture.

At home again, I have one apple left.

And the stale chips.

--Mitchell Hegman       (Note to Gayle: We can’t slay dragons every day…but we try)