When we sat on the kitchen floor playing and cuddling with your dogs, I didn’t know it would be the moment I fell for you. Yet, it is a moment crystallized into my memory that will never shatter, brightening any dim day.
The smallest moments are what make a life. Passing by many of us without a warning to focus our attention.
How tightly you squeezed my hand as the witches flew and sang. Or the caressing on the small of my back as tears and laughter alike filled the air around a table of friends — an unspoken message of comfort and support.
Little things we fail to notice — even acknowledge — until no longer there. The smiles and twinkling eyes. The knowing glances. The wishes and hopes hanging in the balance somewhere between possible and lost.
Author’s Note: This is a work in progress, but thought I’d see what everyone thought as we approach Halloween. Copyright: Joshua M Magill
She was tall and lean with grittiness to her face that had always warned others not to get too close. I’d always heeded that warning, staying as far from her as possible. Mom and Dad were just trying to be good parents—always giving her hugs and trying to be “firm, yet fair” in their discipline—but none of that mattered when Taylor sent hot bullets through their heads. She only cared about herself, only cared for things that she thought were important. So, when our parents grounded her for having sex with Dirk Benson, she killed them without even a tear.
Taylor was only fifteen. She was not yet a woman, but much more than a mere girl. She was curvy in all the right places, and the boys noticed the sexy way she carried herself—something our mother unintentionally taught her each week on date night. She could never be accused of being a “lady,” which by contrast our mother certainly was, having grown up a Southerner in the hill towns of north Georgia. Taylor was, by all accounts, a “guy’s girl” that loved to be outdoors at the lake or hiking in the Cohutta Wilderness or simply watching a game of Alabama football on television, but it was her eyes I remember most. They were green and sparkled like the shimmer of a rattlesnake’s back in the sun, and it was those eyes that frightened me every day of my life.
She shot our parents on a Friday night. I remember because our parents always had date night for themselves on Friday. Dad said it was to keep the “romantic juices flowing” in their marriage, but at some point I knew it was to get away from Taylor, who on that night—after being grounded—stormed through the house throwing lamps, ripping pictures from the walls, and cutting the furniture with mother’s favorite butcher knife. I hid in my room, playing video games, until the gunfire started. She used the Ruger LC9 that Dad bought on her 14th birthday. It had a key lock that deactivated the trigger making it safer around children, but Dad felt she was old enough to learn.
“The key lock is so your brother doesn’t play with it,” he’d said, smiling at me so I’d know he wasn’t being mean. He was a perfect complement to our mother, an Alabama boy from Gadsden—a huge “Roll Tide” fan that taught my sister and I everything there was to know about football. It was his gentlemanly ways that won Mom over when they started dating. On their first date he said she was “prettier than a speckled pup in a little red wagon.” Her heart was his from then on, but that charm never worked on Taylor. She didn’t care for romance because she didn’t know how to love.
At the sound of shots, I dropped the game controller and burst for the door, but I froze once I reached the door knob; I hesitated. Taylor had killed them each just after they entered the house and closed the door. They never had a chance to scream, never even saw her. Something told me I’d be next if I opened that door, so I didn’t. I just sat there on the floor wondering if my parents felt any pain, if they lingered a while to say goodbye before they went to heaven. They were good people, good parents, that didn’t deserve what they got from Taylor, but none of that mattered now. They were gone.
I went to see her once at the Montgomery Mental Hospital for Women, just a few weeks after the crime, but she just sat there not speaking. Her stare was a long, cold icicle stabbing me in the heart. Taylor hated me for testifying against her and I could see my death in her dark green eyes, the eyes I’d always feared. My death would be gruesome; she would make me suffer for putting her in this place, for not giving in to her hate during court. The orange jumpsuit clashed with her eyes and her long blonde hair was grungy and unkempt.
I tried to get her to talk, tried to reason with her: “Taylor, you know what you did was wrong, and this is justice, right?”
She only stared. I’d seen this Taylor before, just once. It had been a few years ago after she’d stolen money from Mom’s purse and I had tattled on her. She glared at me, not moving, not talking, during the lecture our parents would give her. Two days later she broke my arm. It was considered an accident when she ran out of her room and bumped into me, sending me sailing over the bannister and onto the stairs below, but when I looked up she was smiling the sinister grin I have come to know—her teeth so perfect and white, gleaming her satisfaction of an unpunished crime.
“Somewhere inside you has to be a good person,” I said. “Just find that person and you can have a life again.”
The guard standing nearby chuckled. I stared at him in disapproval, but he wasn’t discouraged. Mom was like that. She had a face of stone at times, especially when she knew she was right, when she wanted you to know she was right. Her upbringing gave her that motherly charm that only comes from the South, only comes from generations of humble means and plainness. “Think for yourself, boy!” she’d say. “Life isn’t about guessing and hoping. It’s about making smart moves when nobody else is. Don’t get out common-sensed.” That was her way of saying be original, but don’t overthink it. I loved watching her complete her paintings in the mornings on the back porch before school, with broad strokes and quick swipes of the brushes.
“Boy, that girl ain’t worth saving, if you ask me,” the guard said, pulling me from the lush backyard I remembered so well. Here in front of Taylor it was cold, with formidable yellow walls that closed in like a bad dream.
“Nobody asked you,” I replied.
“Look, she’s already stuck three people since she’s been here. Sent them to the infirmary with life-threatening injuries. Do you want that to get out on the streets?”
“No, but she’s my sister.”
“I know it’s hard, but you should forget that girl ever existed. Move on with your life.”
I looked back at Taylor. A tear ran down my cheek, knowing the guard was right, knowing Taylor would never change. She was lost. I began to leave. Quickly, Taylor tapped on the glass between us and beamed that evil smile, a dragon teasing its prey before the strike of death. She spoke four simple words.
“I Will Kill You.”
Nobody heard it but me. I was only twelve-years-old.
I went to live with relatives in Illinois—Uncle Percy and Aunt Connie—during the time my sister was incarcerated. Uncle Percy had always been my father’s favorite uncle. He taught him to fish, to hunt and even the best way to catch a “lady.” Uncle Percy always took credit for the marriage between my parents. “If it wasn’t for me, your father wouldn’t be so good with the ladies,” he’d say with a smile. The small town of Neponset sat on the east side of the Mississippi River, far from the hate I’d seen in Alabama. Fields of corn and beans grew each year to farmers that worked from dawn to dusk and sweat for every dollar they had. My great-uncle was one of those farmers—a tough old man—who had worked his two hundred acres for nearly 30 years when I arrived on their doorstep. He had some cows, which I learned to milk, and a couple of fat pigs, too. I learned how to plant and harvest the crop, enjoying the work because it made me forget about the murder, made me forget about Taylor and her threat. I was happy again and I considered myself an only child now.
A registered letter had been sent to us from the State of Alabama when Taylor was released. It said we could meet her in the lobby of the mental hospital if we would like to take her home. Aunt Connie thought about it, but then changed her mind once she was reminded of that Friday night I wanted so badly to forget.
“What do you want to do, son?” Uncle Percy asked. “I’ll take you if you want to go see your sister. She needs somewhere to live, but it can’t be here on account of her being a murderer.”
I was now almost twenty-five and knew I didn’t want to see Taylor. I knew her hope was that we would come, pack her up in the station wagon, and then she’d kill us all along the nearly eight hundred mile stretch of highway back to Illinois. Maybe she would dump our bodies in the Mississippi River so we’d bloat and rot, the dirty mud and water washing away all the evidence of her involvement. Maybe she would bury us near a dusty deserted road where few people ever went in Tennessee or Missouri. Or sink us in the swamps of southern Illinois. There were so many scenarios I could imagine, but she would not get the chance.
“No, I’m okay with not seeing her,” I said to Uncle Percy. “She isn’t my sister anymore.”
I saw his shoulders drop as if he’d been holding his breath, praying I wouldn’t ask to go, never wanting to be close to the wickedness that had taken his beloved nephew from this earth. Uncle Percy was a religious man who believed deeply in God and would do anything for anyone, and he never backed down from a chance to change another life through the gospel. “Standing up for your family, with true faith in God, is what being a man is about. Don’t back down from that,” he’d say. Yet, in that moment I saw a different man, someone petrified for his family, for me. His hands shook as the relief seeped from his body, reminding me of the old furnace, as it lets off steam, rattling the farm house each morning. Uncle Percy loved Taylor, but he didn’t want to see her any more than I did. The gospel couldn’t save her.
Three days later, on Highway 34 heading out of town on a family trip to the Quad Cities, I thought I saw Taylor, standing at the side of old Josh Griffon’s convenience store. Her hair was black now and shorter, like a marine would have. It couldn’t have been her! But I’ll never forget those eyes or that grin. Has she come to finish me off? Has she come to kill the rest of our family? Will it hurt? Can I save them? My thoughts swirled through my head, bouncing crazy ideas of the walls of my skull, but nothing happened. Despite my fears, and knowing I’d seen her next to Griffon’s, the murders never came … at least not to my family.
Josh Griffon’s grandson was twelve-years-old the morning Sherriff Chauncy Delms found him in the Centennial Oak Tree in front of the Neponset courthouse. The tree was the oldest in town, planted by founders James Nepon and Silas Setterberg, and had been memorialized last year in a grand ceremony that the governor himself attended. Red, white and blue streamers were hung from the tree in celebration and honor, the high school band music blasted through the small streets of downtown under a bright warm sun. It was a memorable day.
This might be just as memorable, but not for the same reasons. I bet the national news would get a kick out of this! Sometimes Delms’ thought things he would never say out loud, but he was upset and soggy when the words came out: “Looks just like one of them streamers from last year, but wet.”
Hanging from his ankles and without a stich of clothing on, Jared Griffon was covered in the color red—blood that oozed from the cuts all over his body. There wasn’t much skin left around his midsection and he’d been cut at the neck to bleed out like a hog at the slaughterhouse. I wonder if he squealed like a pig. Maybe somebody would have heard it. Well, maybe not, since most folks don’t live close to the courthouse. Wow! I’m really a horrible person to think that about this young boy, aren’t I?
Delms turned to see the white patrol car with a brown strip down the side pull up behind his, lights still spinning as one of his deputies, Burt Jeneer, stepped out.
“You think they made him squeal before he died?” Jeneer asked.
“Why don’t you ask old Josh Griffon that question when you stop by his place to tell him his grandson is dead,” retorted Delms, hoping to keep some sort of professionalism among his officers.
“Sorry Sherriff,” said Jeneer. “I’ll head there now.”
“No. It should probably be me. I was friends with Jared’s father,” said Delms. “Dang it! Why did it have to be a Griffon that got murdered?”
Twenty years had gone by since the day my uncle asked me what to do about Taylor. My birthday was coming up—the big four-oh—and a surprise party, that I wasn’t supposed to know about, had been planned. My wife Anne had given us two beautiful children over the years—Johnson and Kate—who were both intense high school athletes that we enjoyed cheering on each year. Running the farm had its privileges, allowing me to cut my day short so I could attend a football game or a volleyball match, or baseball, or track. Anne and I were always there, never missing one second. This was our town, this was my home and I made sure I took full advantage of that by faithfully attending Trinity Baptist Church on Sundays or being the second-best bowler around as part of the Henry County Bowling League. Folks around Neponset waved at me each day and I waved back with a smile nobody could take from me.
Uncle Percy and Aunt Connie did little more than sit on the porch in their rockers these days, both nearing a century old and watching the dust float past the house. They’d comment on how dry it was and wonder if the crops would make it. Anne made sure their bellies were full, prescriptions filled, doctor appointments kept, and most importantly, she promised we’d never put them into one of the new “homes for the elderly” going up in Peoria.
“I might need to help that boy with the harvest this year,” Uncle Percy would say as he rocked.
“Don’t be silly, you old coot,” Aunt Connie would shout back, since she was hard of hearing. “He is a grown man and you’re nearly dead. He can handle it.”
“You don’t have to yell. I can hear you just fine, you old badger.” Uncle Percy would whisper with a small smile, knowing she couldn’t hear him.
We never worried much about what happened to Taylor, except on holidays when Aunt Connie would look at old pictures and wish things had gone differently. Sometimes I’d hear her praying that God would protect Taylor and help her to have changed her ways, that she’d be forgiven of her sins and help us forgive her also. I wasn’t sure I could ever do that; wasn’t sure I could look into her face again and care about the sister I once had. She was dead to me, just like my parents, only she didn’t have a bullet hole in her head. Sure, that image still came to me in the dark—nightmares—when I imagined Taylor standing over my bed with a gun to my wife’s head, insisting I watch my family die before she made good on her promise. Really, it was just one dream, the same one over and over again.
The nightmare was always dark, only the faint moonlight from beyond the trees to the north gave any sense of direction. Lying flat among the wheat, just fifteen feet from the south fence that separated the farm from County Road 72, which was bumpy, cracked and had little traffic, I was incredibly still, frightened to move even an inch. The smell of death was near, but how close I wasn’t sure. Taylor had missed me as she inspected the field from the road. I had played dead, stopped breathing—an art I’d mastered as a child while playing with her because if she found me, she tortured me. Now I lay knowing that if she found me, she’d kill me. The smell of death lingered; yet, I was unquestionably alive and knew that I had no place to go.
She’d been gone now for a while. Maybe thirty minutes, but who knew for sure? Slowly, I reached out bracing myself to stand up. Suddenly I felt like I was going to puke out all my insides. My fingers had sunk into the warm, blood-oozing gullet of a body. Johnson? No! Not my boy! She’s eating them. Jerking my hand away, I involuntarily let out a painful yell of shock. Reluctantly, I reached out to my other side expecting to find another dead body. I felt nothing as my arm extended except the warm breeze that brought a continuous vile stench, but as I pulled it back I felt the unmistakable feeling of a human nose. Sliding my hand upwards, I noticed that there were no eyes, just the soft, mushy feeling of a sponge. Being curious, I squeezed a little, then realized what I was doing—massaging a dead boy’s brain—Jared Griffon’s brain. I began to tremble uncontrollably and knew that if I didn’t get up and move, I might never leave this awful place.
I cautiously stood to my feet, careful not to touch anything around me. I heard a rustling sound—someone being drug across the ground. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew the direction from where the noise came. Guessing about thirty feet to my left, I crept along toward the unknown. Just as I approached, something turned and I saw two bright green eyes catch my presence. I saw the emerging white-toothed smirk of evil I’d come to know so well. My body wouldn’t move, frozen stiff like a possum playing dead. The body on the ground whimpered. Anne? It couldn’t be her …
A hand with long, bony fingers swiftly blasted through the cold air and snatched me by the throat, squeezing so firmly I couldn’t breathe. When I felt myself being raised from the ground, I seized hold of the arm the hand came from. I’m going to die!
A startling scream burst through the wind.
Each time the nightmare came, the scream—my scream—shook me back into my own world, and I awoke to find that I was gripping my pillow so hard my hands ached. But now, the dream was becoming more intense, too hard to handle, so I quickly moved to the small window of our bedroom, opening it to the bright light of that same unnerving moon as it hung in the sky like a giant marble. I allowed the outside air to overtake my hyperventilating lungs. Finally, I calmed enough to go back to my bed, but I knew I could not sleep. I knew she was coming, she would kill me, and it would be gruesome.
She reminds me now of my childhood, when things were simpler, but felt like it all hinged on one decision. Hair was big, tanning salons were full, and your reputation lived or died by the clothes you wore. I gained the courage to ask a girl out in the 7th grade, even though I was too late and didn’t get the date. The butterflies buzzed my stomach like an angry swarm of hornets … yet, I did it and have never been afraid again to speak to a woman.
Until now.
Hiding the nervous energy seems to come easy because I’ve donned a confident mask for decades. Pretty much my whole life, but underneath that facade is a 12-year-old kid praying not to say the wrong thing, be wearing a dorky shirt, or have food in my teeth. A quivering feeling I haven’t felt in so long that every crazy scenario runs through my head while she talks.
Damn! What did she say? It’s so loud in here. Did I just dribble my drink on my shirt? Feels like something is on my nose. Son of a B!&?@!
I wasn’t even this screwed up in the 90s. Couldn’t we just start over and talk on an app for weeks first? The words flow so much better when I can pen things out – a writer’s soul – but here in front of those eyes and mischievous grin, I fumble along. An unsophisticated hillbilly begging for inclusion despite his backwoods social awkwardness.
Like an old hillbilly movie. “Excuse me, miss. You sure look purdy…”
Her eyes never look away. They hold me with a force my past experiences could never muster. She is solid, unwavering. My fear fades and the courage returns because in front of me stands a strong woman not willing to let me run away. She reminds me that I overcame my childhood, dropped the mask, and tamed the buzzing butterflies. She reminds me that we are all human, none better than the other. She reminds me who I’ve truly always been.
If you have ever had trouble with your weight and the hardships of trying to lose it, then you will understand the frustration that comes along with it. I wrote a piece in April 2013 about realizing that I was fat and wanting to do something about it. That article was published at The Good Men Project under the title, “I Am a Man and I Am Fat.”
The second reflection on my struggle with weight loss and the understanding of when and where it started came in my second piece (early Aug 2013), also published at GMP. It is tough, but you can read about the journey by reading that article called, “I Am a Man and I Am Winning at Losing.”
Things seemed to have come to a content ending for nearly a decade, so to speak. Diets happened. Some team sports also, but the rollercoaster continued, but I was once again inspired to challenge myself again physically in 2022. A pandemic, a second divorce, and losing my daughter came and went. I had to figure this out! Because of everything I was thinking and feeling, I wrote, “No Excuses …“
And there will be more to come as 2023 has seen the best transformation of my life. I’m two years from being 50 years old, and I plan to make that birthday a triumphant moment on this journey. Please let me know your thoughts and struggles by commenting here or under the actual articles. Let’s walk this journey together.
Life never goes the way you plan it. You try so much and it breaks you over and over again. I’ve gotten up many times and kept pushing forward, with dark pain deep down that raged and burned hotter each day. I tried often to snuff out this inferno, but whatever higher power is out there never allowed me to succeed. A death I was not deserving of yet. That pain is still there, but it’s become a catalyst for something different. Though I can’t explain it, I’ve changed. I’m different in a way I do not understand, yet I feel the inferno burns a special shade of white that is cleansing my soul somehow.
It’s a deep concept. A vision only I can see … but it is there.
The biggest change is in how I connect, how I love, and how I process the reality of life versus my expectations for life. I’ve released control of the image in my head of what should happen at any given moment. I can love someone in a way that I didn’t anticipate because they are meant to be in my life for a reason I did not see, at first. I can remain close to someone and grow a connection despite what I’d originally hoped for in the beginning. This is not an easy thing for someone that has been stabbed beyond their limits often. It can be excruciatingly painful on the soul of a man bound by emotions; someone that feels deep and never internally releases a connection.
You see, my reason for living has always been to connect and learn. I believe that we—our energies—move from manifestation to manifestation (not the primitive reincarnation idea) throughout space and time with a special group of connections (other energies). We do this to grow and learn and expand our intelligence and understanding of everything around us, especially each other. For years, I struggled in this expression of myself, not understanding what I was supposed to gain from it. I finally hit a rock bottom, if you will, and became determined to understand who I was. This is when my special group of connections, that I’d always known began to show up in my life. Some had always been there … like my long-suffering mother. Others were new to me in this life, but the immediate recognition of who they were to me was overwhelming to my soul.
I get it. This seems an odd belief and way of going about this life, but I’ve never grown more emotionally and spiritually and mentally as I have in the last few years. They are the reason. I was always looking outside myself for the answers, but it was when I looked inward and began to change my basic instincts and reactions, my way of seeing myself, that they came to lift me up even higher. I was looking for my worth in other people. That is why I hurt so much. I lost myself. Now, I truly see certain people, and though I still don’t know why, I feel we’ve known each other before.
When I gained some understanding of myself and my reason for being, I found a reason to connect with people beyond the basic human connection. I’m still learning what it all means for me and my eternal connections, but I now know what it feels like when I meet someone in this life that I’m a part of and they a part of me—connected energies. It means that those friendships are extremely important to me, no matter the circumstance.
Life never goes as you plan it, but you can find the right connections—energies—and make it the best life.
If someone says that YOU are amazing. Believe them.
Whether it is true or not doesn’t matter. They believe it, so in that moment … it’s true. Then, if they are worth it, live up to such a lofty statement. This is how you build yourself into a beautiful, wholistic person. Not in a conceded or pretentious way, but in a supportive way. The right friends and loved ones come into our lives for this very purpose—to love us to great heights we could never get to otherwise.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The source of the compliment matters. What are their intentions? Is their vibe sincere or nefarious? That is something your gut will have to help you decide, but in the end, you can still use the compliment to build your personal outlook, to lift your spirits and beat back the inklings of doubt that creep upon you. You see, the compliment is not about them. It’s about you. They come second to anything else.
So, what does a compliment like “amazing” mean? A few ways to look at it are these words: awesome, fascinating, incredible, marvelous, prodigious, extraordinary, fabulous and fantastic. It could also mean resilient, hard-working, strong, loving, intelligent and down-right kick ass! “Amazing” is in the eye of the beholder—well, in this case, the one giving the compliment—but it is how they see it, and that makes it real.
So, own that reality and see yourself as they see you. Be amazing!
Connections are a funny thing. You will literally break down laughing trying to understand how and why you would connect with one person and not another. How is it you can read one person so well, and why you feel that almost instant feeling of trust with someone?
No clue.
I’m not completely sure it matters to know, just that you recognize when it happens, when it clicks, and have the ability to decide where that person fits in your life. As young people, we make mistakes in this matter more often than not. As folks with more experience, we hedge our bets and hold back much more than before … often missing out on a great opportunity for connections.
We call it boundaries, but it’s fear.
Connections are what this life is all about, but it’s the right ones we must find … in a intentional and patient way. So, we keep learning; we keep trying in different and better ways, until we finally do right by that beautiful connection.
A year earlier, I had urged my grandmother into letting me live in the basement of the house she owned across town. I was living, along with my younger sister, in a small two-bedroom apartment at the front of a storage unit facility that my grandmother managed south of Salt Lake City. Grandmother never made us pay rent, but insisted we help out around the facility instead. My sister, who shared one of the small rooms and bed with our grandmother, took payments from customers, set up new accounts and managed the office as needed. My duties were to clean out abandoned storage units—keeping anything of value that could be sold to recoup the loss of rent—and to plow the snow that fell each winter.
For a time we all got along just fine, but after a short time I felt I needed some space of my own. I was twenty-two and not sure what to do with my life. My uncle—just seven years older than me—and his young family occupied the two main floors upstairs. The basement was an unfinished apartment my grandparents had started some years before when living with the family of their oldest daughter. They enjoyed the ability to have their own place, but be close to family that could help them when needed. The living room, a bedroom and most of the kitchen were complete. Only the area that was to be a second bedroom was completely unfinished, with cold concrete walls, and the sounds of the furnace and water heater gurgling with disgust at anyone who came near.
Excitedly, I moved the few possessions I had across town and into the basement. My young cousin—a toddler in those days—would knock on the door at the top of the stairs, calling for me, knowing I lived downstairs. “Joshy! Joshy!” he would say, and if I was home, I would visit with him, enjoying every minute of his company. But within a couple months, my uncle would take a different job and move his family to a new town in a different state, to a new house with a basement where when my young cousin knocked and called, “Joshy! Joshy!” I didn’t come up the stairs. His mother said he cried and asked where I had gone. Why didn’t I live in the basement anymore?
I felt the loss too when they left because now I had nobody calling for me, nobody needing my attention. I was lonely. Some days I would go upstairs and sit, listening to the sounds of the house, the sounds any empty house makes when no one lives there. Those sounds made me feel lonelier because I had no real friends that lived close, and even those friends didn’t like me much because I could be harsh and unforgiving. I couldn’t find anyone willing to split the mortgage with me and the $150 my grandmother asked me to pay was a lot against my seven-dollar-an-hour job, but my spirits picked up when another cousin, Jacob, not much younger than me, moved to town from Wyoming a couple months later. He was the son of my grandmother’s oldest daughter that had once lived upstairs, and he needed a place to live so he moved into the basement with me.
A Hispanic or Asian …whatever … family had already moved in upstairs so after some argument, in which I said I was older and had been there first, Jacob took the unfinished bedroom as his own. He covered the concrete walls with posters, hung a blanket from the ceiling for a bedroom door and made friends with the growly furnace. And often he would remind me that this used to be his house.
“I lived here, you know,” he’d say, and I’d roll my eyes before finishing a can of Pepsi, then getting up to place it on the pyramid we were building with the cans.
“I know you did. But that was then and this is now,” I’d say while he flicked a quarter at the ceiling fan, a blade sending it at my head.
I helped Jacob get a job at the same fulfillment warehouse I worked at where we stuffed VHS movies into yellow-colored, bubble envelopes, then pushing them down the line to be heat-sealed and tossed into a large brown cardboard box bound for some big city. Each position was integral to the success of the warehouse because if one person faltered it slowed the entire process. The label on the envelope had codes that signaled each “stuffer” as to which movies went in that envelope for that customer order. Also on the label was a post office city code so that after the package was heat-sealed the person in the middle of 15 gigantic boxes knew which one to toss that package into—a job that could quickly become overwhelming with two lines of envelopes coming at you. I burned my fingers many times on the heat-sealer and loved tossing envelopes, but it was the third line I enjoyed the most and a position I had worked hard to attain.
The third line came from a machine that wrapped one or two movies between two pieces of corrugated cardboard paper, then sprayed hot glue to the top so a plain white invoicing envelope could be attached. It was an old machine, but when you got it humming she moved like a sexy salsa dancer—flawlessly, gracefully, and in perfect tune to the music—and that is how I treated this big green monster. There was only one person that knew how to run this machine until I pushed the warehouse manager to allow me to learn. When he agreed, he said: “We do need somebody in case Chad ever takes vacation.” And so Chad trained me how to respect and pamper the big green salsa dancer, giving my life meaning.
The goal of this machine was to go fast, never stopping, which could only be obtained with perfection, which I demanded after Chad took a different position and I became the head machine operator, actually, the only machine operator. The machine was huge; having space on the backside to hold rows of boxes with movies in them, plus two people must stand on the backside of the machine to feed the movies into slots in a specific order so each customer received the correct shipment. I would stand in front of the machine, opposite the two “feeders” making sure all ran smooth by replacing the corrugated paper rolls, scraping dried glue off the sensor because the machine had a aiming problem, or snatching movies that twisted in the track.
The green monster was dangerous for the operator, but even more so if they became careless or comfortable. One could lose a finger or more to the crushing steel prongs that moved the movies along the track or burn the skin off the top of a hand or arm when reaching under the glue nozzle, but my goal was never to let the machine stop unless it was quitting time. I pushed the limits, making the machine purr, becoming quick at every paper change, scraping the glue sensor milliseconds before the nozzle would spray, or snatching twisted movies from the gaping mouth of the steel beast without ever being hurt. I smiled at this salsa dancer, speaking sweetly to her, prodding her along with a confidence we both never had. I awoke every day thrilled to visit my friend, the machine, and eventually only allowed two women to work as “feeders” because they were the best we had and they met the expectations I had for the machine—never stopping with perfection.
Things were going so well, and I thought I felt so good about life that I decided on a week-long vacation. I don’t remember where, but prior to leaving I was told I needed to train someone on the machine, so I chose my cousin, Jacob. We trained for a few weeks and he easily got the hang of it, and with his height and large frame it was easier for him to lift the paper rolls into place. But he wasn’t as fast, or maybe he didn’t love the machine—the salsa dancer—the way I did because she burned him. Really. Hot glue melting the skin and hair from the top of his hand and wrist. I returned to a new rule that machine operators must wear a mitt, a rubberized glove, to protect them, but I refused. I would not do it.
“It gives a false sense of protection,” I argued about the glove. “Not my fault he burned himself.”
Management pushed for me to wear the glove, but I wouldn’t. They overlooked it and asked that I not go on a vacation longer than a couple days because they couldn’t find an operator that ran the machine as smoothly as I did. I agreed, knowing that I enjoyed being needed; I enjoyed being necessary. I enjoyed dancing the salsa with the big green monster.
As a boy, I began collecting secrets, random things about folks in Buhl, Alabama that they wouldn’t otherwise tell anyone, actions kept hidden from the world. Like Mr. Abbott, who lived next door and wore his wife’s clothes around the house after she left for her job at the dentist’s office. He was a writer, never leaving the comfort of his home or yard. My first grade teacher, Ms. Hendrick, was secretly a wrestler in Elrod, the next town over, on Thursday nights. She used the stage name “Raven” when she stepped inside the ropes of the dimly lit ring at an unmarked warehouse by the railroad tracks near Malone Street. And even my father stole copper tubing from behind the Home Depot a couple times a year. He then sold it to a junk dealer named Grayson Mills to help pay the rent on his small hardware store. One night when my mother was out attending her ‘girls only’ game night (which meant she was drinking martinis down at the Holiday Inn) my father took me along on the heist. He said Home Depot owed him after coming in and taking all his business, but it still had to be our little secret—nobody could know, “not even Mom.”
So keeping this last secret for Eddie was easy, until it began to eat away at me and I had to tell somebody—anybody.
I had known Eddie all my life. We were childhood friends, but his life had never been easy. Eddie’s neck was crooked, causing his head to tilt to one side, his left ear almost touching his shoulder. His face was crooked too. The left side melted away a bit—a snowman in the hot sun—with his eyes uneven, and his nose curved like a knotty carrot.
It was the extra bone at the top of his spine that caused the droopy crookedness. But Eddie could walk straight and see straight, nothing kept him from a normal life … except other people. Cruel people were the biggest setback to the ambitions Eddie had for his life. But that all changed two weeks ago, on Saturday, when he told me it was going to be different. It was going to be different because he wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer, and he was going to make people see him for the person he really was—confident, hard-working, and intelligent, but most importantly—merciless.
On that fateful day, two weeks ago, I stopped collecting secrets. Eddie’s was the last one.
Eddie was used to being bullied, especially during his younger days at school. He hated the pushing and shoving, the name-calling, and it hurt to think about those days, even now. It didn’t matter anymore because that day—a Saturday—would change everything, and they would see how wrong they all had been about him. They would see the devastation Eddie could cause when they messed with him. They would see destruction that had no meaning to them, no answers, but it meant everything to Eddie. Everything.
Don’t misunderstand, my friend Eddie is not a killer and would never hurt anyone, but he had to do something, an act so large it would shock the small town of Buhl and all of Tuscaloosa County. Something that would bring them to their emotional knees was the only deed that could help these pretentious jerks understand his sensitive pain.
You see, Eddie wasn’t always unhappy. No, he changed 15 years ago, at age seven, when Eddie stood stoically between his paternal grandparents to mourn the death of his own parents after a blazing car accident. There were only a couple tears that streamed down his face during the funeral, but he felt alone, with nobody that really knew him, except me. The car had flipped along Interstate 90 after blowing a left front tire, sending the car crashing into the bottom of a lake canyon near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. His parents were driving home from a second honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest. They had always wanted to see the Space Needle and Crater Lake.
The bodies were unrecognizable, making it necessary for the caskets to be closed during the funeral. It was hard for Eddie. He was angry at the heavens, only able to visualize what their faces might have been like during the blazing crash—burning, melting off from the heat, sizzling bubbles popping holes in the skin. Sometimes this ghastly image worked its way back into his mind and he shuddered, knowing he would never forget that pain.
Eddie’s parents were both writers—of textbooks—but his mother knew how to string a good story together. She would often excite Eddie with tales of dragons, werewolves, and vampires, but the stories of cowboys and Indians were the ones that he liked the most. Nobody else knew, but he would daydream about being Geronimo, fighting off the union troops, killing buffalo, and smoking the pipe to the beating of war drums. As young boys we would play in his backyard—I was the cowboy and Eddie dressed as Geronimo, complete with a head dress full of feathers and moccasins on his feet, but I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone—one of many secrets.
We were almost twelve-years-old, so for Eddie this made us too old to be seen playing “cowboys and Indians,” but he couldn’t help it. He loved the idea of being a wild man in the woods that knew how to survive, or outsmart the civilized oppressors. He was right about us being too old to play the game. I did it because he was my friend, and he had no father to spend time with, and his grandfather was an old man that dragged an oxygen tank everywhere he went. Eddie needed someone to be his friend no matter what because he had given up on God—my first secret.
I believed in God, but my family didn’t attend a church so I had no formal religious training, just my own speculations about what he—I was pretty sure God was a ‘he’—wanted us to be doing in this life. I had a pretty good handle on what was wrong and right, but even I kept secrets from God. At least I told myself I was, even though in my soul I had a sense that God saw everything and would soon interrogate me, exposing my secrets. I was afraid for when that day would come because I didn’t want to ruin the confidence Eddie had in me.
“Why do you hate God,” I asked Eddie one Saturday after the funeral. He shifted a bit, not looking at me.
“He killed my parents. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Alright, but I’m curious … would you pray if you were in trouble. I mean, what if Jimmy Glisson was beating you up and praying would get him to stop, would you do it?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’d need to because I can handle things. I’m not helpless. Jimmy Glisson is a jack wad that has picked on me before, but never actually beat me up. He beat you up once though so I think you are the one that needs the praying,” Eddie snorted back with a smile.
Eddie knew very well that fight the year before wasn’t the same, and it had lasted only a few minutes before Mr. Bennett, our PE teacher, broke it up. I beaned Jimmy in the neck with a baseball on a three-and-one pitch count. Jimmy grinned viciously before he tossed the bat and charged the mound to tackle me. I flung my glove at him, somehow missing his gigantic muscled frame. Even in sixth grade, Jimmy was already starting to grow facial hair, not much, but enough to be considered “manly” compared to the rest of us boys. From the sneaking looks around the locker room, all of us were starting to grow armpit hair, and feeling somewhat insecure about it—except Eddie. He always hid in a toilet stall to change clothes. He had asked me once if there was a trick to growing body hair. I told him I didn’t think so, but he was sure there was and that I must have done it accidentally. One day, when I came over to play “cowboys and Indians,” I saw him before he saw me, and he was using his mother’s mirror to look at his armpits, hoping to see even a single tiny black hair, but nothing was there. My secret—I waited until he put down the mirror before allowing him to see me and say hello.
The tools in Eddie’s bag were his father’s. They had been kept by his grandfather after the car crash, but then willed to Eddie two years ago when his grandfather’s lungs finally gave out. The oxygen tank still sat in the corner of the living room because he didn’t know what to do with it. Eddie would have asked his grandmother where to put the tank, but she had died three years ago from Alzheimer’s, so the house was his too—paid off with no mortgage—and the car, a gold La Sabre. It was all Eddie’s, but he missed both of his grandparents. This stuff didn’t matter to him.
Inside the bag were a pipe wrench, a rubber mallet, a flathead screwdriver, and a set of Allen wrenches. Taking up the most room in the bag was a portable blow torch. Eddie had bought it at Home Depot, and had made sure he bought two cans of fuel, just in case the first one wasn’t enough to complete the work. He made sure his 1977 Toyota pickup was full of gas, and had spray-painted it black instead of the bright red it was originally when he bought it from a long-bearded good ‘ole boy south of Tuscaloosa. Eddie had purchased the truck after the 2011 tornado, which had devastated much of the college town and surrounding areas. It had killed 64 people, left a path of destruction more than 80 miles long, and received non-stop national attention—until another tornado flattened Joplin, Missouri less than a month later.
Tuscaloosa was all but forgotten after Joplin, yet folks moved on, doing what they always did by helping their friends, family and neighbors. Most people were back at work now, and college students—the “Roll Tide” nation—were trudging back-and-forth across the blistered campus of the University of Alabama. Eddie, had attended classes off-and-on, but couldn’t handle the everyday structure required to finish a full semester. In contrast, he had faithfully attended every Crimson Tide football game since his parent’s death. The nostalgia of attending the games as a young boy with his father always hit him as he entered section 28, where he settled into the seats they had always watched from, high above the field near the 35-yard line. His grandfather had joined him each game until his death, and then I became his companion for the epic battles of athletic will.
Saturday football is a religious event here in the South, something not to be messed with, a topic for passionate debate that could divide families. This area of the country is not afraid of a good fight or controversy, having been a large part of the Civil War and a focal point of the civil rights movement. But during every aftermath or struggle, Alabama football has been what holds residents together when they need help to move on. It gives them something important to support, a way to cope with the negative things surrounding their lives. Winning coaches are heroes, demigods, among the people of Alabama, but especially to those who grow up understanding their great southern heritage. That understanding has everything to do with the knowledge that the South lost the Civil War—or what people in Alabama like to call “The War of Northern Aggression.” Old-timers enjoy cornering a young person to tell them the real stories of the war, stories that have interesting twists, stories that end differently than history books, but then you see the sly grin creep across their face like a well-worn wrinkle and you realize where fiction began and why so many great storytellers came from the South. You understand that trying to debate the authenticity of the tale will only allow the old man to embellish more, allowing him to drag you into a world where the South triumphs, or an account of the medal bestowed upon his grandfather by General Robert E. Lee that you dare not dispute.
The understanding and legend of southern heritage is theirs to keep, and anyone that tries to change that is a “damned Yankee” that has been indoctrinated with lies about history. Yet, one thing both Yankees and Southerners usually agree on is that college football is done best in the South. The football field is a place where Southerners can demoralize their old northern foes, a place they can prove superiority against any would-be oppressor, and above all, a place where Southerners can win the war.
In Alabama, one man personified all that—a coach feared by opponents and beloved by his fans—the great Paul “Bear” Bryant. Eddie’s grandfather played for Alabama in the late 1960’s, a linebacker that prowled the middle of the field with deadly eyes and gruesome hits on any opponent that dared to venture near him. They won none of Bryant’s six championships in those years, but they were still good, and they were still feared by opponents. Black-and-white photos of the two men still hung on the dining room walls of Eddie’s home. He stared at them sometimes and wondered what it would have been like to play for the “Bear.”
“Papa told me once that he hit a running back, from USC, so hard that he had to leave the game because a rib pierced his lung,” Eddie said without smiling.
“That’s pretty hard,” I replied.
“Papa was pretty proud of that hit. Not because he hurt the guy, but because he said he had tackled like ‘Coach’ had taught him to.”
“How’d the Tide do that year?”
“He said it was in sixty-six. They went undefeated and won the SEC title. They played in the Sugar Bowl that year, beat Nebraska pretty good, thirty-four to seven.”
“That ain’t a bad career at Alabama, huh? You think Bryant was really as tough as they say he was?”
“If he was they sure loved him for it. Papa said it made them tougher men, boys worth something. He said you couldn’t play for ‘Coach’ and not treat a lady with respect or become a successful person around town.”
Eddie’s grandfather had been a history teacher at Buhl High School for 45 years, and the assistant football coach to a floundering team of boys that yearned to win, but didn’t have the talent. Yet, the Buhl Fighting Geese were one of the top ten squads in the State due to everyday hard work and guts. His grandfather had always told Eddie that Geese only looked pretty, but if you threatened them they were likely to spread their wings and attack, pecking at your face until you died.
“Coach Bryant was like that,” Eddie’s grandfather told him a few weeks before his death. “If you messed with one of his players, he was bound to set you straight or knock your head clean off. He loved us like we were his own sons. That is a man I’d want watching over my grave if I could.”
I wasn’t surprised, when a couple weeks later, Eddie and I stood before Coach Bryant’s statue at the Walk of Champions plaza outside the stadium. We stood staring at the nine-foot tall bronze Bryant, sipping our Budweiser beers in clear plastic cups that we’d taken from the alumni tent. I looked at the statue’s face, amazed at the detail, while Eddie stared at the feet. Alabama fans crowded all around us, looking at the statues of other great Alabama coaches—Gene Stallings, Wallace Wade, Frank Thomas, but most stared at the new statue of Nick Saban—and smiled and laughed to the smells of football tailgating. I began looking for the closest spot to get some barbeque and beans, my favorite game day meal, but Eddie wasn’t hungry. He just stared at Bryant’s statue.
“How long do you think it would take to cut through the ankles of this statue?” Eddie asked. “A couple minutes, maybe?”
“Depends on what you use,” I replied with a chuckle. “I’d use a blow torch. They got these little ones now you can buy, easy to carry around. Why, you planning on stealing it?”
Eddie didn’t flinch, my heart stopped.
“Eddie, there is no way you could do that. For one, you couldn’t move it. The thing has to weigh a couple thousand pounds.”
Eddie stepped closer to me and leaned in to talk quietly.
“If we back my truck up to it, then cut it at the ankles it will fall right in the bed and we drive off. Ten minutes max.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Look! I’m tired of being pushed around by this town and its phony bunch of smarty-pants professors,” Eddie said sternly. “We could do it this Saturday morning about 3am, so nobody sees us, but they will definitely notice before the big game on Saturday against Auburn.”
“Eddie, what would you even do with something that big anyway? I don’t get the point. I’m not sure I want to be a part of this.”
His eyes went tight, and that creepy smile I’d known since we were boys slithered across his face. Eddie was about to use the one tactic he knew I couldn’t resist.
“You are my best and only friend,” he said in a hushed voice. “I need you to do this with me. It will be our secret.”
When Eddie finished packing the tool bag, he handed me a rope, a strong one, the kind used by rock climbers, and he told me that the rope would be the only tool I would need to use. Then he gave me the keys to his truck and said, “Oh, and you have to drive too.”
Steering the truck slowly down University Boulevard, I thought how I’d never noticed how dark the university campus could be in Tuscaloosa at night, probably because I’d never roamed the streets at such an early morning hour. It was 2:30 a.m. and I was terrified. No cars, no people—nothing—it was the lull before the storm of fans would descend upon Bryant Denny Stadium for the Iron Bowl, which in the state of Alabama is the biggest game of the season. Alabama vs. Auburn. State rivals that literally hate each other in many cases, a rivalry that divides families and long-time friends, making this weekend dangerous for either side. It was “Roll Tide” vs. “War Eagle,” and we were about to ignite the powder keg. My hands trembled on the truck’s gear shift as we pulled to a stop in view of the plaza, quickly looking around to see if anyone was watching, then carefully put the truck in reverse and eased the open tailgate up to the statue of the great Paul “Bear” Bryant. He gleamed in the dim moonlight, and I stared as I exited the truck.
“Hurry up!” whispered Eddie. “Get that rope around his shoulders.”
The fear of the moment once again stirred me to action, and I quickly jumped on the tailgate and lassoed the shoulders of the statue, then climbed over the top of the truck’s roof and down the hood until I was standing in front of the truck, pulling down on the rope. Eddie took out the flathead screwdriver, holding it at the skinniest part of the back of each of the statue’s ankles, then hitting it a couple good times with the rubber mallet to make a small dent. He then lit the blue flame of the blow torch and began cutting through the ankle at the dent he’d made. He tried to shield the glow of the torch with his black coat, and in less than eight minutes the statue began to lean, causing me to pull harder until it popped. As it fell, the knees of the bronze Bryant hit the tailgate creating a catapult effect, slamming the front brim of its fedora hat into the truck bed, piercing the metal of the truck and imprinting the coach’s face.
“Get in the truck now!” I yelled to Eddie, running for the driver-side door, flinging the rope into the back.
“Don’t speed,” Eddie said. It was dark, but I could see that his thigh was bleeding badly.
“What the heck happened?”
“The ankles flew up and cut me when it popped,” Eddie said, not showing that it mattered or hurt. “Keep your eyes on the road and get us back to Buhl.”
“Where are we taking this thing?” I asked.
“The graveyard.”
Paul Finebaum
The phone lights inside the booth of the Paul Finebaum radio show lit up on Monday morning. Fans of both sides—Alabama and Auburn—had their own thoughts about why the statue had been cut down.
“Damned Auburn fans can’t win without doing something as sadistic as this. They ripped our hearts out!” screamed one irritated Alabama fan.
“Stinking ‘Bama fans just making excuses for losing so many times to the best damn football team in the SEC, including on Saturday. War Eagle!” retorted a loyal Auburn fan.
Finebaum did he best to keep things in perspective, but he had no luck. He reminisced about the “good ‘ol days” when this rivalry had been somewhat respectful, but how it had turned ugly a few years ago when an Alabama fan poisoned the famous trees at Toomer’s Corner in Auburn and then confessed on his show.
“Now this,” said Finebaum. “What it happening to the state of Alabama? We are better than this. It is just football, not war. The person that did this needs to come forward and tell us why so we can move on, so we can heal.”
But nobody listened. The listeners continued the barrage of negative comments against each side. Finebaum could only shake his head, but nobody saw his disapproval through the radio.
“Caller, welcome to the Paul Finebaum Show,” bellowed Finebaum. “What is your comment?”
“I don’t have a comment. I have a secret,” I said softly, scared. “I know where Paul Bryant is.”
Silence, Finebaum couldn’t find the words—another confession on his radio show? I swallowed hard and coughed, waiting, but the silence continued. Finebaum hadn’t expected this and though he tried he couldn’t ask me what everyone wanted to know. Where?
“He’s in Pate Cemetery, south of Buhl on Booth Town Road,” I said, finally. “The Bear is standing next to a large tree with lots of branches. He is watching over the grave of one of his fallen players.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Finebaum. “Did you do this?”
“I was there, but I cannot truly claim responsibility. That claim goes to a great friend of mine and he is long gone, never to return to Alabama.”
Eddie clicked off the radio and smiled. He steered the gold La Sabre onto Highway 82, west toward Mississippi. He was going to see the Space Needle and Crater Lake like his parents did before they died. He was thinking of moving to Idaho—maybe Coeur d’Alene—to be somewhere quiet and peaceful. And maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t done keeping secrets because this one was safe with me.
(This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.)
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It is revolting that I think about the plane crashing every time I fly. Sometimes I even hope for it so I can help save people, but knowing not everyone will live. It’s morbid, but it’s true that I think this. Who would make that up?
I flew for the first time the summer I turned 12-years-old. It was a flight to Phoenix from Atlanta, and I watched the flight attendants move back and forth, wondering if they ever worried about crashing. Now, I know that some have the same fantasy I do. At least Allie does. I met her on a flight to Miami for business. She was beautiful and I could not take my eyes off her olive-colored face, wrapped by her perfect brown hair, which was shoulder-length with big curls that bounced when she walked, giving the impression she walked on air. Then, I remembered we were flying and were actually on air as I watched her pass complimentary drinks and snacks to passengers.
After spending the weekend together, I fell in love and moved to Chicago to be with her. I couldn’t get enough of Allie; she was intoxicating to the touch, a drug I could not give up. Together we dreamed of saving the world. Allie loved to fly. She would remind everyone she was a flight attendant – not at stewardess, never a stewardess. But she yearned, that just once the plane would go down, maybe into a cornfield south of Chicago, skidding on its metal belly and stopping short of crossing a country road. Allie knew she would be heroic and calm while saving lives because that is what she was trained for—saving lives. Yet, the planes she was on never went down. They always landed safely, maybe with a little rough landing, but always pulling to the gate without an emergency incident.
“That plane that crashed into the Hudson River,” she said to me one day. “That should have been my plane. I wouldn’t have let that passenger open the back door.”
She waved her right index finger back-and-forth at me, pursing her lips, her left hand on her hip like girls from the big-city projects, where she grew up, do—that way that came with an “Mm-Hmm” as if you should know better than to think any different than you were being told.
“No way would that idiot have opened that door on my watch,” Allie said. “I would have stopped him.”
“You know the flight attendant was hurt and tried to stop them, right?” I countered.
Allie didn’t respond. Her eyes were closed and she smiled. She was living the fantasy in her mind, keeping people from opening the back door of an airplane in water. She was saving lives. I watched her lips as she silently lip-synced commands to passengers. I wanted to kiss her, but instead I closed my own eyes and imagined sitting in the exit seat of that same plane. We saved lives—me and Allie—together.
One morning, I awoke to the odd sight of Allie staring at me. She sat cross-legged on one side of the bed, arms folded across her bare chest, staring. I stared back, but said nothing.
“I think today might be the day it happens,” said Allie. “Today is the day we crash.”
“But it’s our vacation to Tahiti,” I whimpered. “It can’t be today.”
Allie had made arrangements to work the flight down to Tahiti, after which, we would enjoy two weeks of sunshine, water and each other. “I might even let you marry me while we are there,” she joked. But I knew that would never happen because Allie didn’t believe in marriage. “It breaks the spirit of true love,” she had once told me, and because I loved her I was willing to go along with it.
The flight took off that same as they always did. Allie was more beautiful than ever standing at mid-cabin, going through the motions of the safety procedures. I looked out the window of 12F, an exit row seat that Allie had secured for me with her airline status. The Chicago skyline glistened below us and I felt at peace, knowing we would soon be in Tahiti. For the first time I was not thinking of a plane crash, but of Allie and how sexy she would look on the beach in the green bikini she had bought just for this trip. Though she would never marry, I knew she loved me, too.
The plane began its turn southward and I could see our apartment. Beverages came; Allie snuck me a free snack box to eat, and I watched us pass over Springfield, Illinois where her mother lived with a second husband name Jake. I sipped on my ginger ale until the turbulence started. I looked to the front of the plane and saw the twinkle in Allie’s eyes smiling back at me. The plane dropped fast over Marion, Illinois doing just as Allie had hoped, skidding to a stop in a field somewhere north of Paducah, Kentucky.
My head had banged the seat in front of me hard. The window exit was now open. I stayed outside the exit, above the wing, and pointed and yelled at passengers to go to the other side of the road where they’d be safe. I was surprised how many didn’t listen to me. Only after everyone had left the plane did I see Allie poke her head from the exit window.
“Only two dead,” she said with a smile. “Not bad for our first crash.”
“Not bad at all,” I replied.
Then, we were sitting on beach chairs, sucking margaritas from a straw. Allie was stunning in her green bikini. I leaned toward her and kissed her – those lips soft and perfect. I knew we would never fly again, never see another crash, but we had done just as we always dreamed.
Simply Me 
