Funny Bones
Day: October 17, 2020
Augie’s Field
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Augie Sisler lives in a little house in a field, all by herself.
She haunts her pumpkin fields alone, sometimes she sits by a lily choked pond half mile from her house on a marble bench and watches the Sunset alone.
Everynight she watches the stars wink on one by one
and she is always very much alone,
Sometimes just a few minutes after sunset, Augie sees a figure of a lone man with his head bowed, his chin almost touching his chest, his unbuttoned long coat flapping open when the cool evening breeze leaves the tops of the acorn trees because, I suppose it wants to keep him company.
There are times when the man looks up and sees Augie under a tree or standing in her field. He raises his hand as if he is about to wave a greeting, but when he see’s her face he covers his eyes and he shakes his head from side to side.
You would be safe to assume he was going to run away, but he doesn’t.
He turns and stumbles down the road, head bowed, dragging his feet and he disapears after a while at the bend in the road where the acorn trees give way to rows of weathered and gnarled crabapple trees.
The man at the road always has a different face, when he shouts out to Augie he always shouts in a different voice and sometimes he is wearing a long coat and sometimes he isn’t wearing one at all.
That doesn’t matter to Augie, she recognizes him and he recognizes her because Augie never changes.
One night Augie sees the man wallking towards her Pumpkin field and she decides to walk towards him.
She glides across her field like a shadow, she leaves no tracks in the soft earth, her eyes are closed and she is taking slow deep breaths through her nose and her slightly parted lips.
” What do you want? ” he calls out to her.
” What do want! ” she shrieks at him, ” what do you want!”
She is moving faster towards him- the pumpkin vines and pumkin leaves move away from her, the trees pull back from the field, they are pulling back from Augie. ” What do you want!”
He is standing- like all of the others in his family who have visited Augie’s field in every nightmare they have ever had- in the middle of Augie’s road and she waits for him at the edge of her field.
Her eyes are shut but he is sure she can see every inch of his his face, of his hands and like all the others before him he knows this one thing for sure- she can smell him and taste his fear.
It makes her smile, it always does.
” What do you want! ” she shrieks.
” I want this to end! ” he shouts. ” I want to never hear your voice again. I never want to dream about you again. ”
Augie opens her eyes and light pours from them faster and faster and miles away from her field the man is back in his car and he sees the other car racing towards him.
And his wish comes true.
He never sees Augie or her field again.
But his son will, or his great grandson or maybe his nephew.
Eventually they will end up by Augie’s field near her house, at the family’s cemetery on Sisler Road with a lily choked pond and a marble bench where you can sit andwatch the Sunset or the shadows fall – like Augie does
and she always will
alone.
Word of The Day Challenge: Banshee
14 Days and Counting
There are 14 days left until Halloween.
Have you conjured up your Halloween spirit yet?
It’s Tuesday Somewhere
Putting My Feet In The Dirt: On a Typical Tuesday Morning
On a typical Tuesday morning the local commuter bus that stops in front of the Suttel Apartments is always late.
As it pulls away from the curb, the stop lights at the intersection that it is headed for start to flash wildly from green to yellow to red and then they shut off.
From inside the bus a man rushes up the aisle to the front, kicks the door open, runs out to the street looks up and says, ” I’m dead, I’m dead. Somebody wake me up I’m dead. ”
On a typical Tuesday morning the woman in H201 on the third floor of the Suttel decides that today is the day and she goes out to her balcony, swings her leg over the railing and pushes her self off to the street below.
On a typical Tuesday morning a little blue car with it’s bumper held in place by duct tape tries to out run a Fire Engine with a screaming siren and fails. It jumps the curb and hits a green and white trash can sending bags of fast food wrappers, beer bottles, and coffee cups into the street and across the sidewalk.
Among the half eaten burgers and bags of chips that are littering the street, perched against the curb, there is a severed human hand in a freezer bag with last years date written in blue sharpie across the front.
It stands on it’s stump for a few seconds before it slowly falls palm side down.
Above the street at the Suttel, a woman named Betty watches the excitement on the street below from her kitchen window and when she’s done she steps back closes the curtains and takes her seat at her kitchen table and pours herself some tea.
She adds a little sugar and as she stirs her warm- no longer hot tea, she decides that today is probably not a good day to clean out the rest of her freezer.
That’s a typical Tuesday at the Suttel Apartments where on Tuesdays time hits the ground in front of it like a lightning bolt.
In most cases when lightning hits the ground it leaves nothing behind but a little scorched earth. However, anything that was there before is gone now and all that’s left is a mark, that with time will fade away.
In time maybe that’s what will happen at the Suttel, maybe one day that Typical Tuesday will get dimmer and dimmer until it disappears all together from memories, calanders and clocks.
Unless of course that bolt of time hits on Saturday five years ago or on Friday six years from now.
It might sound confusing, but in this part of the Universe that failed on the day it was created-
it’s typical.