My Tasmanian Tiger

Word Of the Day Challenge: EXTINCTION

Thylacine

Remember when we used to tell ghost stories?

Remember when we used to gather in the living room after dinner and the tv was off, maybe the radio was on and we would talk about monsters and devils and lights in the sky that didn’t behave the way lights in the sky normally behave?

Remember when we would wonder what made the floorboards in the attic creak and we wondered why the laundry room door never stayed shut and why was there a coat hook in the pantry and why was the knife drawer in the kitchen always open?

Remember when we used to be curious about the world, what made it tick,  no matter how scary it seemed to be at times?

I remember when we used to do these things.

Now I  wonder all on my own because some of the people I used to sit with after dinner grew old and died  or they moved away and now a few of them post pictures on Facebook about what they ate, or what they are drinking and and sometimes instead of saying how they feel about the world, they post a quote from someone else’s wall to paint a picture to show us where their head is today.

Sometimes I feel like my curiosity  is an animal, like the Tasmanian Tiger but my curiousity is one breath away from extinction and will anybody notice when it is gone?

Will I mourn it’s loss when it’s gone? Will I notice? Will I care?

God. Please let me notice. Please let me care.

The Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) is a large, carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf. It is now believed to be extinct.

The Ghost Bunny Trick

Today’s Daily Prompt asks, What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

Artist Uknown

This is a story about the night one of our neighbors died.

Because I was so young at the time, my memories are a little fragmented so to keep my account as close to what happened as possible, I don’t want to fill anything in because I think it would take away from my memory.

To begin, I don’t remember his name, but the elderly gentleman who lived a few doors down from where we lived at been a magician and worked the vaudeville circuit.

He was a little famous in our neighborhood and he still had posters and props from his stage days.

Before he got sick and his health began to rapidly decline, he had taught me to work some of the  magic tricks that I had bought at the dime store.But he always apologized after our lessons because he said his timing was off. It had been off since the night he had crashed his car driving over an icy bridge and ended up in the river below.

That’s why he left the stage and had given up his act. His timing was off, not by a lot from what I understand. But enough to remove him from the ranks of being a professional magician.

He had changed after the accident too. Not by a lot. Just little things that sometimes made his family and friends say things like, ” he wasn’t the same after the accident. ”

I was friends with his great granddaughter and she had told me that sometimes he forgot their names and sometimes when he looked in the mirror he didn’t recognize his own face-  so his wife took all the mirrors out of their house. The only one they had was in the bathroom downstairs that he never used.

Artist Uknown

On the night he died I remember seeing the Priest going into our neighbor’s house and a little while later I saw the Priest leave.

I was sitting at the end of the walkway and I asked him if my neighbor had died and he told me he had.

I told him I would miss learning my magic tricks from my neighbor and the Priest looked a little  sad. I told him he had taught me the disappearing egg trick, the Chinese Rings, and the Ghost Bunny Trick.

” Which one is that? ” he asked me.

I told him I knew how to make a ghost bunny appear from a top hat. But I said, I hadn’t figure out how to make it get back into the hat right away.

My neighbor said his timing was off and he couldn’t get it back into the hat at all and that if I worked on my Ghost Bunny Trick I could get it to go back into the hat where it belonged.

The Priest nodded and smiled and as he walked away I looked over his shoulder toward’s my neighbor’s house.

I saw the shadow of the ghost bunny from my Elderly Neighbor’s bedroom window- it’s ears were long and pale white, and they curved  away from it’s diamond shaped head instead of over it.

It waved it’s spidery fingers at me and I waved back.

Artist Uknown

D-Day

 

Over the weekend I ordered my copy of  ” The Pope’s Exorcist ” and according to amazon it will be here and dancing away in my dvd player by June 13th.

That’s a Tuesday, not a Friday. I checked. 

I can’t help but to feel Amazon missed the chance for a cheap laugh, but whatever. The Pope’s Exorcist looks like a great horror film so I’m going looking forward to seeing it.

Lost laughs aside, to get myself in the mood  here are a few little devilish tunes I’ve been listening to get ready for D-Day!

 https://youtu.be/wda-XQwipds