Bats.

I am on my knees in the grass in our front yard, pulling out the weeds with a fork. I am wearing gray sweat pants and I swear at the dandelions when their roots break.  My next door neighbour has let the weeds take over his yard and they've started to creep into mine, their little seeds breaking loose and floating gently through the air in the night and starting their greedy little roots in my dew soaked grass.

Sometimes I imagine spraying his lawn with Kill-X, or maybe a couple of kilos of salt liberally sprinkled in the night.

Other times I imagine him being spanked by his wife, wearing a ball gag, or engaging in watersports.

I swear again when the next root breaks.

There's nothing worse than waking up to discover that someone has made off with your slippers sometime while you were sleeping. The feeling of cold toes on colder floor makes you shiver when the heat hasn't been on for three weeks because you're too broke to pay the bill, you quickly come to realize that it's probably all your fault. You can't help but wonder where your slippers went as you make yourself breakfast for the second time in two weeks.

Later on that morning, as your toes are warming up on the train, you wonder if today will be the day that you make it big and score that job, but of course you know, if you have to wonder, then today most certainly isn't the day. What you don't know is that next Tuesday is, but you'll ignore the alarm and sleep off your nasty hangover for another five minutes. It will be the day you'll be missing more than your slippers when you wake up and you won't know why until you realize, that today was the day, so you'll go back to bed.

After that you'll sit back in your chair and knock one of the almost empties off the coffee table with your sleeve as you reach for a light and the cat will get drunk off the last few drops of beer while you're feeling the scratch of tobacco smoke's familiar slide down your throat for the first time today. It's Thursday, and suddenly Wednesday is somewhere with your slippers and missed opportunities, and you start to wonder how long you can keep all this up because the pieces are starting to fall away faster than you can scramble frantically to keep them in your pockets along with the rent money, which was due two weeks before tomorrow.

And you know that this is all getting you nowhere, but at least the change from taking back the empties will get you through another deck of smokes, which you'll drop in a puddle sometime tomorrow afternoon amid much cursing. Oh, and speaking of pockets - if you hurry, you can salvage some of those smokes and tuck them into your shirt pocket where half of them will break into the shorter side of two when you trip over your shoelace going up and down (at the same time) the stairs to your apartment..

Enjoy the stubs. They're all you've got left.

Peter Francis came around the corner from the kitchen and stubbed his toe hard on the door jamb. His first reflex was to make sure that his plate of peanut butter scones in his hand was safe. This was his final and ultimately fatal stupid mistake in a lifetime of bad decisions and stupid mistakes.  Had he known what was coming for him, and having the chance to go back and change the last few moments of his life,  he would have realized that his second reflex, which was to expectorate a string of powerful expletives, caused a small cracking sound to escaped his attention.  His third reflex (which was somewhat involuntary) was to close his eyes in pain, causing him to miss a sudden movement in his peripheral vision. If it were not for these three reflexes, perhaps he would not have missed the two small but significant events that ended his life.

The shudder caused by his foot hitting the door jamb forced a screw loose from holding up a mounting bracket on the wall. Normally this would not have been a big deal, except it was this particular mounting bracket that held in place an unexpectedly razor sharp ornamental ninja sword. As he rounded the corner, the sword swung loose from its place of honour on the wall above his Gaming Chair, separating Peter Francis’s head and a small portion of his torso from his body, and ultimately Peter Francis from his plate of peanut butter scones.

The only truly sad part about all of this was that since nobody was there to hear the satisfying sort of squishy crunching sound the sword made as it sliced neatly through flesh and bone. Though Peter Francis' swift and brutal death was completely silent, it was ironic that the sound that wasn’t heard (and thus wasn’t there) was very close to the realistic death sounds he made for his imaginary adversaries as he sashayed around his living room in his grubby old black pyjamas, wielding the sword impressively as he pretended to be a Ninja. He would imagine that he had them cornered and cowering from his impressive Ninja skills and then would alternately decapitate, disembowel, or otherwise finish them off with fluid and impressive death blows. This was how Peter Francis blew off the steam from his mind dulling job, and it worked like a charm.  That, and the Peanut Butter Scones.

As the time from his death passed, the pool of blood from his lifeless body seeped in its slow sticky way from one carpet fibre to the next all the way across the living room, under the front door and out into the hallway.

    The Thai Food Delivery Guy rang the doorbell and chuckled softly to himself as he heard his customers inside scrambling for their clothes.  It was as he was politely looking the other way when the door opened to a young man buttoning up his shirt, that he noticed the stain coming from under the door across the hallway.  He did the only thing that made sense in that moment.  He stowed away his tip, remarked that it the stain looked awfully fresh and awfully like blood, and then got the hell out of there.

After a few minutes of bickering back and forth about whose business it was to call 9-1-1, or if it was even necessary, the boyfriend of the very pretty girl who lived across the hall finally gave in and made the call.   This was the very same boyfriend whom Peter Francis had lived in envy of for months, and had quite frequently imagined him to be one of the Ninja Sword's Victims.

For a while, the apartment was a flurry of important forensic activity. Cops in uniforms came first, followed by paramedics and then Detectives in suits. Next it was the Medical Examiner types and people in lab coats with gloves who descended on the apartment.  Faces peered out through the curtains on both sides of the street and a crowd had formed out front when the police cars and ambulances first arrived, rewarded finally by the sight of the black body bag being wheeled somberly into the back of the Coroner’s van.  After the body was gone, there seemed to be no point in sticking around anymore, so everyone went back on their way to whatever it was they had been doing when their morbid curiousity was piqued.

Once the police were finished up their work for the night, the door to apartment three-oh-six was sealed with evidence tape, the night went back to its quiet self, and things back to more or less normal.

The following Tuesday, a small contingent of inconvenienced looking relatives that consisted mostly of a few elderly aunts and even fewer wheezy looking uncles, decided that the best thing was to have the pieces of Peter Francis cremated, and his ashes placed in the cheapest to-code ceramic urn that money could buy. 

The next day, the small contingent gathered at a nearby cemetery to have the Funeral Director read from his generic book of things that are said at funerals, said their prayers (which were very brief) and had Peter Francis’ cheap ceramic urn placed in the ground next to A Loving Wife, Mother  & Daughter (1954-1998).
 
This was, in all honesty, more than he deserved.

As our story begins, Eleanor and Pete Francis Sr. are in the timeless frenzy that very close-to-expecting parents go through in the immediate moments leading up to the drive to the hospital.  He is frantically gathering up her bags, his hat and the car keys. She is on all fours by the front door, panting and moaning loudly while simultaneously cursing and marveling at that lazy Sunday afternoon in bed nine months and four days ago.  She focused herself by thinking back to the events that had led to her current situation.  

Not that it had been entirely unpleasant at the time - even though they had long given up on conceiving they laid there together, with the rays of the afternoon sun gently filtering in through the curtains, making love on the same bed that Eleanor herself had been conceived in.  And by some odd twist of timing and coincidence, the baby they had so desperately wished and tried to have for the last 8 years was conceived. And now the time was here, and the baby was letting Eleanor know in a rather unpleasant and urgent way that it was ready to join the world with all due haste. And so it was back to the panting, the concentrated breathing and wishing that Pete would hurry the fuck up so that she could get some fucking drugs for the pain.
 
Just a few hours earlier, they had been enjoying a lovely dinner party in the crested glow of the last few moments of a dazzling summer evening sunset with patio lanterns, with good food digesting in their stomachs, surrounded by the best of their friends. When Eleanor went to the kitchen to fetch dessert, it was on her way back out to the patio that she felt a sharp pain in her lower back and dropped the plate of peanut butter scones she was passing to her husband.  A look of confused surprise crossed her pretty face as she felt a warm rush of fluid between her legs.

A look of confused surprise crossed Pete’s face as well, because to drop a plate of peanut butter scones (especially in the middle of a dinner party, and in front of guests) was generally unheard of in the Francis family.  The recipe went in the Francis family back to the time of the creation of peanut butter, and as he watched the plate fall almost as if in slow motion, a small gasp of horror escaped his lips.  He turned to his wife, with the look of confusion still on his face and, seeing his expression matched in her face, he said “It must be time.”

Later on at the hospital, as she screamed, cursed and pushed, he paced, cursed and smoked.  And when the screaming stopped, a newborn cry rang out in the delivery room. That was when the nurse came out to tell him that he was the new and proud father of a beautiful baby boy. He was so overwhelmingly and exceedingly overjoyed at the news that when he felt a pain in his chest, that at first he thought must be a rush of love for his wife and newborn son. 

But as the pain spread to his left arm and choked his breath in his throat, he simply said “Oh.” and turned suddenly quite purple in the face and promptly fell over and died with a grin from ear to ear on his face.  A rush of doctors and nurses scooped him off the floor and flurried around him in a sudden haste of tubes and needles and machines, shouting things like “Another 10ml of Atropine!” and “CHARGING 250….  CLEAR!”, but Pete was clearly long past gone, his heart having literally burst with happiness.

It was the very same nurse that had delivered the news to Pete that very much reluctantly returned to the delivery room twenty minutes later to announce to Eleanor that her husband had died from what the doctors could only assume was joy.

She was sitting on the park bench, listening to the leaves blowing and whispering in their wind dance above her head. Her head tilted to listen, the other sound she relished in was the scratching of her pencil on notebook paper as she sketched the hunched figure of an old man with untamed hair.

He was muttering to himself, standing alone on a bench in the square feeding the pigeons as they scatter and shuffle around his feet. He sucked his tongue through his teeth, calling them to the birdseed in his outstretched hand.

The hardest shape and emotion of the scene she worked to capture, was the look of unrestrained glee in his wrinkled, gentle old eyes when one of the birds bravely hopped into his hand to gorge itself on sunflowers, flax, oats, and spring wheat.

Jack pondered slowly, turning the dime over and over in his fingertips.  He liked the way the light would shine on the sails of the little silver sailboat, and flicker off the glass of the fishtank into ripples on the wall.   He liked how the silence dissolved,  pushing it into the other room and down the hall with a shout, then smiling when it would come snapping back in somersaults when he closed his mouth. This was how he spent the evening (and once in the night) - yelping and shouting - surprised every time at how the silence would come back to him - like a boomerang.

He figured that maybe silence was a liquid, or possibly fine sand. It moved like the way sand seeped over the edges of your running shoes when you walked down the beach filling up the spaces between your toes with grit, getting into the laces... and by the time you got to the pier your shoes would be full and you'd have to lean against something to empty them, one at a time - and even then you'd still have sand clinging stubbornly between your toes that you'd get out later that night at home, on the carpet when nobody was looking.  But that sand would get rubbed in and make its way deep into the fibers - coming to rest in the spaces between the gold burlap fibers and the floorboards, making a mess of the perfectly good hardwood floors underneath and this was why good people wore flip-flops to the beach, he thought.  Making a note to avoid beaches whenever possible because he didn't have flip flops, so people might think he was rude.

Another thing to be avoided at all costs was mailboxes. Things that went into mailboxes were put into a red truck by a man with a moustache in kneesocks and khaki shorts. This wasn't the worst part. No, the worst part of it all was that the things that went into mailboxes never came back - even if nobody wanted them when they got there.

Sometimes when he saw a dog tied to a telephone post  he would think it the worst sort of life for a dog to endure, with nobody to talk to but a mouldy old telephone post and strangers who never stayed for long.  This is why it would never surprise him when he'd see that same telephone post a few weeks later with one of those tear off numer sheets advertising that its dog had run away.   He never told on the people that would come and untie the dogs while the telephone post wasn't looking because the dogs always looked so happy to be going away with them.