Yes, this is a blog

She had dark hair, dark eyes, strong nose. Like my father, like my sister. In her youth she was spry and mobile. She rode motorcycles with her husband and posed for photos seen years later framed in colorless, dazed remembrance when clearing out her house. But I only remember her sitting or wobbling precipitously on her walker. Sitting in her home, her room padded with a mountain of her possessions. Dressers and miscellaneous clothes and makeup kits. A large thermos atop a night stand beset by a litany of pill bottles in various sizes. She pulled me near, hand in my hand. Her old skin a cellophane husk pulled too loose in some places and too tight in others. Over the fingers and knuckles like knobby roots. Mulberry veins so distended and raised it looked as though they were scarcely connected to her body, like a detachable apparatus of tubing that laid just on the surface of her arms. She wore thick makeup, a cosmetic disguise that rubbed blush on the bedspread and her purple blouse....

On the outskirts, spread even and deliberate, are towers in T-shapes with ladders and antenna. Behind them a chain link fence casts a wide perimeter, easily traversable. They chaperon a cardboard cutout of Kansas plain country stitched to a quilt in the downslope shadow of the Smokies. In the hill valley hemmed by distinguished plateaus and accompanying rivers. The land is cut and cornered by a road that zig-zags from point to point, lilting up and down and steady like the tide. The pavement widens and shrinks and digs underneath runways. One tunnel's so long and spread your radio craps out and the car in the next lane honks its horn for the echo's novelty value alone. A grey, bright ambiance from the multitude of square overhead lights like buttons on a console board paint the inside and set it distinction. A building is on the left with a slanted roof. It is alone, surrounded by more flat terrain. A hangar with a small jet inside. More structures and busyness encroach fur...

A preamble of deliberate silences and curt remarks. In the atmosphere a feeling of conflict already poised to detonate. The kind of recurring antipathy that rises every so often to the surface when it has stewed and boiled over. The staccato barbs and knowing looks. Try your best not to light the fuse. Avoid as much contact as possible; speak gently and directly. Count and measure your words for any could be the one that sets off the neutron bomb laying on the couch after a long day. Long day, long week, long life. How quickly the temperature changes. Like a coin flipped in the air it is either/or. Tender and bitter, generous and vengeful. Two faces of one person appear seemingly at random as if the same breath could heal and brutalize with equal intent. There are no disguises here, no masks. This is honesty. These are the true contents otherwise buried and hidden away. The purified current of venom that runs beneath the day to day. Tomorrow they will shake hands with dressed up acqu...

I sit in trepidation. Have been all year, or at least the last quarter. Sitting for weeks knowing it was coming. Leading all up to this. For nothing but a few moments I've been commanded to endure. Same as its ever been. You'd think by now I'd be used to it, even skilled. Done it too many times now, so many points prepared and rehearsed. A man can get good at anything after all. Like skydiving or jumping off a cliff. Things that strike terror in most people embraced by those whose joy comes from nearly dying. But this, somehow, is different. Stood apart as the thing most abominable; a fear even surpassing death. Something that requires no real danger, no chance of physical harm. Only your nerves are at stake, your status in the eyes of others. What fragile arrogance. Please like me. I'd rather you kill me than not like me. So I sit. That morning I remembered to bring a shirt reserved for special occasions and wear pants with a modicum of formality. The bare minimum re...

When your visage graces my screen I recoil and turn away. The jolt fires up my spine and I hover paralytic with my head down and my eyes sidled. A jittery kid hiding and peeking behind the doorpost. Irrational, stupid fear. Fear that has stained my life, stunted my growth. To look away is just to let your mind wander, to freeze that frame and elaborate grotesque imagery from its imprint more haunting than anything solid. Look again. Just a man. Man of affliction. Great, aberrant, horrible. Beyond different. I know your title and the name shadowed by it. Been taken by your history, heard but never seen. Often you've returned to my thoughts, inexplicable as your continued infamy. Your bulbous forehead and crimped mouth and gnarled contusions the marks of defective notoriety. A tumorous enigma more famous than most. Could I see myself in you? No. I wouldn't dare. How ludicrous are my complaints compared to yours, king pariah. There is none more ostracized, no one farther away. But...

He couldn't make out any of their shapes in the window though he knew them by heart. Cassiopeia and Orion and Ursa Minor. Their weapons and their bipedal forms. On his own volition he studied them as a child always with the dream and motivation to travel by them, to greet them on their own turf and wave a hand hello in that great black open. The excitement and allure that for many had been lost but never for him. So groundbreaking and terrifying were the advances in galactic traversal. Expedited interstellar travel. The colonization of celestial bodies. The discovery and communication of alien species. Their arrivals came with point impacts that faded and disappeared not a moment after they had solidified. Just another facet of life, exploding every prior sight and sound known to existence then shrinking back down again. Such was the way of people, be them earthlings or seven-foot tall speaking reptiles. Adapters. There they were, a family of them sequestered by a docking station...

They kept their backs to a stream where the water ran constant and clear like a current of glass smoothing a bed of stones and falling white faster than they could go. It was cold to the touch and pure in taste and it would satiate them on the trail when the hours drug and dried. They held to their order and rested and watered over a gray caucus of shore rocks. The bank was hemmed by a mud wall ingrown with conniving roots that bowed out upholding slanted timber that grasped at its life blood. Farthest down there the thin soldier bated and spoke almost nothing. The boy would glance at him brief every now and again. Curios. Never was his scrutiny returned nor any measure of acknowledgment shared. A pricked rod of quartz he was, his visage and his demeanor. He knelt with his weapon and put his hands into the sparkling folds of the mountain runoff and cupped them and rubbed his cheeks that against the granular padding of his palms sanded a short crop of chin whiskers. A goatee he wore nea...