Unto The Night

Unto The Night
Amazon.com/ron koppelberger

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Within an Ace of it

Ron Koppelberger
Within an Ace of ItAdjacent to the luscious bougainvillea scrub and marigold bushes lay a splintered wooden guide, a separation of daydream barbecues and backyard millenniums. The wooden fence was the defining line between fate and mythical commons.
Sly’s neatly tended yard, patio and lawn furniture were centered around a large brick pit. Pig roasts and turkey barbecues for the holidays, a cool brew and a dose of sunshine. The sweet smell of flowers in bloom was subdued by the odor of fresh dirt and wounded earth, his neighbors yard was an amalgamate of backhoes and bulldozers, men in plastic overalls and all surrounded by yellow police tape.
Sundays child, he was Sundays child in fortune and happenstance. He had knocked on the front door on Sunday, “Hey, can ya help me partner, my wife, she’s bleeding.” In reality she had stopped bleeding and breathing weeks earlier. “Can ya help me brother?” his neighbor had called with a feigned urgency through the front door. Sly had considered it for a moment when the phone rang. A gentle whisper across static filled lines, “Snares of homespun hell, homespun hell!” then the line went dead.
“Sure thing!” he said out loud. The swath laid bare, the covenant of forward speed a drama ensnared……by what….homespun hell? The neighbor had left to return to his house. The front door lay open, unimpeded by the man’s presence. “Can ya help me brother?” he had said. Sly shut the door and a rain of delicate gypsy moths flittering near the sliding glass door caught his eye. Flittering, evanescent scarcely there yet ever trifling with the currents of moted sunshine and summer warmth. He watched the tiny tempest of moths flutter near the wooden fence. A separation between paradise and hell.
He had tried chance and the forty or so bodies buried on his neighbors property were now in the care of the F.B.I.; he sighed, he had been within an inch of it, an ace and a hair.

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