The days seem long, the years go fast

ephemeral, it cannot last

life, love, the memories you share

dream of forever if you dare;

blink and the present becomes past

the days seem long, the years go fast

the path behind a vivid guide

death lies ahead, you cannot hide;

you gave your life for this moment

was it worth it? Do you own it?

the days seem long, the years go fast

the echos of yesteryear are vast;

do you rejoice in existence?

Meet time's passage with resistence?

Enjoy it all! The die is cast!

the days seem long, the years go fast.

Thanks for the truth

Thanks for the alcoholism

Thanks for the breakdown

Thanks for not much

Thank you for everything

David Burdett

6/18/2023

The day after they moved in next door, I baked cookies, my husband picked a few heirloom tomatoes from our garden, and we went to welcome them to the neighborhood. We knocked and the door was opened only enough for the woman who answered to block the view inside with her body.

“Hi! We’re your neighbors,” I said pointing to our little red house. “I’m Darla, this is my husband, Jay. We just wanted to drop these off to say welcome.”

“Who is it?” a man said from in the house.

“Neighbors,” she yelled back.

Plastering a very fake smile on her face, she accepted the cookies and tomatoes, saying, “Thanks so much. That was very thoughtful of you. I’m Angel.” A man’s head appeared above her shoulder. “This is my husband, Garrett. We’re still getting settled so I can’t invite you in for a tour…” Is that a thing? A tour?

My husband and I glanced at each other and away. “We didn’t come to visit, just to say welcome.”

Her husband gave me what one might call an intimate smile and said, “Very neighborly of you.”

Wifey must have heard the look because the sickly smile added dagger eyes when she snapped,“You’re in great shape. Do you work out?”

“Um, yes?” Rather random, but whatever.

“Figures,” she mumbled then continued with the brilliant albeit fake smile, “Well, we have to get back to it. I’m sure we’ll be great neighbors. We’re very quiet.”

“We are as well. Except I do like to play music and sing. Hopefully, we’re far enough away. Lilly and Matt never said anything anyway.” Lilly and Matt were the previous owners.

“I love music. Don’t I love music, Garrett?” He looked as confused as Jay and I felt. “As soon as we are settled in, we’ll have you over for a tour.” Again with the tour.

“Good luck,” I said as they closed the door and we headed across the lawn to our own home.

“We’re not going over there again,” my husband said.

“A little weird,” I replied. “But not as weird as Jill’s new neighbors."

“Emma and Jake?”

“I swear, Jake never blinks when he talks to you. And his eyes are such an icy blue I get chills every time he talks to me.”

“They seem like a nice family.”

“Hmph. And where did they come from? I mean, there was never a for sale sign, an open house or moving vans. One day the Davidsons lived in the big yellow house and the next, Emma, Jake, Alec and Lily Jones did.”

“I think your imagination is itching to write a new story,” Jay said kissing my forehead before opening the door for me.

“Maybe,” I replied, not convinced.

A few months later, Christmastime, Angel knocked on our door while I was at work.

“Hi, Jay. I just wanted to drop these off,” she handed him a box of chocolates. “We love these. They’re very expensive. So good. They’re Garrett and my favorites. Really expensive.”

“Thanks, Angel.”

“Jay, do you think you could give me, Darla’s cell phone number? I’d like to ask her a question.”

“Sure.”

A few minutes after Jay called to warn me, she called.

“Darla? This is Angel. Your neighbor.”

“Hi, Darla.”

“Sorry to bother you at work, but Jay said it would be okay to call you.”

“No problem. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to ask, have there ever been any robberies on the block? I don’t really know anyone on the street yet besides you to ask, but we think someone has been trying to break into our home.”

“Really? That’s scary. But no, there has never been a problem. I mean, we do live behind the police station…I would imagine most criminals would look for easier pickings…Plus, it’s not exactly millionaire’s row.”

“Well, someone tried to come in the garage.”

“I’m really sorry to hear that. The block has been a wonderful community for the nearly 30 years we’ve lived here. Have you contacted the police?”

“We don’t need the police! We know people.”

“Okay…”

“I got cameras installed all over the property. We’re close to catching them. We have some suspects.”

“Okay…” Her voice sounded like we were suspects.

“Well, we don’t know anyone so maybe you could let people know something’s going on.”

“Will do. Good luck. Bye.”

That night when I got home, they had “No trespassing signs” around the house. And I guess hidden cameras. And spotlights.

“Don’t be too friendly, Darla,” my husband said when I told him her story. “I don’t trust those people. Something’s off.”

“Yeah, well, I hadn’t planned on any double dates, don’t worry.”

Things were quiet for a few weeks – as they often are in winter. Then over a period of days in March, alternately Angel or Garrett were screaming at people who parked in front of their house to get away from there – regardless of the hour. We have a neighbor who trains people in his garage starting at 6 am and his first client of the day was parked across the street from Angel’s house at 5:45. She went out in her nightgown and screamed at him, “Who are you? What are you doing here? Get away from here!”

Another day it was some members of a Christian woman’s group meeting at the home of a long-time resident, Martha. “You can’t park there! Get away from my house!”

Then it was men from the town doing work on my curb. “I’m going to call the police!”

“Lady, the police are right over there,” the man said pointing to the cop on duty. She huffed and went inside.

The strangest was when Garett went banging on the door of the elderly couple across the street: Martha, 82 and John 84. “Stop following my wife! She saw you following her car! You better cut it out!”

John was taken aback (you think?). “I’m 84 years old, I can barely drive to the supermarket.”

“Huh. Well, you just stay away from my wife.”

At this point, we all figured they were probably some kind of certifiable paranoid and we decided together and separately to keep our distance.

The last incident involved Emma. She said, “Hi, Angel,” one day while walking by with her dog and Angel started screaming, “Who are you? I don’t know you! Don’t talk to me.”

Emma tried to remind her that they were neighbors, they’d met when they first moved in. But Angel wouldn’t stop screaming and flailing her arms, so Emma kept walking.

Maybe two days later, I got home from work and the street was full of police cars and neighbors. I parked and walked down the street to the crowd and saw that the police were leading Jake Jones out of his house, in hand cuffs.

Feeling vindicated in my earlier wariness, I asked my neighbor Jill what happened.

“Apparently, he got angry that Angel screamed at Emma. Snuck in their house last night and stabbed both her and Garrett multiple times in their bed. He must have thought the signs about cameras were a lie. The alarm company has a patch into their camera system and caught him entering and leaving on tape.

“They put the photo on the neighborhood blog and statewide police wire, and someone recognized Jake. Not only from here in town, but also from several other towns.

“From what I hear, he is wanted all over the state. Maybe the country.”

“Oh my god!”

“There’s more. Look.”

“I turned as they carried out four body bags.”

“What -?”

“The Davidsons.”

“I knew it!”

When I was a kid I was afraid of Johnny Cash. His music hit like a storm, so that the mere mention of his name was enough to conjure up black clouds and whirling winds in my childish mind. I didn’t know him, had never even met him, but when a girl in my class said she was related to him it was enough to send chills down my back. Country music was what my family tuned-in to in those days, and Johnny Cash was country music (all others, to include the hillbillies before and after, being mere imposters). Such was the living legend of “The Man in Black” down where I am from.

It wasn’t the prison associations he fostered that frightened me, nor his priestly black, frock coats, nor his towering physical presence, nor even the deep bass of his voice, although any of those things could be scary enough in their own rights to a seven year old. It was his aura that unnerved me. It was the reverent way that people I knew and respected spoke about him, as though Johnny Cash was the Resurrection itself, or worse, that he might have actually sprung from that other place that we were not allowed to talk about. Johnny Cash seemed larger than life back in the early 1970’s, and capable of any and everything. For instance, my Memaw would say with certainty to everyone gathered around her television set that Johnny Cash was the very devil himself come up from Memphis, and this as she sang and clapped along to he and Mother Maybelle picking out the Wildwood Flower. How is a child to process such oxymoroneous (I just invented that word) behavior?

Later, when I was in my thirties, my wife and I moved to Hendersonville, Tn., where Johnny and June had a house on the lake. I saw them while shopping at the local Lowe’s one day, she carrying a list as she scurried up and down the aisles, he struggling to keep up on the little electric handicapped cart, his bowed head humble and gray. Any unresolved fear I harbored was lifted at the sight of it, he being so obviously near his end, and yet I felt that same shiver I’d felt when my little classmate, Angie Cash, had told us all so long ago that she was somehow his kin. I never would have believed that day in Lowe’s that Johnny could somehow survive June, and looking back on it I wish he hadn’t. Her death left him even more broken than the turncoat, ”keep up with the times” country music industry had.

Johnny is gone now, and it is still debatable which direction he traveled from Tennessee, north or south, but he left behind a discography of greatness to remember him by; a plethora of songs to remind us in their simplicity and lyric, from rockabilly to gospel, that our time here on Earth is short, just as his was, and that there is something worth considering after… maybe even something to fear.

Just how high is that water, Momma?

In darkest night a single shot rang out,

a body lay upon the preacher's stage;

the pages of a Bible strewn about

were evidence of some unholy rage.

My job it was, to solve these heinous crimes—

the holy dead man here was not the first.

Though I possessed a sharp deductive mind,

it had become my blessing, and my curse.

These men were foolishly all targeted

by some poor fool, in superstitious zeal,

who used a silver bullet to strike dead

the werewolves they must have believed were real.

The true sadness was one they'd never know,

as in the moonlight, I felt my fangs grow.

----------------------

© 2023 dustygrein

Where do the ghosts stay at the hospital

The sick who died without an even chance

The patients who left without remittal

Of diseased parts that pushed them the distance

Of all the ghouls who come to those who fear

There aren't those more fright'ning—to the staff

Who made the mistakes that haunt each career

And leave the trail of death on their behalf

Arithmetic mistakes preclude recount

As when concocting potions meant to heal

These are the blunders making death tolls mount

And guilt that does not pay for lives they steal

The horror tales that spin of wraiths and ghosts

Ignore the places where they're brewed the most

Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

Today, we feature one of our resident legends, thanks to a request by another one of our long-time writers. They know who they are, and so will you when you click the link below. The title of the video slightly gives it away, but just slightly...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzS14lqNo7U&t=7s

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

He was screaming he was bleeding,

Injuries that need treating,

Shot point blank,

Ripped open his right flank,

Moving and working to get him care,

I pinched my finger it's just not fair!

Throbbing and aching it hurts real bad,

A blister has formed and it looks real mad,

His crying is not helping my pain,

I wish people were not so vain.