FRANK SULLIVAN ARRIVED early at the stadium. He was in a somber mood. His brother-in-law had been bending his ear about the elections. They were still three months away and already Frank was tired of the rants. He didn’t understand it. He was already disinclined to vote for the incumbent, but couldn't see much difference in the challenger. Why was everyone so excited over so little choice?

He tried to put it all out of his mind as he changed clothes and got ready for the game. But the political rancor followed him even here, in the umpire’s locker room. His crew were debating the candidates, and they tried to draw him in.

“Hey, Frank, what do you think?”

Frank focused on tying his shoelaces. “It might rain,” he responded without looking up.

“Come on, Frank, don’t you think Obama needs another four years? Bush left him with a real mess.”

Another voice came across the room before Frank could answer. “Are you kidding? He’s only made things worse.”

Frank was finished with his shoelaces but remained sitting, staring at his feet, while the others continued their debate.

JEB FOUND HIS YOUNGEST SON sitting under the old oak tree in their garden. The lad was weeping. He sat beside the boy, placed an arm around his shoulders, and asked, “What's wrong, son?”

The boy sniffled and kicked the dirt at his feet. “Nothing,” he murmured.

Jeb squeezed his son and coaxed him, “Come on, son. Something's bothering you.”

Several moments passed and Jeb's mind wandered. He soaked up the sun filtering through the leaves and enjoyed a birdsong wafting on the breeze.

The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and tried to pull away, but Jeb held him close. He was about to try again to get his son to open up when an acorn bounced off his shoulder. Looking up, Jeb saw his two older sons scampering across the branches above.

“Sorry, dad,” Lyle, the oldest, shouted.

Jeb smiled up at the boy. “Careful up there,” he called out.

“We're careful, dad,” the two boys aloft chorused.

Turning his attention back to his youngest son beside him, Jeb saw that the weeping had resumed. A glimmer of understanding came to him. “You want to be up there, too?” he asked.

The boy nodded and snuffled loudly, then inhaled deeply and sighed.

Jeb smiled. “You will,” he assured the boy, “someday.”

The boy looked up at his father. His eyes said it all: Could it be true? Then, doubt. “When?” he asked.

Bob sat staring at his best friend, Frank. He had composed his face into a study of patience as Frank vented. “Don't you care?” Frank demanded. 

Bob shrugged.

“You should,” Frank continued. 

Bob raised his eyebrows, just for a moment, and breathed a sigh.

Frank stormed towards the refrigerator and opened the door. He stood with one hand on the door handle, the other on the upper edge of the appliance. His back and shoulders were rigid. Bob watched and waited from the kitchen table where he sat, a half empty bottle of beer sweating on the tabletop. Frank's bottle sat untouched across the table.

The distance between the two men seemed to expand in the silence that followed Frank's last outburst.

Frank muttered, “Damn,” and Bob prepared himself for the next installment in the tirade.

BARRY WALKED PAST the ladies in the lounge without seeing them. He pushed open the door and stepped inside, oblivious to a warning shout that followed him. He was in a hurry and already opening the zipper fly of his pants as he glanced around. Confusion ruled his face. Where were the urinals?

No time to look for them. He slammed open a stall and stepped up to the toilet. He was in mid-stream when a giggle brought him back to his senses. He tried to stem the flow and failed. Then he heard a voice, a female voice. Another answered. Panic took over.

Barry jammed his thumb over the end of his penis as he turned around and sat. He was surprised to find urine squirting in all directions. He tried to aim into the toilet before letting go but his pants were still around his waist and the zipper was pulled up preventing him from achieving the proper angle.

Southern California has two seasons: Wet and drought. I've lived here almost forty years and only seen one wet season. My wife, a native, assures me that she lived through a lifetime's worth of wet seasons during the 1950s. We'll just have to take her word for that.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of varmints that seem quite content with the drought. I had an occasion to meet a colony of them one evening in Laguna Niguel as we prepared to watch the Fourth of July fireworks.

My wife and I and our young daughter, Kaili, together with my children from a previous marriage, John and Judy, had met my business partner and his family at a small regional park. We arrived around lunch time to set up shop for a day of picnic and games. The grounds were riddled with deep burrows that seemed vacant. So, we simply spread our blanket over one and scattered chairs and umbrellas about it.

Never buy a home that you only visited on Sunday. My parents did and regretted the decision when we lived there on our first Monday. That's the day we discovered that there was a ready mix concrete plant on the other side of the woods that bordered our backyard. As if the dust and noise wasn't bad enough, there was the continuous traffic of heavy concrete trucks making deliveries to construction sites all day, every day.

In time, the community rose up and filed a court case to obtain a cease and desist order. The judge granted it, but reversed himself when the business owner sold out to a more politically well-heeled gentleman and the concrete operations resumed.

Rather than rub our noses in his power, the new owner sought ways to be a better neighbor. In this spirit he demolished a field of tool sheds that occupied a couple acres of his property like a shanty town for dwarves. Nature, inclined as she is, filled this new vaccuum with a host of young boys from the neighborhood who came to play ball.

JEREMY FOUND HIMSELF propped up with his back against the workbench, his left arm looped around the grinder and his right around the vise. He hadn't fainted, at least he didn't think he had. His mind simply had abandoned him for a few minutes while it came to grips with what he had wrought. The horror of it sat on the basement floor, staring at him.

It waited without moving until Jeremy's eyes focused. Its posture was expectant, like a predator measuring the distance to its prey. Its expression, venomous.

Jeremy found his feet and shifted his weight to them so that he could free his arms. Now he gripped the edge of the work bench with both hands. Fear both dictated escape and froze him in place at the same time. 

The thing, tired of waiting, spoke. “Why have you made me?”

THE BLANKET FELL, one crystal at a time whispering in the dark. Like nature’s cosmetologist, it smoothed every wrinkle and hid every blemish. Peace reigned, if only for a moment, and the deepest scars were bandaged. A sign rested on the ground at the intersection of two roads barely discernible beneath the accumulation of snow covering the countryside. It read Bastogne 2KM and pointed to the west although it may have pointed in some other direction when it was affixed to its post nearby.

Peter stood transfixed. He ran his sleeve across his eyes and the sign disappeared. Only the snow remained. “Old fool,” he muttered and shook his head, then returned to shoveling out the driveway.

“Peter, come in here and have some hot cocoa,” a voice filled with concern called.

DENNIS RETREATED to his room in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. It was almost Easter. Mom was baking her traditional coconut Easter eggs. Dad was in the basement attempting to crack one of the tropical drupes. Yes, a coconut is neither a fruit or a nut. It's a drupe. Dennis had come across that arcane fact while searching for instructions on how to split one open. He found them, but his father refused to listen. His father never listened. Dennis wasn't worth listening to.

A sudden crash followed by extensive cursing wafted through the home's forced air ventilation system. The ducts of the house's force air heating system worked like speaking tubes in an old steam ship. Dennis could clearly distinguish his mother in the kitchen, baking her cake. His father vented his annoyance for another half hour, then came the silence. It was a dreadful silence. Dennis bent over his desk and tried to focus on his textbook. That must have been his father's fifth attempt and Dennis was prepared for the next phase of the assault. His father's angry footsteps, up from the basement and on to the second floor, echoed throughout the house.

HAROLD SAT ON HIS SON'S FRONT PORCH playing Monopoly with his grandchildren when the youngest, Jeremy, pointed to the sky and asked, “What are those, Grandpa?”

Harold looked up and saw the high wisps of clouds that had caught his grandson's attention. “They're called 'horsetails',” he replied.

Turning back to the game he could feel the boy staring at him.

“What do they mean, Grandpa?” the child asked.

“Mean?”

“You said that clouds tell you things.”

Harold chuckled and tousled the boy's hair. “You're right,” he assured the boy. “Those clouds tell me that there's going to be a change.”

“A change?”