The Day the Jockeys Ran the Derby

Louisville, KY

I swayed in the paddock with my new friends and my Old Forester. Beyond the twin spires, thunderclouds rolled. Despite my elevated spirits, I was down big and in need of a little luck. I had a hundred bucks on a longshot named Sasquatch who finished last. I stood up and kissed a stranger in a stranger hat. Afterward, she stole my phone and proceeded to place several large bets in my TVG account. Although it was the last of my cash, I didn’t intervene. I just sipped my mint julep and cried. The trio of teenaged eunuchs serenading us with Stephen Foster was incredibly moving. Then we watched breathlessly as they loaded the horses into the gate for the big race, but by now the sky had turned a shade of green that I’d never seen before, and all the thoroughbreds seemed thoroughly spooked, and the woman I’d been Frenching stopped and said, “Pardon my French, but what the shit is that?” From what I could gather, she was looking at a greenish mist that had settled over the horses. Next thing I know the entire scene is moving in green, slow-motion sludge, and the gates open, and the horses sputter and stall out like old clunkers. Then the reel rolls into standard speed, and it’s the jockeys who are running the race, and though most of them burn out quicker than virgins on prom night a select few catch their stride and pound beautifully. We’re too busy watching the race to fully realize that the green haze is everywhere now—in the stands, on our hands, eyes, minds—and the world is so much a phantom that it threatens to fold over and fall straight through itself. Two spindly jockeys pull ahead of the small pack and dig hard into the final stretch. It’s too close to call at this distance, and besides, my eyes are damn near useless in this green muck. A pregnant woman beside me goes into labor, and the teenaged eunuchs who moonlight as first responders snap into action. Despite what can only be green toxins everywhere there’s a particular clarity inherent in this mayhem, and I can see the end of my life and your life and our lives are so soaked and wrecked, and yet we manage, somehow, to catch a photo finish of a smiling baby girl to calm this day and claim this crown.

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The Night of the Big Storm and the Bigger Sleep

Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN

They traded barbs electronically. From her extravagant penthouse in Minneapolis, she texted that he was a terrible lover. From his busted bungalow in St. Paul, he sipped a tall gin fizz, bit into an oddly bitter-tasting chocolate bar his brother had gifted him, and texted back that it takes one to know one. “Good one,” she wrote. “I know,” he wrote. “I am a good one.” “A good what?” she wrote. “Moron? Because you’re the best moron.” “You mean that?” he wrote. “The best?” “Of course, I mean that,” she wrote. “I’m dying laughing,” he wrote. She wrote back that he should go ahead and die already. “Why haven’t you died?” she wrote. His fingertips meditated above the symbols on the touchscreen. Despite their fucked-up communication, he felt a real heart behind her words, and his own heart recognized it. Their six-month anniversary was tomorrow: Cinco de Mayo. He hoped it would stop snowing by then. God, how he missed her. He was about to write this sentiment or something similar when his breath caught in his throat and his chest seized. He stood up, sat down, and dropped his gin drink on the carpet. Just then, his younger brother came in from the cold, holding a gigantic bag of chocolate bars. One of the perks of being the second-shift manager at the local chocolate factory. The two brothers looked at each other, and they also looked a lot like each other, but they weren’t identical twins. The slightly older brother clutched his chest on the couch, his lungs filling with fluid and the blood draining from his face. There was nothing left to say. He died right there in the living room. The slightly younger brother took out his phone, set down his bag of chocolate bars next to his dead brother, and texted her: “It’s done.” She texted back, “Duh, you poisoned him! Come over. I’m so hot right now.” He texted back: “That makes two of us.” He waited. Then he texted, “Can you believe this weather?” “Right?” she wrote. “So much for global warming,” he wrote. Outside, it was a full-on blizzard. The climate has officially turned strange, he thought. Then he wrote, “I’ll be over after I clean up.” He picked up the poisoned candy bar and hid the evidence in the chest pocket of his ski vest, and then he grabbed the poisoned glass from the carpet and rinsed it thoroughly in the sink. To be extra careful, he thought he’d run it in the dishwasher. He opened up the door and slid out the bottom row and placed the glass next to a sprawl of bowls and silverware, but just as he did this, he heard an odd sound in the next room. He thought: No! He can’t be alive? Not possible. He turned to investigate, but he turned too fast, and he tripped over the dishwasher door and fell face-first onto two sharp knives that happened to be facing upward in the silverware basket. Both knives plunged into his neck artery, and the little brother bled out on the kitchen floor. Across the Mississippi River, in her swank penthouse, she felt keyed up, so she ate half an Ativan to calm down. Then she ate the other half and waited. Then she drank champagne and waited. She ate another Ativan and waited. More champagne. She waited. She masturbated and waited. A shot of vodka and a sleeping pill. Waited. Eventually, she fell asleep on the sofa all alone and lonely. Outside, the snow punished both cities.

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The Night Sasquatch Shot the Snake

Twin Falls, ID

In a toolshed behind a modest, mid-century ranch, a graying Sasquatch squeezed into an ill-fitting Evel Knievel suit. He’d had the white leather coat customized with his initials in blue on each spangled sleeve, B and F, and across the jacket’s back, it read in gold sequins: The Legend Rolls On. He helmeted himself, but before dropping the visor on his shock-absorbent hardhat, the Sasquatch slugged some single malt from the antique decanter on his workbench wet-bar, careful to savor the intricate whirlpool of smoky peat with pear and orange-peel flavors upfront, as well as the background harmonies of beeswax, coconut, and mud. At least he thought it was mud? It was something earthy that reminded him of his wild years living on forest detritus and animal carcasses. Yes, he’d come a long way since then. He’d taken a job as a bouncer at a cowboy bar, bought a corner lot on a dead-end street, and aside from his occasional motorcycle stunts, he’d generally acclimated well to suburban life in southern Idaho. Indeed, his tastes had changed, and his once-monstrous palate had evolved enough to appreciate a top-shelf Scotch, but in the end, the heart wants what it wants. On his way out of the shed, Satch stopped at the mini-fridge and shotgunned six cans of Old Milwaukee. Now he felt braver and bolder. He hopped on his Sportster and rode a wheelie from the mouth of the cul-de-sac straight to the edge of town, eventually stopping at the lip of the Snake River Gorge where he flipped up his visor and flipped his giant middle finger to his challenger: the gap. His hero, Evel Knievel, couldn’t clear it in his prime, even with his special-engineered Skycycle rocket and whatnot. Tonight, Satch was making history on his Harley by attaching it to a homemade hang glider that would hopefully carry him the distance. He’d posted event flyers around town at his usual haunts, over at Honker’s Place, the Pioneer Pub, and also on the bulletin board at work at the Cowboy Club. The flyer read: See Satch Shoot the Snake This Saturday Night @ 7pm. Below the text, it depicted him standing on his bike seat in midair, all done in a crude contour drawing that Satch whipped up one night after a few swigs of Scotch and a couple cases of Old Mil. Now he wasn’t surprised that no one had shown. Everyone he knew was gutless these days except when they were on the internet, and let’s face it: nobody believed in Sasquatch anymore. Even his best friend, Bill the bartender! Bill was sure that Old Satch was just a furry fetishist who never broke character. Speaking of Bill, where was he? You can’t make history alone. Ask any loser who’s ever written a history book. Now Satch watched the sun slip behind the opposing hillside and decided it was time to ride with or without a witness. He got to work, assembling the makeshift glider attachment he’d designed—and once configured, he tied it to the handlebars of his bike with the bulk of a thirty-pound spool of strong fishing line. Then he strapped a parachute to his back and backed up to get the proper arc. By the time he went over the rim of the canyon, the Sportster’s digital speedometer said 123 mph, and the RPMs were in the blood-red region, and so he let off the gas completely, killed the engine, and let the glider wing him through the air, and just as soon as it appeared that he’d come up short and would crash into Snake River, he pulled the ripcord on his chute just as a fortuitous tailwind picked him up and ushered him triumphantly to the other side of the canyon. Sure, he’d lost his bike, but he’d bested his hero. He wished Bill had been here to see it but decided it didn’t matter. It’d be a long walk. It was getting dark. He tossed the parachute into a nearby shrub, and instead of starting the steep trek back to the surface road which would ultimately lead to the city, he turned and took a serpentine trailhead down into the valley. Soon enough, he had no idea where he was, but even so, it felt familiar, like a wild approximation of home. You’re a legend, baby, he thought, act like it. He saw a great horned owl in a Juniper, and when he reached out to greet it, he accidentally crushed its skull. What he didn’t see was the man in the Bigfoot suit shitting himself behind a shrub.

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The Night of the Flower Blood Moon Eclipse

Twin Lakes, CA

The twins kidnapped our baby goat. I was sure of it. My best guess is that they’d sacrifice it tonight at their witchy ritual up at Mammoth Mountain. These were our prodigal daughters who returned home immediately after their collegiate soccer careers ended in academic disgrace, and now Nora and Dora were living together in an old converted grain silo at the edge of our property. “We don’t necessarily know it’s them,” you said. We stood in the pasture under an alien sunset. I said, “Oh, it’s them. Not a doubt in my mind. Those kids went bad.” You rubbed your stomach, mournfully. “Does it have to be bad?” you said. This question took me by surprise, but I understood what you meant. We’d come far enough in our marriage that even when I didn’t understand, I did understand. We walked to the pond in silence. Pink chutes fanned out in the sky. I thought about sex then I thought about cheeseburgers. You shed your overalls and slipped into the water. After we’d inherited the property from your eccentric Uncle Bob, we dredged the pond and bordered it with smooth stone. When the girls were young, they’d stretch out waterside and lap ice cream cones. In later years they’d sneak down at night to hypnotize frogs. You liked to come down here to paint pictures of planets. I liked to drift on my floaty and drink beer. This pond was a restorative place, a place to come back to ourselves when we’d been pulled too far from the anchor of our spines. But times had soured. Our parenting skills were crippled by technology. Our moral infrastructure had crumbled. You floated on your back, your nipples pointing toward the heavens. I slouched at the edge with a mouthful of pebbles. I spit them like teeth, one at a time, into the water. You took a deep breath and went under. Looking into the space where you’d been, I thought of you from a different time, a time when you were the former child actress turned mighty diplomat. The thought gave me a new feeling, a good feeling, a light feeling. I waited for you to come back up so I could tell you what I was feeling, that I thought our daughters would do the right thing and bring back our sweet baby goat. But you never came back up. Then everything grew darker and along came the moon, a pale salesman.