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Monday, February 25, 2013

A Strange Morning...

Biker Dude woke up today...

Oh shit! The fiction gods are going to have a fit. Every wannabe writer too who has ever read about how not to start a story is already thinking, "Aha! It's a cliche. You're never supposed to..."



Give it a break.



Biker Dude woke up, and that's when the craziness started, so that's where the story is going to start.

Okay?!

Anyway, he sat up, then stood up and stretched. Wow, that was a good night's sleep. The windows were all wide open and it was in the fifties. Perfect.

He knew he was going to be seeing his girlfriend that night, so he knelt down just below the bedroom window where, plugged into an outlet strip, was a timer. He was just dialing it to the current time when a rustling noise came from outside. Not just outside but RIGHT THERE. AT the window.


With the timer still in hand, he looked.

A blue jay sat perched on the flower box outside the window. It looked in.

It seemed to look at the timer like it was some interesting new gadget it wanted to try out. Then it looked up and saw that Biker Dude was looking at him just as curiously and it flew up to the wire coming to the house from the telephone pole.

It looked down at Biker Dude for about ten seconds, made a couple of skritchy chirpy sounds, then flew away.

Hmmmm...

Biker Dude finished setting the timer and went towards the kitchen. Before he even got there he heard all this cackling and screeching going on out on the patio.

He opened the blinds over the kitchen sink. There were at least 50 grackles out there. On the feeder, on the ground, on the roof of the garage and in the wood pile and the bushes next to it. They were on the back porch and two were exploring the old abandoned bird house sitting there waiting to be fixed or thrown out.

A group of sparrows were perched on the fence by the wood pile just watching while the Grackles monopolized the bird seed.

Normally Biker Dude would chase the grackles away, but he was still a bit sleepy and didn't feel like going out there... yet.

He stepped away from the window, went to the stove top counter, and looked at the mail from yesterday. When he picked up an envelope, an ant, a big one, scurried from where the envelope was to under another piece of mail.

Biker Dude moved the other envelope, and, before the ant could get away, he smashed it with his hand.

The cat, who was laying by the refrigerator, got up and looked at him like, "what did I do?"

"It's okay. I just killed an ant. You're not in trouble," Biker Dude said.

The cat lay back down, stretched, and started to close his eyes.

Biker Dude found a notepad. He wanted to write himself a reminder to bring his mom's book with him when he went to visit her, and when he reached for a nice sharp pencil, another ant appeared from under it.

It got smashed too.

And then another and then another. It was like they were coming out of foxholes. A backpack sat on the countertop and Biker Dude moved it to make some room for the battle he knew was coming. Six more ants were hiding under it and went running in all directions.

Bam... Bam Bam bam.... bam BAMM!

They all got smashed.

What the heck? Biker Dude rubbed my hand, which by now was feeling a little sore.

Then he saw some ants inside the unzipped compartment of the backpack. It was a regular party going on.

He shook it, and six more ants fell off and scurried for the safety of the edge of the countertop or for cover under glasses cases or pencils or sets of keys.

They all got smashed too.

Now there was ant juice and bodies strewn everywhere. Not a good day for the ants.

And still more ants were inside the backpack.

Damn.

Biker Dude decided to take the backpack out to the patio and dump it out. There must be some reason they're so fascinated with the back pack, he thought. Maybe the cherry coke? Maybe the pretzels? Can't be the water or the pencils. Not unless these ants are thirsty, and they're writers.

He opened the back door and the multitude of birds on the patio scattered. They sat on the roof of the garage and in the lilacs just next to the woodpile and watched. It was a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock.

Biker Dude pulled items from the backpack one by one and ants dropped off each item onto the concrete.

He decided to leave no survivors to tell the tale and stepped on them one by one. Flapping sounds around him told him that new arrivals were gathering to watch the action.

Altogether, by the time he was done, at least sixty ants lost their lives.

When the pack was pretty empty except for the last ants hiding deep down at the bottom in the crevices, Biker Dude turned it over and shook it out and killed the last of them. Along with the last of the ants, shards of a cracked jawbreaker fell out.

Ahhhh... A light bulb went on.

One mystery solved.

Meanwhile, the birds just watched and waited. A few cackled their approval like crowds watching hockey enjoying a fight. But then when they saw that all the action was over with, they one by one flew away.

Biker Dude picked up the items and stuffed them back into the backpack. He tossed the remains of the jawbreaker toward the anthill just off the edge of the patio and went inside and sat down on one of the stools and thought, "Hmmm... First the blue jay, then the grackles, and then ants. What's next?"

And then he heard a scratching sound coming from outside the kitchen window to the north, where the poison ivy patch grew. He got up to look, then stopped. "Do I really want to know what that is?" he asked the cat, who lay by the base of the refrigerator.

As if to answer, he heard in his head a snooty, know-it-all voice saying, "You should never ever start out a story with someone waking up."

"You're absolutely right", Biker Dude said, and he went down the hallway and got back into bed.

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