On this one particular day I decided to get off my lazy ass and drive to Lexington to fill out a couple of applications for warehouse jobs. One seemed somewhat encouraging. I needed to find a job if I wanted to fix this house up right, since it was in desperate need of repair. The walls needed to be painted, the roof leaked, the upstairs bathroom was under construction but had never been finished. There was a tub but no sink. Plumbing for a toilet, but no toilet. No walls but two by fours with pipes and wires running through them. When I first moved in I ignored the problem and did nothing but smoke pot and cook simple meals on a hot plate. There were piles of used cans stacked in a corner of the kitchen. Out of hunger, I broke down and bought a stove and refrigerator with the money I had in savings. The next day I found an old kitchen table and four chairs at a yard sale in Carlisle.

The trip to Lexington was a disappointment. I didn’t have the right qualifications for either job I applied to. Being an Army veteran doesn’t seem to matter much to employers. The receptionist at the last company indicated that they needed someone with experience, which I lacked.

On the way home I stopped off at a thrift store and bought a cheap used bed, mattress and couch. They didn’t look half bad and it had to be much better than sleeping on the cold hard floor. When I got home, I drug the bed and mattress to the back bedroom and put it near the window. Just outside my window a red male cardinal was sitting in a large shrub eating the last few berries left over from the fall. It would be nice to wake up to this site every morning. I said to myself.

I tugged and pulled finally managing to get the couch through the front door. It didn’t look too bad facing the fireplace. It was just long enough for me to stretch out on though it did have a couple of holes in the cushions. I decided to throw a sheet over it since I was the only one who had to see it. My house started to feel more like a home than just an empty shell.

I went to the kitchen and made a ham sandwich, poured a glass of iced tea and got some Doritos and a glass of iced tea, grabbed my pot and a cigarette and headed for the porch swing for a quick lunch. The sun shone brightly on such a crisp March afternoon. The redbuds and dogwoods were in bloom off in the woods that lie beyond the fence. It was a beautiful spring day and had a sudden desire to explore what lie beyond the tree line. I grabbed my jacket and walked past the barn and the fields towards the barbed wire fence. I experienced a brief sense of deja vu as I neared the fence, but dismissed it. Most of the trees were still quite bare. I climbed over the old fence and followed a small trail through the underbrush leading downhill, crossing a small stream and then rose again on the far side. Birds of all sorts were busy foraging for food and building nests. I followed the trail uphill for a ways. Near the top of the hill, the trail opened up to a cedar glade where the soil was rocky and bare. Fireflies lit up the sky above the rocks. I noticed three buzzards circling in the sky above a pile of rocks and boulders, that’s when I caught a whiff of something dead.  That was the last thing I can remember until later that afternoon. Everything in between was a blank. 

I woke up in darkness, lying prone against the cold musty earth. I shivered and my teeth chattered as I clutched my chest for warmth. I had a throbbing headache that felt like I’d been hit with an iron skillet. I got to my feet making out a small clearing just a few feet away from the tree line.  

I was unfamiliar with the woods, and at night it was impossible to tell which direction I was facing. I had an eerie feeling of being watched by something. I wandered blindly stubbing my toe on a rock.  “Ow! God damn it! Where the fuck are my shoes?”I growled. I got down on my hands and knees crawling in circles groping for my shoes. I couldn’t go walking barefoot through the woods with all the briars and poison ivy. A few minutes later I tripped over them near a pile of large rocks. As I put them on, I thought I heard the sound of a car driving by. I stood and walked off in the direction of the sound. I knew that a road went by my property in a north south direction and that the woods were to east. If I could just find the road I could follow it to my front gate.

I stumbled blindly down the hill and fell a few times. My face got smacked with branches. I ran into a swampy area and muddied my shoes as I crossed to the other side. After fighting briars and thickets, I reached a fence line beside the road. The single lane road had no shoulder and I feared a car might drive by. It was a rather long walk, but I finally reached the gate and followed the gravel road to my house.

So spooky the silhouette of the old house and trees looked against a dark vast sea of glimmering stars. Trudging up the gravel road  whippoorwills, owls and nighthawks were hooting, and crying out in the darkness. Once I reached the front steps I glanced back at the ominous dark woods that lie beyond the barn. Something attacked me and it was still out there. Once inside I walked towards the kitchen and turned on the lights. I examined my aching palm and saw a faint hexagonal bruise wondering how it got there. I went to the cabinet and took three aspirin.

My stomach growled despite my throbbing head, so I decided to make something quick and easy.  I opened the refrigerator and poured the leftover vegetable soup in a pan and heated it on the stove. Then scavenged through the refrigerator and found some deli sliced ham and made a sandwich. The house felt very big and lonely for the first time since moving here days ago.  As my soup warmed up, I pulled out my stash of weed and smoked a big bowl. I sat in my old couch and grabbed the remote. The TV screen lit up to mostly static. It sucked not having cable service this far out and thought I should probably get a satellite dish. Andy had an antenna hooked up beside the house but the reception was fuzzy. I was hoping to hear the local news, but all I got was static and strange popping noises. I changed channels with the remote control, but it was the same. As I walked closer to the set, a fuzzy picture appeared on the screen. Elephants were marching down the middle of some small town to the sound of violins played by clowns  followed by circus wagons. The scene changed showing two foxes cruelly tied together by their tails, one black and the other a lighter color rolling around on the ground violently biting each other in some woods. Then a flash of the close up image of a mother cat and small kittens aboard a row boat being towed by something under the water. And one final image of two jacks out of a deck of playing cards pinned to a tree with a cross shaped dagger. It was all so strange and I wondered if I was hallucinating from the pot. I switched through the channels again and finally got a fuzzy picture from channel 7 out of Lexington. At least I could hear the news but thought it best to go up on the roof and turn the antennae in the morning. I built a fire in the fireplace, got a warm blanket, and wrapped myself up on my couch. The news calmed me down a bit, but later I saw other images of some other place superimposed upon my house. “The pot must be laced with something,” I thought. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but it sure felt unusual. I tried watching more TV, but it was hard to concentrate, so I decided to go to bed early and hoped the headache would be gone by morning. Perhaps I had a concussion in the woods, or maybe was hit by something that fell from the trees, or perhaps I’d been poisoned or bitten by something. In any case, if I didn’t feel better by morning I would drive to Lexington and have it checked out at the Veterans hospital.