The Fool

I told the fool not to look at me straight on. Keep to the mirrors, to puddles, chrome bumpers or windows––I don’t want to see the red-veined whites of your eyes, I told the fool.

But like all fools, he wasn’t the listening kind.

It was the kind of day when anything could happen, sun or rain, music-making or lovemaking, ripped jeans or suit pants. It’s the kind of day a dead man like myself feels most at home. It is also the day the fool took his eyes off the window and peered through the wire openings of the abandoned mill.

I saw the whitish circles of his eyes, looked down into them and saw the dark pit inside his gut, the snapping teeth within and the slithering of serpent’s tails. He looked at me hard and long, long enough for me to reach through the rusted grain bin and clutch the fool’s collar.

You screwed up boy, I told him, then yanked him and his dark coiled gut into my world and swallowed him whole. Fool, I said, and picked my teeth with a small bone from a bird or mouse. My advice to you, don’t be a fool. When a ghost tells you something, you listen.

It might just save your life.

Postcard Stories Podcast – An Author Reading.