Picture of Major Mite from December 7, 1922 via Shorpy.com

My favorite show as a kid, the one that had me stretched out on the carpet in front of the radio every Wednesday night with my chin in my hands, was Wee Wendell’s Wondrous World. You remember that one? It was sponsored by Wiltheiser’s Watchworks, “makers of God’s own timepieces.” There’d be the tick-tick-tick of a clock and then the swelling woodwinds of the Wee Wendell Orchestra.

You don’t remember? Wednesday nights?

Well, Wee Wendell was apparently a wealthy gentleman of dimunitive stature who traveled the world on his vast inheritance, having adventures of various kinds appropriate to someone small: getting stuck in an air shaft at the Pyramid of Cheops, perhaps, or having to paint himself gold like an idol to escape South American aborigines. He usually had his cheeky flapper assistant Miss Penny with him to help get him into and out of these scrapes, and her catchphrase in times of trouble was always, “Whalefeathers!”

Yeah, that never really made sense to me, either.

Wee Wendell had been a professional wrestler and pugilist, a Vaudeville singer, a night watchman at the Oswego Waterworks, a coffin tester, and a Munchkin for The Wizard of Oz. Plus, as I said, he had his family’s vast fortune to spend, earned during the wicker furniture boom of the late teens. He traveled the world with Miss Penny via ship and dirigible. Of course, on the radio, all you’d hear would be the low mournful blast of a horn or the whistling of the wind. Your imagination filled in the rest.

I’m not sure what appealed to me about Wee Wendell. I’ll admit I wasn’t a big scrapper as a kid, and even now at seventy I’m just five and a half feet tall. My old man, though, was a big slab of meat with fists the size of hams and a head that was as square and solid as a bank safe. He liked to tell the story of how a horse kicked him once and broke its leg. I often wished a bunch of horses would try it again when my father teased and humiliated me for being small, so maybe I just liked that being small was actually an advantage for Wee Wendell.

Wee Wendell could spy from under the bed. He could punch bad guys in the knees. He could be smuggled in luggage. He could run a fleeing killer to ground from the back of a wolfhound. I tried all of that, and I have the scars to prove it.

My father hated Wee Wendell.

“That little sucker is probably half again your height,” he’d shout from his rocking chair after the day’s work at the building site. “He could spin you over his head. You’re wee-er than wee! I wish I knew what I’d been drinking the night I brought you into the world so I won’t do it again. Whisky, most likely, but whose?”

I told him that no, I was bigger than Wee Wendell but he wouldn’t buy it.

“It’s all radio. It’s lies. You think Johnny Dollar really has a million dollar expense account? Wee Wendell is probably played by some fruity weirdo who’s six feet tall. You mark my words.”

It wasn’t long before I got the chance to prove him wrong.

Wiltheiser Watchworks had a promotion, asking kids to write an essay on “What Wee Wendell and I Would Do with an Afternoon,” and I quickly wrote about how we’d have adventures in Central Park, climb the rocks and explore the woods and all of that cool stuff, the two of us being about the same size and all.

“Why don’t you tell him you’d play Whist?” my father shouted from the living room as I wrote it.

I mailed it in and wouldn’t you know it, mine was the essay selected. The prize was, indeed, that wonderful afternoon with Wee Wendell and I couldn’t wait. Of course, with Mama stuck in her wheelchair, the only person to take me down to the RCA studios to meet my idol was my father.

“Can’t wait,” he said the day we went, taking buses deeper into the city. “I can’t wait to see how your little hero stacks up to your old man.”

As I sat staring out the windows, I realized I couldn’t wait for that, either.

There were a bunch of reporters in front of the studio taking pictures of Wee Wendell when we got there. It was kind of sad, really: they kept putting odd objects beside him for the funny comparison. It was a camera when I first walked up, but someone was yelling, “Quick! Get a dachshund!” and someone else was shouting out for wine bottle.

Wee Wendell was taking it well, posing with each weird thing and doing his best to smile. He seemed relieved when we got there, though, grateful to start (and, I was sure, finish) this whole ridiculous promotion thing.

“Look at you,” he said when I came close.

“Look at you,” I replied.

“Jesus, we could be brothers,” he said, and that pretty much made it so. “You’ve got my hair and my eyes.”

I shrugged, smiling.

“I’m his father,” said my father, sticking out one of his mitts. “Mr. Weatherly.”

“Indeed,” Wee Wendell said, shaking it with his tiny hand. My father gave it a good crushing squeeze but Wee Wendell didn’t even blink.

“So,” he said, turning to me. “What do you say we get away from all these big people and do something fun?”

And then we were off for the park, leaving them all behind. A few trotted after us for a last picture but it wasn’t whole-hearted. My father just waved us away.

It was great, the best afternoon of my life so far. We went all over, dirigible or not, and I was a better sidekick than Miss Penny would ever be. Wee Wendell ran as well as I did, climbed whatever trees he wanted, and had none of the worries that adults have about getting dirty or being seen.

“You’re a kid, aren’t you?” I asked when we’d gotten to the resevoir.

“I have no idea what I am,” he replied in a tired voice. “All I know is that I’ve been it longer than I want.”

“But…your adventures…”

He tilted his misshappen head in my direction and shot me a withering glare. “You know none of that’s real, right? You know they basically store me in a closet between episodes and then take me out to be their monkey, don’t you?”

“What?” I said. “That’s terrible.”

“Is it? Maybe. I don’t have much to compare it to. Every ten years or so, my brain seems to empty itself and I start all over — I have to learn to read and write and wash myself, and I lose all my memories, too. Sometimes my caretakers tell me and other times they don’t, but I think that some of it might stick in my skull like batter on the inside of a bowl.”

“How old are you? For real?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I vaguely remember Europe. I can see green waters. One of my caretakers told me stories in Latin.”

By then, we’d found a secluded copse of trees and taken our seats on a boulder. The leaves whooshed above us against the breeze, some of them breaking off for the beginning of Fall.

“If you want it to stop, why don’t you stop it? Find new people?”

He turned in his little waistcoat and shook his head. “And then I’ll forget them too and I’ll get sold back to a circus or put in a home. No, it doesn’t work.”

I thought that over. It had to be terrible, going from one set of horrible parents to another, having them make money from whatever was wrong with you, showing you off to the world until you — and everyone else — forgot it all. Bad as my father was, I’d only be stuck with him once.

That thought turned itself over in my mind.

“Your caretakers have always been adults, right?”

Wee Wendell, now idly spinning a stick in his hands, nodded.

“Well, I’m ten years old now,” I said. “If I live to be anything over sixty years old, that’s five more wake-ups for you…with the same person.”

He sighed. “I don’t think–”

“I’m small, too. Not as small as you but small. Small on the outside and small on the inside, and I’m sick of both. I’ll always be small if I’m around the same people who see me that way, but I know you won’t. I know we’ll have adventures.”

“I couldn’t ask you–”

“You’re not asking. I’m offering. Is there really a wondrous world out there? Neither of us knows, right? Maybe we ought to find out.”

“And get ourselves stuck in the pyramid?” Wee Wendell asked wanly.

“Yeah, and get ourselves unstuck. Like we will right now.”

Wee Wendell stared down at his stick. I hoped he was mulling it over, and I hoped it was making his heart beat faster to think of breaking free. I know what it was doing to mine.

“What about your father? Won’t he come looking for you?”

I hadn’t thought of that, and a cloud passed over my face I’m sure. If there was one thing my old man didn’t like, it was losing something that was his. Even if he didn’t want it. Even if he hated it.

“Hmmm,” Wee Wendell said, opening his jacket. From an inner pocket, he slid a tiny chromed pistol.

I stared wide-eyed at it.

“It’s a derringer,” he said. “For small hands. I’m not so good with the aim, but I’ve found that if you shoot someone big from below, the bullet bounces all around the rib cage and whisks him like an egg.”

I know it’s horrible, I know it’s horrible, but yes, I smiled.

“We’ll save it for when he comes,” said Wee Wendell, sliding the pistol back into his jacket. “If he does.”

By then, the reporters had found us and were running with their big box cameras and tripods bobbing and wobbling in our direction. My father was loping behind them.

“You ready?” he asked.

I nodded quickly. “We’d better hurry.”

“Nah,” he said. He parted the curtain of vine-covered brambles, just tall enough to let us enter and no one else. “We’ll take the low road.”

Illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green

At least she still comes to see me, the little girl in the white and lavender dress — some people would have left me behind to get help.

Every day in what I assume is the late afternoon, when the sun is far enough to the horizon to cast the edge of the well in shadow, she comes. All I can really see of her at first is her silhouette, the eclipse of her small head and dangling curls against the light. From so far down, she looks even smaller than she probably is, though her voice can somehow always find its way to me.

“Hello,” she says every time. “Would you like a show?”

It doesn’t do any good to say yes or to say no or to say, “Can you please go for help? I think my leg is broken.” She doesn’t seem to care much about how I fell down here or why I haven’t left.

Whether I say yes or I say no, the puppets descend on their long strings. They’re the old-fashioned wooden kind with patches of cloth and hair pasted on their flat surfaces. One seems to be a man dressed in Edwardian style with a brown-gray woolen suit and hat, and the other seems to be a little girl dressed in a white and lavender dress with blonde curls. Both wear paper fairy wings on their backs.

I know the story by heart now.

“Hello, little Lizabeth,” says the man in the brown-gray suit.

“Hello, Duncan,” says the girl in the lavender dress.

“Will you come walk with me?” says the man.

“May I take my puppets?” says the girl.

“Of course,” he replies. “Maybe we can make a show.”

The puppets’ legs jerk and their arms swing, the little joints squeaking as they walk and walk. This part always strikes me as tedious for a puppet show, and I’ve wondered if the little girl is performing a literal time or distance. If she is, I have no idea how far or how long because neither has much meaning here in the well.

“Will you come sit with me?” says the man.

“Where?” asks the girl.

“Over here,” says the man. “On my lap.”

Both pairs of legs draw up and the puppets dangle a moment, maybe thinking, maybe admiring the willows together. To me, they’re staring at wet stone walls furred over with moss.

“You’re going to miss your sister, aren’t you, Lizabeth?” asks the man.

“Very much, Duncan.”

“Am I wrong to suspect that you’re going to miss me, too?”

“Even more, Duncan.”

“We won’t be far, you know. Down the road a few miles in our own home, a place you’re always welcome, with all the woods you could want.”

“But who will come to my puppet shows? Father hasn’t the time, and Mother doesn’t like them.”

“Lizabeth, we’ll build you your own theater at Barrowgrange. A grand one, with enough room for you and all your marionettes.”

The girl puppet hangs her arms and head, swinging quietly in the stale air above me. “What about you? Won’t you be playing with me anymore?”

“Oh, Lizabeth!” The puppet reaches for her and she tugs away. “We can’t stage plays for fairies in the well forever, you know. I wish we could. I’ll miss those plays, truly. But when people get older, they stop climbing around dry wells and imagining fairy audiences at the bottom. Someday soon, you’ll understand.”

“Understand what?”

The puppet in the brown suit shakes its head slowly. “That people grow up. Me, your sister…even you. And grown ups play in different ways. You won’t want to play with puppets someday, just as Mary and I don’t.”

“I’m going to play forever.” The girl puppet’s arms came together as though they were folded. “I want to do one more puppet show.”

“Lizabeth—”

“I want to.”

“I shouldn’t even be here. The preparations for the wedding—”

“You be the prince and I’ll be the princess.” Then, in a slightly different voice accented with a stereotypical aristocracy, she says, “’Prince Duncan, Prince Duncan, whither are you going on the day of our wedding?’”

The other puppet hangs there, doing nothing.

“’Today was the day you swore to marry me,’” says the girl’s voice.

“Is that what this is about, Lizabeth? Something I said when I was a boy, something to please your heart when you were sad?” The puppet reached and this time rested his wooden hand on the other’s shoulder. “Oh, Lizabeth. You’re still so young. Mary and I, we—”

The girl puppet whirls on its strings and reaches for him with her woodblock arms. “Mary and you! Mary and you! Mary and you!”

The puppets tangle now, the limbs clopping together. Their strings twist and twine into one cord. They clatter on one wall and then the other before dropping into the mud beside me. The head of the man puppet seems bent back at a horrible angle, and the girl puppet rests hers on his chest.

“And they lived happily ever after among the fairies,” the girl at the top of the well says. “The end.”

Today’s performance ends.

“Wait,” I’ll say, a little weaker each time, but she doesn’t reply. She never replies. She only pulls away, leaving me for another night and another day with nothing for company but these rotten wooden block bones, plus two sets of human ones.

It had rolled and tumbled, whatever it was, gelatinous and tentacled, from lake to canal to stream.

People watched from the shore, following it with opera glasses and sea telescopes. Some thought it was a squid, others an octopus, others still just a glob of fatty flesh from some aquatic animal long torn apart and rotten. It was milky and translucent with tiny red hooks lining the each of its sixteen flacid arms. Deep blue bruises speckled the skin, wrinkling in like spots on a tomato. It had no visible eyes.

According to the papers, it had drifted for weeks down from Lake Huron to Lake St. Clair and now onward. Dozens of photographs had been taken from advantageous spots on the riverbank, but the results were always blurred. Biology professors tried to snag it with nets; fishermen gave chase with their boats. Somehow, the current always worked against them and it sank just out of reach every time.

No one could tell whether it was dead or merely placidly alive and content to drift. Sometimes it got stuck in bushes along the shore or caught in dock pilings, but a few good nudges with a pole usually got it going again. Someone in Algonac reported that it made a sort of whimpering, sputtering sigh when jabbed with an oar.

It left behind a rich purple trail of something like oil. When the sun hit it right, the long slick refracted the light in all the colors of the spectrum, and you could see it stretching back toward wherever the thing had come from. No one had wanted to touch it, at least until they noticed that whenever that trail swirled in an eddy beneath an old hanging tree or a shrub crackling away for fall, the tree or shrub burst alive again with vivid and unnatural colors. The leaves turned shades of greenish-purple, and the branches took on the shimmer of silver.

So Janey and all the neighborhood kids took her dying little sister Nora to the river. To watch it, of course, from a safe distance as they told their parents. To stand in the shallows with their cuffs rolled up. Only that. Just to watch.

Little Nora did not get out much in her condition, lungs always full of fluid and shivers always flexing her arms and legs. She’d rather have taken the opportunity, rare as it was, to crawl in the sand or play in the grass, but Janey held her shoulders tight and they stood together in the chilly water.

Paul and Ben ventured out the furthest; they’d been the ones Janey asked first, the ones who’d agreed to her plan. At first it was a stunt to them, but then they had to help carry Nora out to her red wagon for the journey to the river, and they’d had to catch her when she lolled to one side and then the other. She’d been too weak to hold herself up, almost as boneless as the thing in the water.

They watched the river flow, the little waves surge over the sand and into the grass. They stared at the promontory fifty yards upstream, and it wasn’t long before the floating thing lazily spun around and came toward them.

Something made Janey sick to see it. It had gotten tangled in ropes and netting now, and a long plank bobbed alongside. Along its journey, it had picked up the trash of the river, and Janey didn’t think that it deserved that, to gather our trash. Watching it now, she had a sense of its strangeness, its otherness, and it didn’t belong here rolling in a knot of human flotsam.

“Here it comes,” said Ben, flexing his fingers and rocking on his feet. He did that on the pitcher’s mound in the park. He wasn’t good at standing still.

Paul bent a little beside him, ready to pounce. “Ready?” he said.

Janey stared while Nora squirmed beneath her grasp. Should they even be doing this? Was it dangerous? Were they dangerous to it?

“Ready?” asked Paul again.

Nora let out a tiny cough and a big shudder, and Janey knew.

“Ready,” she said. “Now!”

The children rushed into the water in a great cloud of spray. Frances stomped in huge strides, and Irene waded forward with the hem of her dress in her hands. Ben and Paul were swimming now, just swimming for it, their arms flailing wildly and their feet kicking. The noise was incredible; they shrieked and the water roared and the people on the shore screamed for them not to do it.

Paul had the longer arms and he reached the thing first. He grabbed the plank and treaded water to spin the creature around, and it swept closer and closer to Janey and Nora. So near now, they could smell its rot, something between peat loam and copper; the strange sharp tang of it seemed to pour down the backs of their throats.

The creature hung limply in the water, just three feet from Janey and Nora, who was crying. They hadn’t told her the plan, and now that they were close, it was obvious that they were going to make her touch it.

But where? Janey hoisted her sister under the arms and thrust her toward the creature, trying not to cry. The odor was horrible now, and the slick of blood or poison or whatever it was had started to swirl around them.

Nothing happened.

Something had to happen. Janey wasn’t going back to the shore until it did. So, eyes clenched from the spray, she lifted her sister into direct contact with it, letting her arms and legs squish into its bruised-tomato skin like some terrifying hug. Nora screamed now, and Janey wished she could clench her ears shut, too.

Four of the tentacles weakly coiled around Nora, and Janey knew she’d made a mistake. She yanked again at her sister, but the flesh only squeezed her tighter.

“Get her!” shouted Janey, and the children tried to peel the fleshy arms from around Nora. They couldn’t even get their fingers in, and they all gasped as the creature made a slow roll with Nora and held her beneath the water.

“No!” cried Janey, pounding her fists on its exposed back, pounding and pounding. The others pounded, too, and Ben flipped open his pocket knife. Good, she thought, cut it open. Please. Get her out.

Before Ben got the chance, though. the thing completed its rotation, exposing a choking Nora once more to the sun. Janey grabbed her sister roughly and this time, the creature let her go, its arms draining from her sides. A whimper, very faint, came from somewhere above the surface.

With Nora in her arms, Janey kicked off from the creature and made for the shore, kicking frantically, screaming for help. The other children drifted back from the creature and let it go on, now with none of that slick substance trailing behind.

It bobbed a little, shuddered, and now the sixteen arms flowed behind it like a woman’s hair. That’s how it drifted the rest of the way through the canals and streams, the limbs torn away by rocks and the flesh nibbled away by fish, until it dissolved to nothing somewhere far away.

Nora lived a long, long life after that. She never coughed again, certainly. She never shivered, either. Her body grew strong and her mind stronger still. She had strange dreams for the rest of that long life, though, dreams of places and things that she later tried to paint and write about. She was famous for a time, lauded for her wild imagination, but she rarely talked about the source of her vision. When she did, she only said it was her “responsibility” to show us what she had been shown.

She held strange jobs and voiced strange opinions and never let anything bother her, not anything small. And to her, it was all small and wondrous.

Nora is missing now, escaped from an assisted living facility in this, her 110th year. There’s a river nearby and a sea not far from that, and it isn’t hard to imagine that she could gracefully dive in and go anywhere she wanted.

As the Alzheimer’s disease took hold, Nannah’s art got stranger and stranger. Not that it was ever normal — she was what her instructors in the extension classes liked to call an “enthusiastic” artist.

She had a curious way of making ordinary artistic mistakes that somehow turned out creepy. Her stained glass frieze of the Last Supper looked like a pack of tyrannosaurs besetting their feeble young. Her lopsided bowls seemed ergonomically designed for pounding brains with a pestle. Her portrait of Grandpa in oils had slightly crossed eyes that always seemed to focus right over your shoulder, as though to warn you something was sneaking up on you.

But she was sweet and well-meaning, and it was always a frantic race to hang and position her work when she came to visit because, as my father put it, “Who wants a hunchbacked clown cookie jar leering at you every night when you go for a brew?” They all were gifts made with love if not care and we didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Though, as her mental capacity dwindled, that got harder and harder to do. It wasn’t so much that the artwork got worse but that it got…more cheerful? Sentimental? No, no: cloying. Like you’d imagine the smell of roses in a coffin, or the taste of your fifteenth white chocolate cupcake in a row.

What was scary was that she got better at drawing and painting and sculpting as her mind pulled away from her body, and that the things she produced were utterly alien in their innocence. The less creepy they were, the more creepy they were — because she made them. They grew more childlike, regressing, reverting, curling backward in the womb.

Her last work was what we’ve come to call “The Cat Painting,” and it was a gift for my sister Melanie with whom she’d always shared a love for cats. Nannah had come to visit for what we all knew would be our last Thanksgiving together — the talk had gotten more serious about places that could better care for her — and we were all forcing ourselves to be as cheerful as her scary paintings.

When Melanie peeled away the paper wrapping of the frame, though, she screamed. Poor Nannah only closed her eyes and nodded, soaking in what she thought was approbation, and my dad had to catch the painting before it hit the floor and shattered.

Nobody quite knew what Melanie had seen. It was a painting of a cat clutching a branch in a tree or bush, examining a butterfly with a certain scientific disinterest. It could be an illustration in a children’s book, or something stitched onto a baby blanket, or maybe even a little girl’s stationery. Weird like Nannah’s other recent work, yes, but nothing startling.

Except to Melanie. “It was like I saw two paintings at once,” she told me years later. “One right, one wrong.”

She recovered then as best she could, choking out a thank you to Nannah and taking the painting with the very tips of her fingers.

“Where should we hang it?” Nannah asked. “Oh, I know the perfect place!” She clasped her hands together and padded off to my sister’s room.

We all followed like condemned men because this time we were stuck. When Nannah only visited for the day, we could stow her work in a closet or the attic after she left. But as her health had gotten worse, Grandpa worried what he’d do if something happened to her on the highway, and this one night, this last night, they decided to stay over.

So there was nothing to do but hang the painting with Nannah’s swaying help, right across from the window above her bed.

“What am I going to do?” he muttered to Mom. “She’s here for one night. We hang it, we take it down, everything’s fine. She’s dying, for Christ’s sake.”

Which is how Melanie found herself awake all night, staring at that cat bathed in the moonlight.

When I got up the next morning, the door to the bathroom was locked and she was crying on the other side. I bent down and peered underneath to see her clutching her knees with the nightgown pulled over her entire body like a shield.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered.

She wouldn’t tell me at first, but I pressed my ear against the door for when she did.

“There’s a second cat,” she finally said.

When Melanie had gotten back from the center that time, Mom and Dad made me swear to tell them if she ever did anything weird or scary again. Being a bigger sister, everything she did was weird and scary, but this time, I knew it was important. So I pressed even closer to the linoleum floor and whispered under the door, “I’ll be right back.”

But of course I wasn’t. When I ran downstairs, my parents were already awake, already upset, Mom crying into tissues while my father held her close. Nannah lay still in the guest bed, peaceful and utterly quiet. I watched a long time and she didn’t move. Mom pulled me against her nightgown and I told her through the fabric that Melanie was in trouble, that something was wrong, but nobody could hear me. They only found her an hour later, still crying in the bathroom, knowing already that Nannah was gone.

Melanie went back to the center for a few months after that, and she comes and goes even today. Opinion in our family is strongly divided between whether there were one or two cats in Nannah’s painting when she first brought it; my parents say two while Melanie and I say one. I’m less sure than she is, but I figure somebody ought to agree with her.

Melanie’s an artist now, and she keeps Nannah’s painting above her bed. She’s had boyfriends leave in the middle of the night, saying they heard it whispering to them, saying that the cats switched places, saying that the butterfly touched down upon my sister in her sleep. I think it’s a kind of Rorschach test she puts them through, and I don’t think anyone has ever passed.

She paints things like that herself now, and she says she understands. She tells me that an artist gives away a little of herself in every work if she’s any good, and all that happened with Nannah’s painting is that she gave away the last.

Once, drunk at a long distant Thanksgiving, she said, “When there’s three cats, you can have it.”

Don’t remember those? I sure do. For a good part of 2010, I worked out several times a week on a stationary bike while watching and reviewing the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It exacerbated an existing spinal injury, crushing a loose disc against my spinal column so far that my doctor asked if I was still continent while looking at the MRI. Emergency surgery took care of it. And after all that working out, I gained four pounds.

Anyway, long after my fiction is forgotten, people will still be searching online for “WILL LUDWIGSEN STAR TREK REVIEWS BAD.” So here they are.

Illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green

If it wasn’t poachers on ol’ Whit Carlton’s property, it was Mormons. Or Klansmen burning a cross. Or a circle of chained apes escaped from the zoo. You’d damn well think that Whit had himself El Dorado on that hundred acres of his, for all the people he suspected of trying to raid it.

Sheriff Beaumont wasn’t having it this time. He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in his industrial metal chair. It squeaked as he propped one boot atop the other on his desk and said, calmly, “Now, Whit, just what kind of clown you reckon is on your property?”

“What kind of clown? What the hell does it matter?” Whit’s voice had an entertaining way of leaping into the upper registers when he got excited, which was often. Truth be told, folks in town liked to “poke the bear” every so often, telling Whit they’d seen Communists taking an envelope from his mailbox or Mrs. Carlton stepping out with a Methodist.

“It matters in lots of ways, Whit. There are different tactics required for, say, your garden-variety circus clown versus your court jester or your fool. Different gauges of buckshot, too — a harlequin has tougher hide than a rhino and they get ten times as mad.”

“I didn’t vote for you, Beaumont,” said Whit.

“Nobody did. I was appointed by the mayor.” Sheriff Beaumont sighed. “What did you say this clown was doing?”

“He was fishing out in the crick, southeast corner of the property just where the cypress swamp starts up.”

“Fishing.”

“For the sake of Jesus, yes, fishing.”

#

The hook passes, the hook passes, the hook passes again. It lingers near the mouth, tantalizingly close.

#

“What kind of bait was he using?” Beaumont really wanted to know; it was spring, and the shiners weren’t as easy for the bass to see in all the sunlight. If the clown was using worms, maybe, or–

“I didn’t stop to talk to him. I only saw him. He was perched in a tree, like, dropping his line into the water, casual like he owned the place.”

“He catch anything?”

Whit Carlton’s face turned as red as a match head, and Sheriff Beaumont figured he ought not to light it.

“Now, trespassin’s a crime, that’s a fact — whether you’re a clown or not. You see any evidence that he was fixin’ to stay overnight? A hobo’s bag, maybe, or some blankets or whatnot?”

“I saw him and I came straight to you, Sheriff.”

You ran, thought Sheriff Beaumont. Which wasn’t all that odd, given how you don’t much expect to see one in the woods like that.

#

It dances, the hook, just on the edge. The wide silvered eyes seem mesmerized by its glint and the mouth slowly opens.

#

“See, the reason I ask is it’s a hot day and the cruiser’s been acting up and we’ve only got one cell with the high school football game coming up. Now, if he’s still there and we catch him, he’s gonna take up room we’d usually use to get a drunk off the roads. You want that on your conscience, Whit, a drunk out running over cheerleaders just to put your clown away?”

“The law’s the law!” cried Whit.

“I don’t deny it, no sir. I’m only asking you to think of the worst thing that can happen with a clown in your back forty. The worst thing, the absolute worst, and compare it to Hap McMahon’s pretty little Opal getting run down. Just as a for instance, mind you.”

Whit thought that over, something he showed by clenching first one side of his mouth and then the other. “He could steal fish,” he finally said.

“They your fish?” asked the sheriff. “I mean, when you think about it, they’re really God’s fish, aren’t they? And if He wants to give a few to that clown in the woods, I don’t know that we ought to stop Him.”

“So I’m to let anybody come on my land all willy-nilly? What’s the point of having it, then? You tell me that.”

“The point of havin’ it, Whit, is that you’re a bigger man for letting folks use it from time to time. When was the last time you was fishing for food on someone’s farm dressed as a clown? Never, that’s when. Cut the man a break. Be a Christian, will you?”

Whit tried to say something and then stopped. He tried to say something else and stopped again. Finally, he stormed from the police station, off to scream at the old men playing checkers or one of the ladies at the bank.

That’s a good day’s police work, though Sheriff Beaumont, tipping his hat over his eyes.

#

The hook catches, slips, catches for good on her blued lips. She rises from the water on the end of her puppet string, her black hair washing back across her pale and wrinkled scalp, and he clutches her cold body close. He squeezes, even, and brown creek water oozes from the knife wounds. She’s found, found again. Found. She’s his again.

I started blogging in 2001 when I was far more interested in myself than I am now. That decade-long pageant of narcissism included painful whining about not being able to write, a diary of my Clarion experience, a hideous announcement of my divorce, complete reviews of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, about fifty short-short stories written to accompany public domain photographs, and a wide assortment of general bitching posts about the world.

Now there’s Facebook for all of that.

I’ve blogged less and less and shorter and shorter because my stories are now more interesting to me than I am. I wake up, go to work, teach a class, write about a thousand words, play a video game, and then retire to bed to read. In fact, that could be my family crest: “Retired to Bed to Read.”

I tell my students that you’re a writer when the work is more important than you are, and I’ve recently wiped my blog of its content because I want to talk about all the great weird things I love and write about…and way less about me.

So what will I be blogging about?

Writing, I’m sure. Teaching creative writing from time to time, too. My rare and infrequent adventures in the real world, of course. And mostly the strange things and places and stories I find that portend some sign of imagination in the universe.

My collection In Search Of and Others is appearing early next year, and I want this site to be more like the spirit of that title story, full of cool strange things and crackpot theories.

And yes, I may repost some of the old content you enjoyed. Some of those Postcard Stories may return for encores, and there might even be new ones.

I hope you’ll come along.