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STORY PREVIEW...

INSTITUTIONAL  ME
A short story by
David DeLane Snow

     The tall, wiry haired man, named Douglas had both outstretched arms pressing against the window as he was licking the glass, and giggling happily to himself.  Suddenly he turned around and began violently screaming bloody murder, jumping up and down, waving both hands wildly in the air for no apparent reason.
   “Douglas stop that!” Yelled a staff from across the room.
   Then uncharacteristically, the client spoke out, “Eerey yehaa Ct-oot!”
   “Shut it up, Douglas, now!” Admonished another staff who came running out of the dinning area, adjacent to the long hallway off the dayroom area.  The first staff threw him unexpectedly to the ground binding his flying arms underneath him, while the other laid across his legs.
   “Calm down, Douglas - and damn it, you know what that means!” Said Thomas, who bore across the pinned man’s shoulders.
   “He probably thought that he saw you-know-who’s car.” Robert said as he
restrained the limp legs.
   “Jason’s?” asked Thomas.
   “Man, let him up.”  Which they both did, assisting Douglas to his feet with earnest sincerity, then Robert injected, “Gessh, I’d have a behavior episode too if I saw him coming in this early.”  They both laughed, then turned and began looking out the window with the glass-licking client in the middle, just to make sure it wasn’t a black Ford pickup after all.
    I don’t know if I can last through the weekend.  Five days had been tough enough to endure.  Getting up at six o’clock in the morning after tossing and turning; chasing bits of sleep  in between the screams and slamming doors of the night shift were beginning to wear on me.  With a room mate like Douglas Edgar Milford; who laid astride his over-sized teddy bear as thirty other pair of stuffed animal eyes looked on in horror wondering when they would be humped next, had me on guard as well...

REMEMBER WHEN

(Apartment 106)
By
David DeLaine Snow


   Of all the Hollywood moments on film or the idealistic wishful thinking of tradition, they would always have the reality of their cherished memories.
   He recalled how they first met. She was a beautiful young woman no more that 19 years old. She was walking from the back of the store to the front counter. A good looking young man was obviously eagerly waiting for her to be his casher. It was a strange metaphysics shop filled with all sort of oddities, stocked with the usual fair of scented candles, wind chimes and tarot cards, skulls and scarves. The youthful vixen wore a vale like purple dress, trying for that gypsy look - with the oversized hooped ear rings, bangles too many on her left wrist and rings galore on both hands. With a shy appearance that said look at me but don’t overly stare; she glanced at the young man, but let the other brunette clerk take over in her stead. The bait and switch worked for it made the eager male customer want to strike up a conversation with the red head all the more. What was her name? He barely made out the plastic name tag. That perfume? Her eyes. They - they were beautiful and he could not soak them in enough.
   Sally, how could he forget a name like that, never in a million years, nor when they first met over rice and baked beans in the service line of his church’s Fellowship Hall.  How he accidentally bumped into her, ruining her Easter dress with his weak red punch. Yet after the clean up she had hardly remembered it at all because of how they had gotten lost in conversation over their forgotten meal and each others eyes.
   Really, they had met on their way to a friend’s house. A group had come by a week after his eighteenth birthday; in a friend of a friend’s old beat up ford pickup to be exact. As he piled into the bed of the truck along with the other gaggle of smiling wind blown faces, the young man locked in on her face. Brilliantly lit eyes, whose slightly round facial features were framed by an auburn Farah Fawcett hairstyle of the day. Softy pouting full lips that just beckon to be kissed, yeah that was his first thought of her grin in his direction. She turned out to be the younger sister of a newly made friend of a friend, but at that moment the young man just wanted to know her name. She seemed to have brushed him off into forgetfulness after that first glance, but for him it was love at first sight and he meant for her to know it too. The young man had taken over one of his dearest friend’s girlfriends, but this one here would be his the first time around. There was just something undeniably fascinating about her eyes, and that smile -- he could not get out of his mind. How could he have ever guessed that they would have gotten married and it would last over forty wondrous years.

   Her father had offered him a Cuban cigar in the hospital’s waiting room, and as a gift to him for the arrival of the new granddaughter, a fancy promotion as head salesman at his radio station.
   Sally never knew her father because he had never been in her life, but her mother and the rest of her extended family of uncles and aunts were there eagerly awaiting the birth of her first child, with balloons and presents to boot.
  Actually, it had only been her young nineteen year old husband and just barely a handful to family that joyously greeted their red faced-pointed ear daughter into the world in that small town’s hospital. Taking their new bundle of love home for the first time was scary as hell for him, yet seeing the sheer delight in his young wife’s eyes and those full smiling lips made all the anxiety of how to deal with it all just melt away.  Never was there ever a happier day for the two of them as that day when they began their lives so many years ago.

   Then again there was the time he had surprised her with a new puppy to cheer her up from having lost her job as a secretary.
   Sally had never worked outside the home before, well other than being a nursery worker in the local church they attended.  But seeing her receive that singing telegram lit up her face more than he had ever seen.
   Seriously, even though he had intended to a thousand times over he had never had flowers delivered to her at home.  But seeing her glow at their daughter’s wedding rivaled that of her birth, and the joy with which she radiated.

   The old man heard an ambulance round the bend entering the apartment complex’s maze of parking lots.  Of all the regrets he had in not making her life better was that of losing her and not being able to have her longer in his life.  As he slowly rose off the park bench, and unhurriedly began walking home, he felt content beyond fulfilled - though a little tired.  The day was quiet as if someone had turned off all the sound in the world but crying.
   Presently, standing outside the faded wood banister of their patio, the old man watched as the coroner loaded the covered body into his station wagon from the sidewalk he himself had paced a thousand times over on his way to work.
   The crying that came from beyond the opened door of his own apartment was a deep sobbing gasp.  A horrific mournful weeping no man wishes to ever hear from his wife.  How would she make it on her own now that he had passed away?  He smiled at seeing his daughter and her family gathered about, tough as it was, she would be alright.
***

OVER AGAIN

(Apartment 92)
By
David DeLane Snow

    Daniel Arthur O`Ryan lay silent beneath his hospital covers as the heart monitor intermittently sounded its annoying alarm.  The eighty-three year old man had been stricken with brain cancer, and now faced his final moments with a barrage of silent noises.  The mechanical whirl of his feeding pump began to tone its beep that his meal bags were empty.  As per hospital procedures with all patients on a ventilator,  Dan’s two middle fingers on both hands had been taped to the bed rails to prevent him from pulling the tube out of his throat.  He was quite a sight to behold, all wired up.  
   Even after the neurologist had told his wife, Sally that he was brain dead, and had drifted off into a coma after having aspirated on his breakfast orange juice, Dan was somehow aware of everything around him.  It was as if he had been standing in the corner of the room watching every gory detail to the bitter end, like some damn spectator.
   Then, it happened.  Just moments after Dan’s cardiologist and his two student nurses departed through the ICU’s sliding glass door, Sally froze where she stood at the foot of the bed.  Aghast, in-between excitement and total horror, his wife was speechless.  With lightening speed, Dan rose up on both elbows, leaned forward toward his wife’s direction and pulled the breathing tube out of his mouth in one swift motion.  Abruptly coming out of his long coma, with eyes wide open, hoarsely told Sally, “To do it all over again --.”
   Suddenly every alarm rang out along with his screaming wife as a medical team ran in, witnessing his flat lined computer screen.  A second later they began to comfort the DNR’s newly pronounced widow.

   A black, silencing moment later everything changed.

   Dan found himself totally aware of everything that had just transpired at the moment he died, and yet, somehow -- afterwards as well -- almost.  Yet the shock of his present state took him half a moment longer to recover.
   Seeing Sally standing in her regular spot behind the teller’s counter of The Second National Bank immediately brought a smile to his now twenty-one year old face.  Realizing that this was the very day they were to meet for the first time in their lives, and that a month later he would propose marriage to her made Daniel’s perfect brain race.  Being the fourth person in line gave him enough time to compose himself, and figure out why he would have gone back in time to this very moment baffled him tremendously. For he had had no regrets whatsoever about his life with Sally.
  Suddenly, his inner thoughts were interrupted as Dan turned about to respond to the tapping on his shoulder.  A beautiful, slightly older than him, brunette stood behind him all dressed in black.  Aggressively shoving an automatic weapon into his hands, she yelled, “Take it and get to work buddy.”
   From that breath onward everything that followed was a complete blur: the chaos of gunfire, people dropping, Sally’s blood splattered against the back wall, the maze of police vehicles and lights, ever changing court dates, and the prison experience itself.  As he lay there, all stretched out on the padded gurney, with an audience just beyond the bullet proof, wire re-enforced windows, Dan numbly watched in slow motion as the fluid of his execution edged its way up the tube entering his left arm.  A moment later the guard standing next to the controls heard the prisoner say, “To do it all over again.”

   Fighting against the waves as more loomed off in the distance, threatening to silence his gasping calls for help, Daniel saw Sally leaning over the side of their blue and white yacht.  Holding her usual Long Island Iced-Tea, she was laughingly scolding him to stop his horse play so far in the open waters of the ocean.  Suddenly, shouting and pointing to a fin slicing its way through the overpowering currents several yards beyond his bobbing head, they both screamed in unison. Bathed with thoughts of scenes from the movie Jaws, Dan spat out salt water while trying to say, “To do it all over again.”  Out of a flash of red came a new realization.

   Two men sitting under a covered bus stop grimaced a half smile to one another as a light drizzle of rain began to pour.  Growing a little concerned that maybe his bus-stop companion was from loony Ville, the young man replied to the older gentleman as his looked at his watch again, “Wow, man.  What in the world did you do to deserve all that?”
  Interrupting the multiple stories of his fantastic life, Daniel O`Ryan stood up and cautiously approached the curb so as to hail a yellow cab.  His worn expression answered back to his restless companion, “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you, son.”  
   Suddenly, without warning the young man jerked back in shock as a FedEx truck jumped the curbed hitting the old man throwing him aside into the oncoming traffic like a discarded rag doll.

   As the medical team quietly worked around them, turning off the life support machines, the Psychiatric Hospital’s Chaplain spoke softly to Sally as comforting as his could, “You know, my child only The Father knows the true heart of man.”  Then, as the priest was making the sign of the cross over her husband's covered body, Sally slowly walked out of the room heading for her children and their families who waited down the hall.

The New and Improved Me

I've shaved and cut my long hair to go along with my new dental work, and confident smile.  Change is good, and re-inventing ourselves is something we do everyday whether we realize it or not.  Though I thoroughly enjoyed my Colombian trip, it is great being back home. Even the mundane activities that make up living: laundry, dishes, walking the dog, and being back to work are revitalized with a new enthusiasm.  These are the little things in life that add up to a fulfilled existence.

Vannah's CAR SHOW


Here is a video I put together. My wife, Alice was ill and wasn't able to attend, so I wanted to pieced together a few little raw pics of the event for her to enjoy.  Our Grand daughter, Savannah and her friend, Mya made some "box" cars and were in a show with their peers. Really cute memories. Everyone did a great job!!!

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