My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

 

It was unmistakable, even to children.  Like they say, ‘Kids and animals… think

you’re crazy,’ or however that saying goes.  Maybe it’s they can tell your crazy, like how fleas can smell fear.

 

Not just kids though.  Everybody thought it was weird when he appeared, even the stupid people.  Kind of people if their ass was on fire you’d have to mention it to them.

 

He wandered into town one day, just like peacefully walking down the middle of the street, slowly in his sandals.  Mid-afternoon in the suburbs, so not a lot of cars, but the mailman and the FedEx truck had to sort of slowly mosey around him like pigeons, looking at him sideways.

 

He stopped in the middle of the four way intersection just off my porch.  He stood there for a few minutes when the kids started coming up to him.  They were on the Majewskis’ lawn  sliding around on a yellow strip of vinyl with a hose laid on it.  The dad spraying the occasional rascal with a hose of his own.

 

The kids dropped their water toys and wandered out into the intersection while me, the dad, and any other adult running past or talking in clusters near the trunks of their vehicles did nothing to stop them.

 

They stood around him in their dripping bathing suits, one fat kid in a wet tee shirt and you could see his nipples from my house.  Then the adults all went over, dropping their phones and papers and gin&lemonades, and congregated around him.

 

When you got close, besides the robe, he had this glow coming out the back of his head.  But then when you came around the front of him, right there, four inches out from of his chest, still beating, was his heart, on fire and ringed with barbed wire, emitting a faint pink light.  He was lightly pressing two fingers against it.

 

He had a beard and didn’t say anything, and without moving his head somehow managed to look at everyone at once.  We sat there amazed at the fire and the light.  But after twenty minutes, when he still hadn’t said anything, we all turned around and went home.