the adventure

The Adventure

Overkill. Beat a dead horse. For want of a horse the shoemaker’s luck ran out and things began to unravel.

Yes, Shards are codes that cloak messages. No, you’ll never decipher them. Agencies with ace cryptologists have been trying for years. All they come up with are broad swipes of confusion, deep wells of frustration, brick walls of bewilderment. The message gets thru undeciphered and unscathed to its intended receivers. The network grows. The battle plan fleshes out.

103 degrees one day, 108 the next, 105, 99 – global warming beats me down off the hill, passing out when the work day’s done, the code in meltdown. A kissing cousin to heat stroke, a crude version of death. The work crew’s gone whacky from the heat, falling off ladders and twitching in the grass, eyes rolled back, gurgling spit. I stole three quarts of holy water from the Catholic Church, sprinkled it on their foreheads, and up they rose like resurrected saints and floated into the shade. The things we do just to feed ourselves, just to prove we’re men.

The new guy on the crew said why steal just a quart, why not steal gallons, I know where they keep it, in a warehouse north of town. He rode out there after dark in his Jeep Cherokee and came back with ten drums of the stuff, and now we’re washing windows with holy water.

It helps some. No one’s passed out since Wednesday. Butterflies flutter around us as we work, hummingbirds dart overhead, rainbows lash the sky with no rain in sight and people have begun to sit up and take notice. Some might call it a miracle.

You may think this is a little over the top, but you can’t swim unless you jump in the water. Have you seen those who try, lying in the dry dust, thrashing their arms and legs about? It’s a sad sight to behold.

It feels like it will be impossible to carry on if this heat wave lasts much longer, but given half a chance, I always bounce back.

Some day tho that half a chance won’t be there, and I’m not sure if that’s when the adventure ends or begins.

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