Dribs and Drabs

It’s a bit early for the neighbors to be at the barbie, Graeme thought, as he opened the back door to the wooden deck off the living room. The scent of wood smoke and seared meat filled his nostrils. Once outside, he realized almost instantly something was wrong. Thick black smoke poured into the southwestern sky from a hill about three miles south. The smoke rose straight up into the sky, spreading into a horizontal band as it reached the low clouds just above the top  of the hill.  Oh my God, that looks like it’s Bambi Dixon’s place!

Graeme Bisterman, an Australian retiree who had lived in the Arkansas woods just over a year, had seen what wild fires were capable of.  The smoke he saw billowing from the dense pine and hardwood forest a few miles away triggered his memory of the fires near Perth that robbed him of his home and his family just three years before.

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Gusts shrieked and howled outside. Caren could feel the cold on her face through the door as she grasped the knob. She stiffened as she turned it, bracing for the numbing blast of arctic air.  Nothing, though, could have prepared her for the brutally frigid slap across her face when the icy wind hit her.  Frost formed instantly on her eye lashes and she felt as if a film of ice swept across the surface of her eyes. The pain was like a swarm of angry bees simultaneously injecting their venom into her ear lobes.  As she started to take in a deep breath instinctively against the cold, the sensation was like shards of fiercely cold glass shredding her lungs.

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The kiss was intended as a friendly peck. Her warm lips against the back of his neck, though, felt to him beyond sensual; they felt erotic and electric. In his mind, that kiss was the long-awaited prelude to a night of hungry kisses and mutual exploration of every inch of their two bodies.

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Ben watched  as the rock sailed through the air, slowly it seemed to him, toward David’s head.  The “Crack!” as it hit his friend’s head was loud. He saw David’s head rock backward, then spring forward, as David stumbled backward and fell on his back.  “David, are you okay?!” As Ben ran toward him, blood gushed from David’s forehead onto his hands that, by then, were clutching the wound.

Ben screamed at the two boys who had thrown the rock and were then running as fast as they could in the opposite direction. “Look what you did!”

Eleven year old boys don’t know what to do when they’re a mile from the nearest adult and blood is pouring from a wound. The dilemma is amplified when one of the boys, the one bleeding profusely, is slipping into unconsciousness.