Jim stood spreadeagled and semi-upright, his hands taped behind his back, his head pushed half over the sink. Sweating, staring wide-eyed over the top of his glasses through the large kitchen window at the lawn and garden in back.
It was turning out to be quite a Saturday.
A while back, Jim had been in the army. He’d been issued a rifle, naturally, but he’d never had to fire it except in practice. He was a headquarters guy. HQ all the way. A researcher and writer. His research, until he discovered the joy of the internet, had been mostly from books and newspaper clippings and libraries. Still, he’d written, for instance, a rather famous piece, if he did say so himself, about the history of military bagpipe marching bands.
Back then, too, he had been informed in his regular late-night discussions with his on-the-ground soldier colleagues that the world looks and feels a lot different when you have every reason to believe your brains are about to be re-arranged, all over, for instance, the new-not-even-paid-for-yet kitchen cupboards.
This Saturday, Jim could see what his buddies had meant. Looking up, through the window was the garden that was supposed to be Jim’s responsibility. Susan had said so.
Truth be told, Jim would happily confess he would rather contemplate gardening possibilities on the internet where it’s clean and interesting, not crawl around the garden out there, where it’s dirty and creeping with bugs.
In the kitchen with him now were his two human invaders. Over on the other side of the house they had used the dirt pathway running from the street to Jim’s backyard. Then to the deck where they sliced through the locked sliding screen door to inside the house. A locked screen door means nothing when encountering a Bowie knife. “Cut open that screen like tissue paper,” said the skinny one.
‘Now, where am I?’ Jim thought. ‘Bent over the kitchen sink. Watching and listening, discouraged and scared.’
The chunky one with the big handgun stuck into Jim nattered on and on about next steps and priorities and what he referred to as tactical issues. The skinny one munched on a Snickers bar and provided an unconvincing impression of listening to his partner. “Skinny,” his partner would often say, “has a dreamy heart, maybe a brain in there somewhere, and a beautiful voice. He could fit right into heaven’s angel choir.” In fact, Skinny often sang and ate Snickers at the same time while he checked out The Shopping Channel. A few days ago he’d managed to order “this neat Bowie knife.”
Unable to take all this in at once, Jim decided to focus, not for the first time he’d admit, but now he was especially convinced he needed to concentrate, get some discipline into his life. ‘Consider this,’ he thought to himself. I have brains. Not an overabundance maybe. But certainly better than not having any right where they belonged.’
